Games

I refuse to patronize Epic until they continue working on UT4. I've been playing their games for 25 years and they make fortnite then decide to just drop all of their long term fans.

Epic’s customer service sucks. Consider my last experience from a prior xmas sale:

• had multiple games in the cart with discounts applied, checked out with paypal, but for whatever reason the communication broke and didn’t go through
• my cart then got stuck in a limbo where I couldn’t check out with any method to receive the discounts, everything was full price again
• opened a customer support ticket to get the problem resolved, then went through 3 days of back and forth, explaining the situation over and over because
  • each of your replies are handled by whoever the next agent is
  • who apparently don’t read any history of the ticket, so they provide feedback or advice that already didn’t work
  • and it can take a full 24 hours or more to get a reply that ignores all previous replies
• by the time the error was resolved by a competent person, the sale was over by only a few hours
• despite the fact that I only missed the sale window because their reps were incompetent, they refused to make any exceptions to apply the sale prices I had been trying to checkout for 3 days

So, fuck them. I only claim free games from them now.

And I concur with problems other people have mentioned.

As someone who seldom plays with friends (I have very few who want to play online), I just pick the store where the games are the cheapest or there's a sale or something. It doesn't really affect me that much.

But if all your friends are on steam, then check before getting a game on Epic, sometimes they don't let you play together. Most of the time they do, though.

Steam and GOG are simply better platforms overall. If you really care about being DRM free and owning your games you go GOG route, otherwise Steam is the king. Epic does not even have a review system.

Epic however is the best source of free games on PC. A lot of the latest games I have played have been from Epic giveaways. Right now they have Outer Worlds and yesterday it was Ghostwire: Tokyo, both of these games I played few months ago after purchasing them through Humble Bundle.

Will I ever buy a game on Epic? Probably not, I prefer Steam, but those that simply refuse to redeem freebies and install their launcher while shouting things like it being spyware are weird.

The first major issue for me was that the launcher was a crypto miner and they didn't tell anyone.

Since then, I have 0 trust in them and refuse to install the launcher. I don't care for the "free games"

They're partially owned by Tencent, a big Chinese company. And as Chinese companies are, the government has direct influence over them. And while Tencent is not a majority owner, Tim Sweeney happily took Chinese money and now pays his co-owner a portion of the profits which then go to pay for Chinese gulags.

There are many things, especially hardware, where it's impossible to avoid Chinese companies but simply buying games somewhere else is super easy. It's obviously not a perfect system because even on GOG there are games using UE, but just buying games somewhere else is such a low barrier, it's not an inconvenience at all.

That said, claiming the free games doesn't help them. It helps the developers making those games because Epic has to pay them and won't get anything in return if that doesn't result in users leaving money in EGS for other things.