I hate Epic Games, they are making PC gaming like console with exclusives, why do good companies do that to their awesome fan base?
Grow up.
Because Epic got tired of steams 30% cut and became aware that most gamers would rather have their library in one place and not worry about things like that.
Epic takes 12% from game developers and with early negative reviews on steam poisoning newcomers from idiots that don’t understand what an alpha is you’d have to be a real glutton for punishment to release on steam.
Also maybe I’m just an epic defender I didn’t have epic until I had to get it to play this game and I’ve already got 4 free games I intend to play.
I want all my games in one place and yes agree, Steam needs to lower their 30%
But Exclusives are a cancer to all gamers, the good thing about PC gaming is we have the choice to choose if we want Epic or steam, but Epic took the choice away from us
I think anyone should be able to play on any device
Also Ashbery76 needs to grow up, I am free to my opinion as you are, it's called freedom of speech
I don't recall seeing anything about their long term plans. Epic is currently short term convenience. No reviews by those who don't know how alpha works and they get a better cut.However, considering that previous titles are available on steam and gog, GalCiv 4 will likely be on those platforms once the game is released.
I agree with that, they are going to be on Steam and GOG, my biggest issue is timed exclusives
no Steam?!
i hate the idea of using the epic store - i have an epic dislike for those guys ):
haha same, steam has so much more to offer
Ah yes, because it's so immature to have concerns about games potentially going exclusive to a store that has absolutely nothing going for it other than "We give the devs a higher cut", "We pay devs for timed exclusivity", "we give away free games". (And by the way, it's great they're giving the devs extra...Just take it from the execs and publishers rather than the users, tends to always be the devs or users who end up being the losers, Tim just switched things around a little and marketed it as a positive.)
If GalCiv IV is a timed exclusive after full release, the devs have lost my sale. I'm sick of having to wait another 6 months-12 months just cause Tim Sweeney is pissed off that he decided to get Epic to concentrate on consoles in the mid-to-late-00s while Valve made Steam and has seen huge profits and industry influence ever since.
The good thing about PC gaming is we all get equal opportunities to play all PC games and now most console game, Epic is taking that away from us and it has to stop, remember when Microsoft tried to make our online games paid like consoles? we fought back, now we need to fight back on this or we will end up being no better than the consoles.
How do you think Steam beat Impulse? Answer: Exclusives.
Impulse in 2010 was better than Steam in nearly every way. Faster downloads. Refunds. User ratings. No running client. Etc.
But Steam had Steamworks which it gave away for free with the requirement that the game bundled / installed the Steam store.
I like Steam. But suggesting that it became dominant on its own merits is a rewriting of history.
There is no barrier to buying a game at Store X vs. Store Y on the PC. Epic isn't "taking away" your choice any more than Steam is. There are literally thousands of Steam exclusives that will never be on any other platform because they rely on Steamworks.
Someone choosing not to buy a game because it's on Epic is like someone telling me they don't really care about the game in the first place. It's no better than those people down-voting Civilization IV on Amazon.com back in 2010 because Civilization V was Steam exclusive (and will always be a Steam exclusive forever because of Steamworks).
The Steam experience today is much better than the Epic store. Hopefully the Epic store will continue to improve. But in the meantime, as someone with Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime, on my TV, I really don't see the big deal about someone having to download and get updates from a second source.
Moreover, you can put games into the Steam launcher if you want to have all your games together.
For me, I launch my games from the Start menu. I don't really pay attention where I bought a given game.
Steam doesn't pay developers to be exclusive, Developers are free to puit there game on any other platform, I don't recall Civ V ever being exclusive, you could always buy civ v on there own platform, and of course steam, that was the developers choice, they didn't get a bunch of money from steam to stay off of Amazon.
Yes I hope Epic gets better, I also hope Steam lowers there profit share, but what is better for all games, release it on all platforms, that's what I mean about Exclusives being a cancer.
Yes I like having my games in one place, however I run them other ways, for example, I run Skyrim with Mod Organizer 2, and I have a lot of older games I run with Dosbox or even some games I will just run with my start menu, I love the unreal engine, so I use the epic launcher for that, I did wait to buy Red Dead 2 because of the timed exclusive, I did that on principle, if I have the choice, I will always pick the best platform at the time but if they make it exclusive, then I wait.
Also if Steam pulled that, I would be just as pissed with Steam, it is not steams fault that most developers choose to make there game exclusive on steam
You are correct you could buy Civ 5 anywhere, I bought it as a CD as I did with its expansions and Civ 6 on launch.
However you could not get patches unless you had a Steam account.
I believe you could not even initially launch Civ 5 without being on Steam but can not say for sure.
TL/DR: Frogboy was right you needed Steam to play Civ5.
Its also not Microsoft's fault most games do not launch with Mac support.
About Civ 5, The developers chose to do that, not steam, not saying it's right but again, it is not steams fault
Oh and Microsoft doesn't choose if games are released on Window, Mac or Linux, again it is the developers that choose that and I think that is not very pro consumer either
Guess where i found out this game was being made?
STEAM
I saw a post there about how the ships in GCIV are gonna be awesome from a guy who made ships for GC 3 because he was part of the team making the ships(I just cannot remember the guys name!) and went looking for more info on this already amazing game(and its only in alpha state atm)and saw it was an epic exclusive and though meh i don't care i wants it ,i needs it ,i must have it and so i made a choice to get it....sure its on epic but so what?
The important part is your saying you don't have a choice of where to buy the game but you DO have a choice you can get it on epic games or wait for its most likely inevitable release on steam the biggest question you have to ask is are you going to let epic is bad reddit neck beard circle jerk make your choice for you? if that answer is yes you have still made a choice even if its a choice you don't like
Steam didn't pay cash. They gave away SteamWorks for "free" in exchange for the game requiring Steam being installed on the PC. But they effectively paid since at the time, the alternative was to make your own network manager ($$$) or use GameSpy.
This meant Civilization V wasn't on Impulse or GOG and whatever since who wants to sell a game that installs a competitor's store and must be run from the competitor's launcher?
Moreover, Stardock had Impulse::Reactor which was similar to SteamWorks except it didn't require a store to be installed and running. However, Steam would not allow games that used Impulse::Reactor to be on Steam. Thus, games like Company of Heroes 2, which were going to use Impulse::Reactor had to go with SteamWorks.
None of this is intended to cast Steam in a bad light. Steam has been very good for PC gamers. But Steam didn't become dominant based on merit. It became dominant because of exclusive content.
By the same token, it's the developer's "fault" for choosing to do Epic exclusives. Except, of course, with Epic these exclusives aren't permanent. By contrast, Civilization V is a Steam exclusive forever because it is integrated with Steamworks which, as part of the deal, requires Steam, the store, to be installed and run.
Games typically use many SDKs during development. Steamworks was the only one that required the Steam store to be installed and be running to play the game. This was done to ensure Steam became the dominant store -- and it did.
By the same token, it's the developer's "fault" for choosing to do Epic exclusives. Except, of course, with Epic these exclusives aren't permanent. By contrast, Civilization V is a Steam exclusive forever because it is integrated with Steamworks which, as part of the deal, requires Steam, the store, to be installed and run.Games typically use many SDKs during development. Steamworks was the only one that required the Steam store to be installed and be running to play the game. This was done to ensure Steam became the dominant store -- and it did.
Yes the developers chose Epic, however, Epic paid them a lump some to do so, Steamworks is a crock because you could still run your game on other platforms even if the steam version had steamworks in it, Steam became the go to place because of a good system, I remember Gamefly, it sucked, This is backwards, consoles are shying away from exclusives and putting there game on PC, and PC's are getting into Exclusives, I for one don't want 50 launchers running in the background on my computer, but what Epic is doing will tell other launcher developers that this is right and it is not pro consumer
Let's break this down point by point:
Ultimately I think this has less to do with actual costs or benefits involved and more to do with people who are fans of a particular store. If you just don't want to buy a game on anything other than Steam then so be it; just say that. But the anti-Non-Steam hate is just pedantic and unhelpful.
As for this particular thread I feel like you started it in bad faith with your self-admission that you just "...hate Epic Games". Unless you have something new to add I suggest you just drop the topic.
You're espousing creative history. Back when it mattered, there were three major services: Steam, Direct2Drive, and Impulse.
Steam had the biggest marketshare because Half-Life 2 and Counterstrike were exclusive to Steam and were far more popular than Demigod, Sins of a Solar Empire and Galactic Civilizations.
One big problem developers ran into was multiplayer connectivity. Developers had to license products like GameSpy (which sucked but worked) or try to develop their own setup (see Stardock's Demigod multiplayer struggles). Valve was one of the first companies to really make MP connectivity bulletproof.
So Steam released Steamworks for free with the caveat that if you used it, you had to install Steam and run Steam to play the game. None of this was really needed to make this functionality work. It was just a way to get Steam onto people's machines and get the Steam launcher to always be running in your system tray.
Impulse didn't require to be running to play your games. Its features worked via DLLs (like most programs). Impulse had more features, refunds (which Steam wouldn't get for years), user reviews (long before Steam), a worldwide CDN for super fast download speeds, built in chat, leader boards, and even gameplay videos. It was, like I said, far far ahead of Steam.
But Steamworks forced developers to distribute the Steam launcher and have it running to play the game. The alternative, Impulse::Reactor did not have this requirement. But Steam wouldn't allow games that used Impulse::Reactor on their store. So developers, having to choose, chose Steam as it had, at the time, a somewhat larger market share and the rest is history.
You don't want launchers running in the background. I agree, I don't either. Impulse didn't require its launcher in the background to run games that used it services (it used DLLs). Steam is what started that.
And no digital distributor is going to sell a game that installs their competitor's store and launcher. That would be insane. And so, little by little, the alternatives disappeared.
Don't take any of this as me being anti-Steam. I'm not. But back when there was viable competition, Steam played rough and they won. They won with exclusive content.
Now, Epic could play hard-ball too if they wanted. They could, for instance, require any game that uses the Unreal engine to install the Epic store and have the Epic launcher running to play an Unreal game. But they're not doing that. They're trying to win developers over with generous advances to address the risk developers are taking and a much, much lower royalty.
I still remember back when you'd buy a DVD of a PC game and the first thing it would do is launch a Steam installer.
Ultimately I think this has less to do with actual costs or benefits involved and more to do with people who are fans of a particular store. If you just don't want to buy a game on anything other than Steam then so be it; just say that. But the anti-Non-Steam hate is just pedantic and unhelpful.As for this particular thread I feel like you started it in bad faith with your self-admission that you just "...hate Epic Games". Unless you have something new to add I suggest you just drop the topic.
Yes Steamworks is a crock, yes it is convenient to install mods, a lot of people prefer Nexus Mods because no limits
You do have a good point about no extra money
That is a good thing about epic paying console exclusives to come to PC, that benefits everyone, Steam could learn from Epic on that
At least right now there is Steam alternatives, but if the industry keeps going this way then there will be 50 launchers, and yes the good thing is you could have them not launch on startup, when I said 50 that was an exaggeration, but it is also a future reality
I will buy games on either platform, however when Epic pays a developer to take a game off of Steam, that's when I have an issue, if the Developer chooses to only put there game on Epic, fine, but don't force developers to do that, I forget what game it was, but there was a steam game that epic paid and they took it off of steam early access to go on Epic
This conversation may not be pleasant to have but it is needed. Epic exclusives are a multi facet topic, often emotional, that can certainly use some rational dialogue. The history of how things unfolded in the past is very valuable and does corresponds to what any honest observer present at the time would corroborate. I remember vividly how much better Impulse was to Steam back in the days. To this day I wish you all hadn’t sold it! In a way, we could say that GOG took its place on the market, but I digress. Thank you for engaging your community on this. Who knows, you may change a couple of minds along the way.
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