The company behind Fortnite is currently in a legal fight against Google over in-app fees

  • BudgieMania
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    141 year ago

    In my eyes, part of the reason for this is that they forgot a key element of penetrating a market… you need a potential customer base that is actually displeased with the current available solutions and is actually looking for an alternative. And, by and large, the current storefronts had done a good enough work of pleasing their customer base that, when the Epic Store rolled out, few people were actively looking for a switch, to the point that no bonuses or goodies or exclusives that Epic offered could outweight the friction of moving from a platform that was perfectly serviceable, please and thank you.

    • ampersandrew
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      71 year ago

      There are problems with Steam that a competitor could win customers from by solving those problems, but they didn’t bother. They only went after the people producing games, not buying games.

        • ripcord
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          61 year ago

          As much as I like GoG, it doesn’t really solve any problems that Steam has that I can think of. In fact, in several ways it seems like they’ve gone backwards in the last several years, imo (as a launcher/storefront alternative)

          • @[email protected]
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            51 year ago

            My understanding is that GoG does some work to make sure that old games they sell will work on new PCs. I have at least one game that is bugged on Steam, but works fine from GoG.

            • skulblaka
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              21 year ago

              When I bought Vampire the Masquerade from GoG it came pre-bundled with the primary community bugfix patch, I thought that was pretty neat. It didn’t come baked in, so they still give you the base version of the game, but I pretty much just checked a box on install and it added it on.

            • @Katana314
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              11 year ago

              That said, Steam could arguably be a better solution for that sentiment, now that it has such good Linux compatibility. I doubt I’ll be able to run Windows 11111 on my computer in 2080, but I can always choose a Linux install.

      • @[email protected]
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        51 year ago

        Yep. I have not and will not give epic store money because they didn’t try to make a better product.

        In fact they attacked me as a customer, in essence, by offering a worse product but then paying for exclusivity on various games. And in exchange they try to bribe me with free games.

        Well, I’ll take the bribes, as I try to remember to collect my free games each week, but I’m not giving them money.

        • Zorque
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          81 year ago

          It does take time, but when you launch a product that’s missing basic features (like a shopping cart, something almost every online store in existence has) you tell on yourself to your customers, and let them know they’re not a priority.

          I don’t disagree that Steam’s feature rich platform makes it hard to compete with on that level… but for fuck’s sake, at least try a little bit. Especially if your first move is to say they’re unfairly gaming the market by… providing something people want.

    • LinkOpensChest.wav
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      11 year ago

      I was never happy with Steam. It always seemed bloated with unwanted features that had nothing to do with playing a game, constantly wanted to run in the background and update, launched at a snail’s pace.

      I’ve found myself liking EGS a lot more because it’s clean and simple.

      Both are owned by big gross corporations, so really I’d prefer no launcher at all.