It’s the logical continuation of Gabe’s law. He said piracy was a service issue and that people would be willing to pay for the product is the service was good.
Epic tried and win by the venture capitalist playbook and give away free shit and undercut the incumbents to steal away their customers. Unfortunately that doesn’t work because their service is shit, and Valve has incredible soft capital built up.
Yours is definitely the best explanation of the circumstances. Epic saw games as the product they were selling. Gamers can pirate games, so the free game you want with some hoops to jump through vs a free game you didn’t ask for with some hoops to jump through is a weak value proposition. Valve sees Steam as the product. It’s not just a good library manager, it’s a store with decent discovery and relatively accurate user reviews, and a moderately useful multiplayer experience. If they had felt the pressure to incorporate TeamSpeak, then Discord wouldn’t even exist, but that was money Valve didn’t have to spend to still be more convenient than piracy.
I don’t make a lot of money, so I’ve gotten value out of the free games on Epic, but their launcher is terrible for figuring out what I’d like to play next. Playnite has ended up being an incredibly useful launcher, because it can consolidate launcher libraries, then show me which games I haven’t played, then sort them by critic score or user score.
I probably have 30 free games on Epic. I have literally ended up buying some of those same games on Steam because the user experience of Epic is so bad.
It’s the logical continuation of Gabe’s law. He said piracy was a service issue and that people would be willing to pay for the product is the service was good.
Epic tried and win by the venture capitalist playbook and give away free shit and undercut the incumbents to steal away their customers. Unfortunately that doesn’t work because their service is shit, and Valve has incredible soft capital built up.
Yours is definitely the best explanation of the circumstances. Epic saw games as the product they were selling. Gamers can pirate games, so the free game you want with some hoops to jump through vs a free game you didn’t ask for with some hoops to jump through is a weak value proposition. Valve sees Steam as the product. It’s not just a good library manager, it’s a store with decent discovery and relatively accurate user reviews, and a moderately useful multiplayer experience. If they had felt the pressure to incorporate TeamSpeak, then Discord wouldn’t even exist, but that was money Valve didn’t have to spend to still be more convenient than piracy.
I don’t make a lot of money, so I’ve gotten value out of the free games on Epic, but their launcher is terrible for figuring out what I’d like to play next. Playnite has ended up being an incredibly useful launcher, because it can consolidate launcher libraries, then show me which games I haven’t played, then sort them by critic score or user score.
I probably have 30 free games on Epic. I have literally ended up buying some of those same games on Steam because the user experience of Epic is so bad.
The epic games launcher looks and feels like a virus. I tried to grab a free game from them once and had a visceral reaction to the launcher lol
It’s like Walmart vs Costco.