Epic cons:

• Filled to the brim with DRM, at the point where you can't even launch many singleplayer games offline
• Actively against linux, for some fucking reason
• Bad launcher (but this one is no biggie, you can and should use Heroic launcher instead of the official one)
• Bad store in general compared to steam
• Ties with Tencent (super anti-consumer chinese state-owned megacorp)

Epic pros:

• Free games
• With coupons prices can get VERY low
• When it opened I heard the percent they take from game devs was lower than the other stores (not sure if it's still the case and tbh if it ever was)

Steam pros:

• Pushing linux gaming like their life depends on it
• Generally correct towards the consumer
• Huge store and many information, from the game store pages to the workshop
• During sales prices are good

Steam cons:

• Drm
• Bad official app Ux and messy ui

Gog

I don't know anything besides the fact that it has drm-free games and that it's owned by CDPR (the guys who developed the witcher series and cyberpunk)

I personally purchase my games on steam, since I think their contribution to linux gaming is crucial for linux to go mainstream

Choose what you will knowing this. If someone else wants to add something to this list you're welcome to do so.

Well, I have four big ones:

• System scanning: EGS is known to automatically scan your system and send your data back to them. While this seems to be the same type of analytics Steam does occasionally, in Steam's case, it's opt-in, and done with full, informed consent.

• Paid exclusives: Epic has been known to pay publishers to make their games artificially exclusive to their own store. They regularly claim this money is to support the development of the games in question, but this is easily disproven, as they've been seen buying games known to be complete more than once. Additionally, this has resulted in bait-and-switch-like situations, where users would prepurchase Steam copies of games, only to be informed that they wouldn't be getting them.

• Publisher-centric behavior: Another user here claimed that EGS is pro-developer and anti-consumer, but this is only half true. This only rings true in the case of self-published games. There have been cases of developers getting unwarranted backlash after aforementioned bait-and-switches, when they were just as surprised to learn about all the "development support" they received as anyone.

• Tim Sweeney: Tim Weeney, the CEO of Epic, is an asshole. A giant, narcissistic, hateful shitbag. Just look at his Twitter, the dudes a giant POS.

I posted about this in another thread, but Epic also bought exclusivity for games that were crowd-funded then had the option to have the game on Steam removed or you'd get the Steam key after the exclusivity period expired. This pissed off a lot of people.

Epic's CEO has a hateboner for everything Linux.

No linux support. Actually, in the case of games like rocket league, they REMOVED linux support.

I personally don't like Epic for paying developers for exclusivity deals, keeping games off other PC platforms for a year or more. Artificial scarcity is bad for consumers.

The multi-billionaire owner with the backing of the Chinese government is claiming that he's the underdog against a popular company/piece of software/GabeN. He's made some poor choices interacting with the community.

Yes, it's probably nice for a publisher to have a guaranteed income, which is why they sell exclusivity. It leaves a sour taste in my mouth, so I choose not to support it.

The rest about the launcher being bad sounds unhinged to me, but some people are really into that.

They bought Rocket League and actively made it worse.

Pretty much every single decision you can see from their history since the inception of EGS is either stupid or blatantly destructive to gaming industry. Just some examples: better revenue shares for developers? Sure but this translates into worse platform. Money bonuses for exclusivity is great for developers? Sure but the game is then stuck at the platform that gives no means for users to interact and let developers know how they could improve their product. Cross platform multiplayer platform that works? Sure but then we have to deal with stupid requirements like having an account on additional platforms we may not want to use, even to play single player modes sometimes.

You can also check Tim's Twitter and see how ignorant and hypocritical he is. I wouldn't mind it but his decisions seem to actually affect the whole platform and therefore the industry so... too bad.

Epic is the worst of the 3 platforms for a user. It is a drm like steam, but with less games on it, and even less optimized (so even more wasted resources and time loading useless advertising).

Steam has it that is makes game run on Linux smoothly, and the biggest library of games. Gog is drm free. Epic has absolutely nothing a user may want, except for free games so that you are now captive of their shitty platform.

aside from what everyone else said, they killed the beloved Unreal Tournament series, which is a huge sour spot for older gamers who fondly remember those. Then there's the excessive microtransaction demand inside Fortnite, a game with a large playerbase under the age of 18. That alone led to two major lawsuits that they both lost

No support for Linux - steam has it built in and the DRM free nature of gog games means that they're not too tough to get running via wine.

Personally my main gripe is their aggressive strategies to force people into their garbage-tier launcher. Compared to Steam it's just miles behind, and it's yet another app to run on your PC. All my friends are also on Steam, and Steam had Linux support. However, if all you want to do is launch singleplayer games, you don't mind the Epic launcher, and you get a good deal, then do whatever you want to.

In short, Epic is anti-consumer. They claim better support for developers, but in reality consumers are the one paying for that. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but you the consumer have no choice in it. You are forced through exclusives and other limitations to use inferior service for the same price. Even free games they give are there to drag you into their ecosystem and abuse.

This is why Valve doesn't feel threatened, I assume, and is not likely to feel the pressure from Epic anytime soon. For that to happen, Epic would have to get on par with features and customer benefits equal or better than Steam and that's not happening anytime soon. Epic would rather throw hundreds of millions on exclusive deal with some developer and force you the consumer to buy the game on EGS than actually improve the service.

I'm pretty pragmatic. While I appreciate what Valve has done for PC gaming, I like the idea of them having some legit competition in the space. So when the Epic store started, I bought a bunch of games there to give it a shot. Outer Worlds, Control... And of course I grabbed up a bunch of free games, too!

...and then, over time, I've repurchased all of the games I liked on steam anyway.

Make of that what you will.

Epic doesn't see gamers as their customer - they see developers as their customer and shape the customer experience around that. For example, Epic said that if/when they add reviews, developers could choose to opt their games out of reviews. That's very pro-developer, but very anti-consumer, whatever you might think of the value of reviews. Informed customers can rattle off a long list of reasons they don't like Epic and why they're bad, but they are a small minority of PC gamers. The "silent majority" doesn't keep up with this kind of stuff or really care about it, so they are literally judging stores on their merits and Epic is a bare bones platform that doesn't offer customers a good reason to spend money in their store because they don't think they need to.

One reason is that Epic are very dismissive of Linux, while Steam go out of their way to be supportive and GOG are supportive when it's convenient

Another is trying to lock games into exclusives with them, which other distribution platforms don't do so much

That said, if you don't play games without cross platform multiplayer and don't care about Linux support or see yourself caring any time soon, there's not a huge reason to push you towards steam and away from epic. GOG is more of an anti-DRM thing, however barring sales the price and the cut for the devs is identical on all of them and it's the same game aside from DRM.

Instead of offering anything to be a better platform they are burning money on the platform in hopes they can pay their way to dominance by paid exclusivivity and giving away games. One of those isn't bad for users. Now consider what Epic offers beyond being able to buy and download a game. Nothing. Epic is only a storefront and they've had years to work on this at this point. Steam has gained dominance and maintains it in no small part due to all the additional features available to everyone. Do you use the steam workshop for any of your games? Have you used the steam community forums to troubleshoot a problem? Do you use big picture mode for a more console like experience? Do you customize your controller settings with the pretty expansive controller support built into steam? The overlay? How about the custom profiles and badges and trading cards? Epic is only a storefront. That's it. That's all that's on offer. So they supplement it with bribing devs to be exclusive to their store and giving away games to try and attract users.

For me it's entirely self-centered and I'm dispensing with all the aspirational and political feelings that people have about the way businesses operate.

Quite simply I recommend Steam because it is a product with so many killer features, it's really hard to take anybody else seriously.

It's just shy of 2024, and Epic is still a non-realized alpha product. Their website, store, and launcher/library is a perfunctory effort at best. The most recent feature they added that I even consider to be an improvement would be the ability to look at my own games library - that should sound like a pretty funny joke but it's said deadpan. They don't even have proper controller support for PC, whereas Steam for example recognizes that PC gamers come with a variety of input hardware.

I mean it's so simply that steam is such a mature product that offers so much to the gamer, and epic just wants money and they're not really doing anything to compel me to want to use that platform.

GOG is great, it's a simple system that gives you the power to own your own games and I very much appreciate that. Personally I don't like to splinter my collection across different services so I'm mostly avoid them but I can't say anything really negative.

Anyways this is just my opinion, I feel like steam has tons of killer features, the otherS simply don't. There's lots of valid discussion in other areas about ethics and things like that but really I'm just looking at it from the perspective of what do I want from my money. Steam gives me the most, and the others don't even hold a candle.

For me it's simply EGS paying developers to lock games only their store.

If they were just competing, trying to deliver a better product I would massively support them, similar to how I support GOG, however when you start locking content to your storez you end up with "PlayStation vs Xbox" devision of content.

Exclusives suck for everyone. Especially when Epic started out, they only had payment processors in certain countries. This meant that some people literally had no legal way to play the Epic exclusives. I'm not sure where they stand today, but that annoyed me enough, along with other shenanigans by Epic and Sweeny, that I avoid the whole ecosystem.

Paid exclusives locking content away from other online stores. Basically trying to force me to use it is a sure fire way of making me refuse.

I don't like when huge, rich corporations pretend that they are an underdog.

On top of that, I don't like when a platform bribes developers to limit their game to one platform.

Aside from the other scumbaggery that Epic does, if you do wanna play their free games then atleast use heroic so you don't use the wasteheap that is the epic games launcher.

They do the same thing that the horde of shitty streaming services do: Hold content hostage through exclusivity deals so they can gain market share without actually providing a comparable technology or service as their competitor.

One of my biggest complaints with the EGS is their anti-competitive actions. Rather than try to out compete, rather than try to be the better choice, they pay developers to only release games on their platform, flat out barring them from releasing on any other store. They don't try to win your favor, they don't try to be a pleasant experience, they just shortcut their way to being the only option, without a care for improving any of the other faults or shortcomings.

My next complaint is that Tencent has a 40% ownership share in Epic Games, and I make active efforts to not give them a dime.

For starters: complete lack of features and user support. EGS gives you the game and basically no way to interact with the community around that game. They don't support Linux, which is huge for some people, but also makes some peripherals like Steamdeck that operate on Linux entirely incompatible.

Because their user support is so bad, nobody really chooses EGS to buy/play games from, so Epic tries to take that choice away buy giving payouts to publishers to only let the game be on their store for six months or longer, meaning anyone who wants to play such a game has to come to them. This is also why you see a lot of free games, EGS trying to lure people to their "service".

Which is where the real big problem comes in. Instead of user beneficial features, most of the storefront and game launcher is bloat ware that would rather show you more and more ads for other products on their store than let you get into the game you want to play. And if reports are true, advertising games already in your library. So they aren't even trying to tailor a custom user experience, they are just blasting you with a bunch of shit till something sticks (or you uninstall)

There have also been allegations of EGS scanning personal computer files outside of its install directory, which is scummy enough on its own but its also transmitting that data back to their central server, which gets handed off to Tencent, the Chinese owned company that is a big investor in Epic and has their own history of scandal and anti consumer behavior. So if this all is happening, its hard to say just what data on your computer is behind handed off to Tencent and the Chinise Government because you wanted to play a silly game on an inferior game service.

Epic wanted exclusives by pulling games from other platforms. I will never spend a single cent on Epic Games. I'm happy to spend it on Steam, especially games that I have pirated before (Commandos series for example) or indie games (Banished anyone?).

For bigger games such as Civilians, I'll purchase it on Steam and then pirate so I don't need to run Steam. I am a big fan of patches to remove the intro screen.

I like the way steam looks better and try to avoid spending money on software belonging to chinese companies like Tencent.

I wouldn't have much reason not to buy from Epic, but I also wouldn't have any reason to buy from it either. Other than free games I don't see why pick Epic over any other place. Steam has more features and GOG is DRM-free, even ItchIO has the benefit of being more supportive of smaller and upcoming game devs. Epic doesn't do anything but the basic.

Tim Sweeney hates linux so that's why I prefer Steam over it. Even though Epic gives people free games, the games were always free anyway (unless you want multiplayer), I know you said piracy isn't an answer though.