this post was submitted on 12 May 2025
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I know it’s popular to hate on Epic because of the whole exclusives thing and… well, that’s fair. But people don’t talk enough about how awful the whole package is.
They need to burn it to the ground and start over. From scratch. Building the EGS software in UE was their first mistake. And it’s a big, ugly “using a hammer on screws” tier mistake.
You want people to not hate you and use your stuff? First, make sure your stuff isn’t terrible. Make sure it’s good. Make sure it does valuable things your competitors don’t. Second, don’t be jerks and try to force people into your awful ecosystem using coercive strategies like exclusivity.
Fix it, Sweeny. Until you fix it, nobody wants to hear what you have to say about it. We don’t want talk, we want results.
Who the fuck cares what a man baby who tried to make PC gaming worse for all of us thinks?
Fuck this punk, FUCK the epic “store”, can’t wait until that POS goes down in flames and all the “it’s just a free game bro” people get their info sold to advertisers.
Not a fan of exclusives and every company having a launcher, but I could work with it if they didn’t require the launcher to confirm the licensing. So they’ve broken it in a way that forces you to use their shitty launcher, which just highlights how bad it is.
People can forgive a degree of shittiness, until they’re forced to use your shitty product.
You mean the thing we, the customers, have been saying from day 1 is true? How shocking.
You prioritized game exclusively and free games hoping that would draw in gamers. Instead, people just hoard the free games and spend no money because they don't like your platform. There was no real reason for anyone to switch and your choices left a sour taste in our mouths.
Ah Tim, here we go with the "look how brutally honest we are" schtick. Yeah gamers dislike the launcher, but it's not even about that; it's about your business practices. Did you forget the part where you took the worst pages from the Xbox/Playstation book and tried to build an exclusivity platform on PC? Trying to buy devs with massive handouts and buy users with free games? We remember, Tim. We remember the Metro Exodus launch and the rest. Personally I can't do much more than to deny you every single cent I can, but please be assured I'll be doing that, and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone. I don't even have an account with you to pick up free games because that'd be one more account that legitimizes your shitty platform. Go bankrupt at your earliest convenience please.
I don't share your frustrations. Games like Control, Alan Wake 2, and Ooblets might never have been made without Epic's funding. The Ooblets developer in particular stated that Epic's funding was crucial for their survival. I think exclusivity is a very fair and normal thing to request when funding a game. Valve does it and people are fine with that.
Maybe it's just me but I can't recall any occasion where Valve said "hey devs, here's a pile of money but you're not allowed to sell your game outside Steam", have any examples in mind?
Valve purchased the rights to Counter-Strike in 2000, transitioning it from a community-made mod to a retail product. Similarly, Day of Defeat, initially a third-party Half-Life modification, was acquired by Valve, leading to a standalone retail release in 2003. In the case of Dota, Valve hired the mod’s lead developer and secured the intellectual property rights, culminating in the release of Dota 2 in 2013. These games remain exclusive to Steam.
These are all Valve not selling their own games outside Steam, their own storefront. Does Epic sell Fortnite anywhere else?
Metro Exodus' publisher is Deep Silver. Epic, a storefront, paid through the nose to get exclusivity on distributing someone else's product. At the last minute.
They are not the same.
What is the distinction for the player? Both Counter-Strike and Control were funded by Valve and Epic, respectively. Both ended up with exclusivity. To the player, what different do the intro logos make?
It sounds like you’re trying to win by technicality.
Had a gamedev from a respected studio tell me that same rumour about Steam pushing exclusivities. All it takes is a little digging to find out that's false. Some people were upset when Steam was installed with Valve's own games as a launcher, and later more and more devs launched their games on Steam as a store because they wanted to. The alternative, Games For Windows Live, was lame and unstable. It was just the a smart choice for those that didn't want to make their own launcher. Also, don't feed that other troll who's been posting nonsense everywhere. 🤣 And yeah, even if some good came from milking tons of cash from spoiled kids (I was glad for Oddworld Inhabitants to name one), as a consumer it's best to just delete your EGS account. If you got a game there for free that you wish to keep just copy its files elsewhere ASAP before deleting your account. Epic Games is known to have randomly deleted games from accounts because of server issues and their customer support will reject complaints about this by default, so getting attached to it's library is not a good idea.
Oh! One more thing. Epic Online Services. If it's optional in a game just disable it. You'll have less connection issues and in some games you just won't be able to play online at all if you don't disable that crap. Same goes for Epic's Easy Anti-Cheat, some mods let you disable that in a few games and doing so fixes some stutters it causes (night and day difference in Elden Ring). You're welcome. 🫶
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And the Ooblets dev was also the one who mocked people who lost interest in the game after it became epic-only - adding a second reason to skip it.
They fund games so who cares if they keep losing user information
That’s obviously bad. My comment was in response to the comment above about exclusives.
Heroic is a FOSS launcher that's straight up better. They use a sponsored link to get some kickbacks when you buy GoG games thru their launcher. Seems worth doing every once in a while in order to donate to the actual best launcher for non-Steam games
TBH using Bottles to run an exe feels more refined than the epic games UI.
Using wine CLI comamnds is more refined than the Epic launcher
It's because he squandered any goodwill or even playing field it might have by being spyware. Valve earned its trust after people fucking hated steam when it first came out
Bit barebones reporting. Here's an article that at least quotes portions of the interview: https://wccftech.com/epic-games-launcher-is-indeed-clunky-admits-epics-tim-sweeney/
I can only partially empathize with the argument that Steam is better because of 15 years of refinement. Yes, they have a big featureset, amazing APIs, developer kit, the workshop, the list goes on. There are a lot of technical challenges here.
However, what cannot be excused with this argument is the Epic Launcher UX being this clunky, lmao. Yes, making a bunch of UI is nontrivial and takes work, but its also not rocket science. The layered and staggered loading of different UI elements and overal slowness of the whole thing cannot be explained by the lifespan of Epic Launcher. Steam was just as responsive on my old Windows XP back in the day as it is now. Throw something like Dear ImGui at a bunch of juniors and they could make something that is snappier than what the Epic Launcher is now.
Google made a bunch of useful metrics called Core Web Vitals that represent responsiveness pretty well. I'm sure they would score awfully on all of them.
There is no chance you can make a consumer-facing product using imgui. The closest to that I've seen is imhex, which admittedly is way better looking than I thought was possible with imgui. But it is a tool for mainly developers, not a consumer-facing product.
Haha yeah you definitely don't want to do that. It was meant as a slightly ridiculous hypothetical. There are definitely better suited UI libraries it there.
IMO they should have put their money into making it good before pushing it on users so aggressively, instead of apparently never since it's been years and they still haven't made the user experience good.
The only thing stopping you from making it not suck, Tim, is you. You did the bare fucking minimum, and it's not even very good at that.
Despite these inconveniences, Sweeney remains optimistic and predicts that, over time, his strategy will better connect players across different platforms, thus surpassing Steam in the long run.
And what's that strategy? Bribe users to come to Epic and but exclusive rights to games to force users to come to Epic to play them? Really? How has that been working so far?
Especially since Epic doesn't really have much to offer over Steam, other than its games and exclusives.
It wasn't all that long that where Epic Games had the infamous issue with the store. Since their store didn't have a shopping cart, if you wanted to buy multiple games at once, you had to buy them all in separate transactions, but the store flagged that as suspicious purchases/fraud, so more often than not, if you found a bunch of games you liked, and bought them all, your account would get locked.
Allow third party launchers and drm free games
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Somehow it takes even longer to launch than the Steam launcher.
Because EGS is literally built in Unreal Engine. Instead of a normal desktop app, they built it in Unreal Engine. Yeah. Seriously.
That explains a lot. Except my computer is pretty top tier and even full games manage to launch faster than Epic Games Launcher
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