I'm genuinely shocked how much Epic poured into the store and it still lacks so much basic features. Sorting games is still extremely barebones, store is filled with NFT/crypto garbage, the store still looks like a college student's first front-end project, and last time I used the launcher to pick up free games (last year), it was still slow as hell. What were they doing in the past 5 years aside from dropping millions on exclusivity deals?

Epic is going to have to prioritize the store and try some new initiatives while also doubling down on earning pivotal exclusives if it is going to have a chance. I also hope other viable competitors arrive.

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[–] TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 34 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (11 children)

I'm far from being a business savvy person, but honestly, from business perspective what exactly is Epic offering that sets them apart from other competitors? Even if Epic fixed their launcher issues, how would they be different to Steam that is already well established for 20 years? That's why I like GOG as Steam's competitor. GOG focuses on selling DRM-free and retro games. If a game also happens to be available in GOG, I would prefer to buy it from there than Steam. Moreover, GOG keep old games well maintained and updated to run in modern computers; something that Steam is very poor at doing. What does Epic even do differently, apart from doing exclusives which any companies could do?

[–] flop_leash_973@lemmy.world 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

As the customer, which in a practical sense is the only perspective that matters to me day-to-day, Epic offers me nothing close to what Steam or GOG can give me. Hell, even EA's and Ubisofts launchers were more useful since they at least had exclusives. All Epic has is Fortnite and for someone like myself that doesn't care for that kind of game, there is no reason to even consider their platform for anything.

And given my recent switch away from Windows and to Linux full time on my gaming PC to put a further wedge between me and the things Microsoft has been doing with Windows that I don't like that is a good thing given Epics history of embracing things that will never work as smoothly on Linux as Steam games do with Proton or GOG's native Linux options do.

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