Neat. The guy’s argument with you has accidentally leaked into another community, with him replying to me and another poster with ad hominem attacks and desires to see us (who never mentioned religion) institutionalized.

I guess, yeah. I will say, though: it feels morally wrong to acknowledge their existence as anything other than a anti-consumer cashgrab, and thus give them legitimacy as a competitor to Steam, GOG, and Itch.

I’m not sure which part of that guys comment suggests anything other other than “fuck epic,” but here’s a short and sweet list:

• Designing a service for their customers instead of relying on paid exclusivity to encourage social pressure or FOMO
• Halfway decent customer support
• Unreal Engine 5’s performance
• Keeping their old of games accessible
• Not scamming kids out of virtual money

The approved competitor to a monopoly is… *checks notes* a wannabe monopoly that’s trying to buy their way into the position by providing less for the customer and instead bribing the publishers for exclusivity?

No, thanks. I would rather stick with the existing monopoly than reward Epic’s anticompetitive and anti-consumer bullshit.

8742 6689 0420 8832

Jokes aside, that might work. I’ll try it next time.

Good luck explaining that to the “I got nothing to hide” crowd…

But how would we get through to normie 12-year-olds who just want to play Valorant and not have their face constantly rubbed in the dirt by “hackers”?

I think it would be good for them to be told the truth: you aren’t being killed by hackers, you just suck.

I don’t think he would make it to trial. The wealthy don’t appreciate those who unite the public against them, and they certainly wouldn’t want him to send another message by having the chance to explain his motives.

Who says it can’t be?

Fair point with neither being publicly traded. I should have been more clear on that.

Unreal the engine, or the game series? From the perspective of a consumer, I don’t think either of them seem to be in good shape these days, unfortunately.

Er… Carmarck is in Id. Epic’s founder and CEO is Tim Sweeney.

“Fucking hypocrite” and “Epic Games”. Never have any other set of 4 words fit together so perfectly.

“Making yourself suffer” by boycotting Steam.

It goes against every fiber of my being to not utterly despise a multi-billion dollar corporation, but I just don’t have the energy that I used to. I have to pick the battles I want to fight, and they haven’t done enough to make it worth it for me to do that.

Some perspective from someone vocally against Epic:

They entered the market and tried to get their foot in the door not by providing a better service or experience to the consumers, but by being underhanded and anticompetitive while accusing their competition of being underhanded and anticompetitive. Add on that with the fact that their CEO lacks any sort of humility and integrity, and I simply do not trust them to give a single shit about me as a customer. If they achieved their goals, I’m confident that they would leverage their position to extract value out of me immediately—be it through ads, increased prices, or selling my data to third parties. I don’t want to support that by giving them any of money.

While I don’t think Valve is my friend either, they at least:

1. Have a history of doing things that provide some benefit to their users, even if its clearly out of self-interest.

2. Aren’t publicly traded.

When it turns to shit, we have the high seas.

Everything goes to shit eventually, but pre-emptively making yourself suffer is just silly. Enjoy the time you have, and vote with your wallet once they start doing anticompetitive crap like paid exclusivity deals. Until then, we might as well enjoy the fact that Valve isn’t a public company obligated to chase short term profits for shareholders.

Epic is the pro-developer storefront.

I think their historically-bad UE5 documentation and laser focus on adding features optimized for Fortnite but terrible for other uses beg to differ.

They’re the pro-shareholder storefront. Nothing more, nothing less.

Reposting my comment from another thread because it needs to be made clear:

Those mod devs are absolute assholes.

As per the decompiled code, the game will refuse to load in certain cases with the message “Upgrade your PC, the current hardware is just ridiculous.” I can understand not wanting to field support requests from extremely outdated hardware, but being condescending and not even giving players the option to try playing it…

I see you’ve just met Kaboom. If your Lemmy client supports it, it would be wise to add a tag for future reference…

The impressive part is that some of those games can actually run even better than on Windows.

Microsoft normally solves problems like this by abusing their monopoly and crushing their competition. In this case though, Microsoft is the underdog since Steam is the one with a much larger gaming monopoly. They’re going to have to spend billions and billions if they want to stand a chance against the Steam Deck.

Oh, they still do it regardless. There was a handheld that was supposed to release with HoloISO (SteamOS) preinstalled instead of Windows to hit a lower MSRP.

Microsoft stepped in (and probably gave them free Windows licenses) just so that wouldn’t happen.

Source:

News article from January showing the spec sheet saying “pre-installed HoloISO”.

Product website with the spec sheet saying “pre-installed Windows 11”

If I recall correctly, the “next gen update” for The Witcher 3 was UE5.

I did not recall correctly.