It's not a store... it's where I get my free games.
It's not a store... it's where I get my free games.
re: this article.
The title is a joke. "Free, but you have to make an EGS account" is a bit too rich for me.
I'm not as salty about EGS as a lot of PC gamers seem to be.
......... But god damn is their default client trash.
Thank fuck for Heroic Launcher on Linux (I think it even got a Windows version?)
But honestly, people complain about exclusivity, and seem to not realise (or care?) that certain games would not exist without this kind of funding deal. They are only funded by the platform that pays for their exclusivity. If you want to be mad at something, don't be mad at the devs, don't even be mad at Epic, be mad at Capitalism as an institution, which rules that art needs money to exist.
Call me crazy, but I don't like it when somebody tries to hold me hostage and force me to do things their way..
My main gripe with it being on EGS is I just don’t know when it’s on sale. For Steam games I can add to my wishlist and get notified when a game comes on sale. If I can’t do that for a particular game I tend to forget it exists.
I can imagine Epic aren’t too concerned about sales, the funding probably comes from the same bucket that funds all those free games. The long term vision of getting to make EGS a think trumps short term profits.
From the article you posted nobody at Remedy complained that the game was underperforming because of Steam nor does Epic grant them any continuous revenue stream that they would rely on beyond AW2 shipping.
Remedy employs 300+ highly skilled and paid people in one of the countries with the highest standards of living while having no access to your live service cosmetics battle pass skibidi money. This means they HAVE to have upfront cash somewhere in the loop because they happen to make very technically bespoke, well crafted titles take years to make. That's the same reason why Tencent has a minority share in 80% of VG companies you know at this point - including Remedy - one time purchases just don't do the trick anymore if you want to even ship a game, especially if you don't crowd it with scammy monetization.
It's one thing not to like some frontend (and yea EGS is ass on many accounts) but blaming a company for making a sound business decision by safeguarding their ability to produce games that are very much a lost best from a purely financial standpoint is seriously odd. It's not just Alan Wake - do you know the proportion of game time players have spent on titles released in 2023 or 2024 during those same years? It's less than 10% - nearly all the rest is live service. Within that same group you're fighting against your BG3s (you know, the same game that was nearly cancelled because Larian was strapped for cash) and any other solo game that happened to be successful. It's dire.
Nobody at Remedy is pretending EGS is the better platform, seeing this under any other lens than basic business logic is honestly weird. Wanna know why anyone would sign an exclusivity deal with Epic? Just look at the state of the games industry.
I like me some freebies, but I could use some friendly recommendations not in the FPS or MOBA category. Outside those two genres, it seems to be just idle clickers and unbalanced pay-to-win RPGs. The reviews on these two remaining categories are typically not very good.
Could you post the article text? It's ad-walled