When you cut though all the BS of this obviously ill-informed paid article, you're left with these. In one sentence, Epic is objectively one of the worst place to buy games from and is bad for the customers. And that's all that matters, the customers. We will buy from the best places, being Steam and GOG.
Epic's their list of anti-consumer practices grows by the day. They're trying all sorts of predatory and monopolistic practices that is not only hurting PC Gamers but also the PC Gaming industry. They're taking away consumer choice and openly criticizing / mocking anyone who speaks against them and encouraging other companies to do the same. They have absolutely no sense of pro-consumerism and are only here for their own greedy ambitions.
Here's a list of major anti-consumer things Epic has engaged in in the last year alone.
-Forced third party exclusive deals and robbing us customers the options to to buy from objectively superior stores like Steam / GOG
-Restricting / preventing third party key sites from competing / selling Steam / GOG game keys for cheaper price points
-Buying off timed exclusivity of crowdfunded games that had Steam / GOG release schedule / promotion from the game creators thus hurting and breaking trust of consumers about crowdfunding
-Lack of many basic and advanced features of other storefronts / launchers, chiefly Steam
https://imgur.com/P6cIq1u
-No forum support because Epic thinks PC Gamers are toxic
-Review system is opt-in by developers / publishers who has full control over it because they want to censor user reviews
-Epic's disdain of PC gamers in general as well as calling us toxic, pirates and blaming PC gamers for lack of sales
-Limited and convoluted refund system which requires threats of lawsuit to get our money back
-Epic owned 48 percent by the Chinese company Tencent who is infamous for spying and censoring people who've been caught spying on Steam users.
-Epic's lack of security on their store / launcher with numerous successful hacking attempts as well as actual spying on PC users through its launcher. There's even a lawsuit going on against the amount of hackers that launcher has.
-Epic does not comply with the GDPR laws set by the EU and have seemingly broken a few
-Epic's CEO, Tim Sweeney is a hypocrite who after expressing his desire for an open free PC platform where stores and customers can freely compete and buy games from without restriction while doing the exact opposite with forced third party exclusives into their own shitty store and strong-arming customers with anti-consumer policies. He has recently stated on Twitter that Epic wants to compete by creating "store wars" and forced third party exclusives on their store instead of improving their stores with better features and services to appeal to customers
https://imgur.com/a/3836Qnf
-Overpriced or lack of regional pricing compared to other storefronts
-Absolutely horrendous customer service
For reference and details of all the above mentioned points, check the source below
@speed45823: Also, unlike what Graeme Struthers said, arbitrary third party timed exclusive is not good for consumers. Most of us like to purchase game from our preferred storefronts like Steam and GOG where we get the best added value when buying games. And Epic is actively preventing us from doing so. He also forgot to mention that the exclusives that Epic's doing are third party exclusives, not first party like consoles. Just look at the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2019 situation and how one of the game mode is locked behind Playstation as timed exclusive for a year because Sony paid Activision money for it. As a result, almost everyone were and still are pissed about that. And that's the same situation on PC....except whole games are being locked behind a crappy bareboned anti-consumer launcher known as Epic while people are unable to buy those games on Steam and GOG for 6 months to a year.
Let me tell you....MONOPOLY is NOT competition. Epic bribing for timed third party exclusives....ON PC NO LESS....and locking games behind their crappy bareboned store, while making developers / publishers sign a contract to ACTIVELY prevent them from selling their games on other platforms / storefronts like Steam and GOG...that is not competition. That is anti-competition and anti-consumer. The developer of the game DARQ found that out the hard way and so did many others who wanted to sell their games on all storefront including Epic but Epic blatantly refused them since its either timed exclusive on Epic store or not at all from Epic.
At the same time, Epic lets big AAA games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines 2 to be sold on all storefronts without restriction essentially the companies behind them a free pass even if they didn't take Epic's bribe money timed exclusive. That's the kind of double standards Epic has going there.
This following video will explain the situation if you guys are not aware
And here's my take on it. In short, Valve's 20 to 30 percent take is justified for the amount of features and services they provide. The whole debate about 20 to 30 percent cut from Steam vs 12 percent cut from Epic is a farce. Its a stunt pulled by Epic. Its not about the percentage cut. Its about Epic giving these greedy publishers a bag of cash to sign exclusivity deals on their platform and Epic lining their own pockets in the process. All the while trying to strong-arm customers to submit to this forced exclusivity and other anti-consumer practices while providing virtually nothing
If it was only about the cut then, these publishers would've moved to other platforms that has lower cut than Epic, who've been into digital distribution platform a lot longer than Epic. Platforms like Discord, which reduced their cut down to 10 percent after Epic store's announcement. Humble Widget through Humble Bundle, which asks for 5 percent of the cut. Itch.io, which asks for basically whatever percent of the cut you want to give them, which is lower than all the others combined. And yet a lot of developers and publishers choose Steam over any of them Why ? Because none of the other platform provides the massive visibility / discoverability of games that Steam provides and the subsequent big sales potential. Not to mentions Steam is the only platform that provides THE most features and services towards both developers and customers compared to any other storefronts in the world, PC or console.
For the record, other major platforms like GOG, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Amazon, Google, Apple and a lot of others also take the industry standard 30 percent of the cut while providing significantly less features and services to both customers and developers in return. I wanna emphasize on Sony and Microsoft (Playstation and Xbox) who are the biggest gaming platforms next to PC, Who've been taking that 30 percent cut from developers and publishers for decades now while doing business with them. They don't provide nowhere as near as many features and services as Steam does. Who takes hefty licensing fee from developers / publishers spanning in millions of dollars to sell their games on Playstation and Xbox. Who used to charge devs / pubs money everything they wanted to patch / update their games on those consoles. Who locks certain essential features and services behind monthly subsciption fee against customers. And yet, developers / publishers happily put all their games on those consoles and make huge profits. Now with Epic, while they do take 12 percent cut, they also provide virtually nothing in terms of features and services for customers. Steam on the other hand provides numerous features and services for customers for their 20 to 30 percent cut.
To give you a rough idea of the amount of features and services Steam provides, take a look at the following chart. It lists all the major features of Steam compared to other platforms on PC. These are just some of the features and services that are public knowledge and / or have been revealed by Valve themselves. There's a whole host of other infrastructures that Valve operates and maintains on a daily basis. All of these combined costs a lot of upkeep on a day-to-day basis. At the same time, Valve regularly innovates, improves and expands on all of these features, services and infrastructures to give customers and developers a better gaming and business experience.
Valve lets all developers / publishers to generate free Steam keys on their platform and sell them anywhere else where the devs / pubs keep all the profit. What's interesting about that third party Steam key, is that on average more than 30 percent of any games purchased on Steam are bought from third party key sites. The rest 70 percent of purchases are straight from Steam itself. Meaning Valve doesn't get any revenue from the 30 percent of a games purchased from Steam. And yet, Valve itself enables and supports the free generation of third party keys for developers / publishers to sell them elsewhere, keep all the profit AND Valve themselves will bear the cost of those games being operated and maintained on Steam. The result is that developers / publishers gain more revenue and we customers get to buy games cheaper from third party sites selling Steam keys.
When you look at all these features and services that Valve / Steam provides and are continuing to provide at an even greater capacity every single year, it is clear that out of all the other platforms, only Steam gives back the most to both consumers and developers. Unlike other platforms, Steam earns their cut AND they're adding and improving new features and services every single year for no extra charge. Not only that. Valve has also reduced their 30 percent cut to 20 percent for those who meets certain sales milestone.
In conclusion, what Epic is doing is using the 12 percent to undercut others using money generated from Fortnite, then trying to get developers / publishers on board with cash incentive and subsequent forced third party exclusives, and then trying to strong-arm customers with said forced exclusive deals and other anti-consumer practices while providing us virtually nothing since they cannot compete with Steam on fair grounds or match Steam's level of features and services with that 12 percent cut. Its all about greedy developers / publishers getting paid by Epic for exclusive deals while shoving down all sorts of anti-consumer / anti-competitive policies on us customers. Epic does not care about customers as they've openly proved and stated it time and again. They only care about lining their own pockets.
Valve / Steam always has customers interest at heart followed by developers / publishers. Epic on the other hand, has only their own interests at heart, following by developers / publishers. We, the customers, will choose the platform to do business with that has our interests in mind. Because at the end of the day, we customers don't need their games to survive, its the developers / publishers who needs us, our business, to make their day-to-day living.
Lastly, its about publisher getting a bigger share of profit while developers sees virtually no benefit from it. Most of the profit a publisher generates does not go to the developers but straight to the higher-up CEOs, CFOs, board members and the likes. If anything goes wrong, its the developers who suffers either paycuts or getting fired from those companies, while the higher-ups enjoys their every increasing profit margin.
The following links are just some of the examples of how publishers fire hundreds of developers despite earning record profit
Here's Epic's own developers being abused and overworked
@Prats1993: No. More like most people aren't stupid like you and knows better to buy their games on Steam where they'll get value for their money with all the features, services and benefits. Valve's a company that treats customers with respect and not like crap that Epic does publicly on a regular basis, not to mention Epic's forced third party exclusives and trying to create a monopoly on PC.
This game is absolutely horrible, horrendous, full of bugs and glitches, piss poor voice acting, dull and stale gameplay and overall boring. Without a doubt, this is one of the worst games of 2019.
That's just BS. EA is raising the expected sales figure to an unrealistic number so that when it fails to meet that sales number, they can say "See ? told you single player games don't work for us" and go back to implementing shady lootboxes / microtransactions in games. Screw EA and everything they stand for.
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