Lol, Civ 5, the mobile game version in the Civ franchise. Civ 6 is miles better than that travesty.
Epic Games taking a stab at Steam
- Thread starter Globusdiablo
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Perhaps. Or perhaps not.
Civ6 AI is a badly coded RNG generator whose difficulty lies in advanced tech start and stuff like that.
Again, picked up Civ 4 on the cheap and realized it is far better than the newer ones, even though unit stacking is annoying at times.
We agree on that.
The rhetoric around the Steam store vs all newcomers is pretty amusing to me. Nobody wanted Steam, nobody wanted DRM, and everyone was suspicious and hostile towards Steam as a platform when it launched THIRTEEN YEARS AGO. What has happened in the time between then and now is that various storefronts have come and gone, and in the process screwed over everyone who purchased games on those storefronts by making their games no longer playable or only playable with a great deal of hassle.
Meanwhile Steam for all its flaws has mostly been pretty good about holding devs accountable for updating/patching their games, for refunding broken games, for grace periods to trial games, for allowing customers to access every title they have paid for on their own terms with minimal hassle and ample resources to fix/modify/troubleshoot their games.
And these new storefronts come along and expect everyone to just sign up to be their captive audience, to allow them to hold a portion of their games libraries hostage, and to immediately hand over all the same hard-won trust that was begrudgingly granted to Steam over the course of more than a decade.
Is there any reason to think that Epic/Tencent will treat their customers with the same (or better) level of courtesy and respect when it comes to managing and owning their games libraries, accessing their accounts, their save files, patches and updates for old games, etc? Is there any reason to think that a game from Epic's store (or ubisoft or EA or Rockstar or Stadia for that matter) will still be hassle free playable and accessible 2 years from now, let alone ten years from now? Ok well that's why there's a Steam "monopoly," a monopoly in which there are no exclusive deals or price fixing or anti-competitive practices, and every dev or publisher freely sells their games on other platforms and through other storefronts, and customers are free to purchase from any of those storefronts with no penalty, but nonetheless choose to buy preferentially on Steam because it's just that convenient and reliable. That kind of monopoly. You know, the kind of monopoly that isn't remotely monopolistic.
Meanwhile Epic is "fighting the monopoly" by bribing devs, not just to offer their products on the Epic store, but to TAKE AWAY their products from other store fronts, and forbidding devs from doing business on other storefronts. The only reason Epic isn't universally considered monopolistic and anti-competitive is because they are failing at it. But gosh I sure don't want them to succeed.
That's why people aren't going to jump onboard with Epic games store just because they showed up and demanded everyone trust them, especially not while also providing nothing for the customer's benefit, bribing devs to pull their games from other stores, and taking marching orders from a company best known for making a cell phone app where you tap the screen to unironically clap for the leader of a totalitarian state.
May very well be. Death Stranding is my first regular purchase on the Epic Games Store.
While I don't agree with all you say, I do appreciate your well argued reply. It's not really all that serious for me. It's a game launcher. I do hope it stays alive long enough for me to grow tired of the game I bought (besides the ones I get for free).
Bottom line for me as a consumer is that competition is good. Keeping Steam on their toes so to speak.
I am a bit curious as to why you defend Steam so vigorously. Would you care to elaborate on this point?
Curiosity awoken, I did a bit of digging.
This article seems to give a pretty fair account of events surrounding the Epic Games Store "Debacle":
The fury over the Epic Games Store, explained
Steam has a wealthy new competitor — but is it competing fairly?
www.polygon.com
An interesting fact suggests that the Epic Games Store is actually better for developers and producers (and not the end consumer so much) than Steam:
All in all I think Epic Games Store will be around for a while, so just another choice for me. And choice is good.
Not sure what else there is to add, really. I'm not so much a Steam defender as a critic of other storefronts. I like GOG just fine, and I'm also generally happy to buy games direct from the devs and forgo Steam altogether. Steam does some things I like, such as excellent controller support and family sharing, but the main point isn't that Steam is great so much as that Steam is (comparatively) reliable and (comparatively) trustworthy, at least by comparison to other companies.
Like, I've used Xbox game pass, and you can't access or back up even your own save files because everything is locked behind a wall of DRM. This single factor alone means I will never purchase anything from Xbox game pass, nor will I bother investing my time in playing one of their games even when it's free. Similarly, EA has changed stores and DRM methods and hence account systems and login procedures a couple times now, and all it has done is made it really unfun to try and play my copy of Mass Effect 2. Microsoft's Games For Windows Live, UPlay's mandatory logins and launchers, the Rockstar Social Club; these have all screwed around with my accounts, broken games for me, or made them a hassle to play.
I don't expect Microsoft, or Rockstar, or Ubisoft, or EA to learn any positive lessons from their first go round because I don't think they're interested in building anything of enduring value to anyone; they just want to leverage their power over a captive audience. So I'm not supporting those efforts. I don't want to waste money and time and hassle with these services; I hope they all fail and go away. If EA wants to exclusively sell their games through their store, that's one thing. It's entirely another thing to lock it to some proprietary launcher, login, and password which they might dump at any moment as soon as their investors detect a change in the wind.
And I don't give Epic the benefit of the doubt, nor Google with Stadia either. My willingness to spend money with any of these services is much much lower than it is through Steam, because with Steam I expect to probably be able to play my game a year from now, whereas with any other service I have no idea what is going to happen but my best guess is "nothing good."
And I didn't even start buying Steam games until maybe 5 or 6 years ago, so y'know maybe after Epic has established a solid 5-7 year track record I'll take a look at buying some of their games, but for now they're going to start at exactly the same place, trust-wise, as Steam started at 13 years ago: zero trust, zero benefit of the doubt; please earn my trust if you want my money. So far, the only moves I've seen from Epic are things which personally annoy me, such as bribing publishers to pull their games from other store fronts, or behind-the-scenes stuff like their ownership by TenCent which is a huge red flag.
Fair enough.
Now it's Borderlands "the handsome collection", up for grabs. Classic.
Too many storefronts, I now have Steam, Epic, GOG, Oculus, Viveport, and Origin. Oh, and Twitch. Eventually someone is going to go belly-up and I’ll lose access to everything I’ve purchased there, which is why I generally don’t purchase stuff outside of steam unless there isn’t an option.
I certainly don’t think Epic will be the first one from my list to go belly-up, however I was really unhappy with the “exclusives” model they started pushing. Hope the devs are able to float on that cash because I won’t be buying any Epic exclusives as a matter of course. No problem picking up a sale, and the freebies seem great, though to be honest I haven’t installed a single one of them yet.
I think Cuberpunk is the only one where I’d rather not buy it on steam, and that’s just because a) GOG is great and provides a service that steam doesn’t touch, and b) cdpr didn’t make it exclusive, they just said “if you like us as a developer buy it here so we keep 100% of the purchase” which seems very reasonable to me.
I certainly don’t think Epic will be the first one from my list to go belly-up, however I was really unhappy with the “exclusives” model they started pushing. Hope the devs are able to float on that cash because I won’t be buying any Epic exclusives as a matter of course. No problem picking up a sale, and the freebies seem great, though to be honest I haven’t installed a single one of them yet.
I think Cuberpunk is the only one where I’d rather not buy it on steam, and that’s just because a) GOG is great and provides a service that steam doesn’t touch, and b) cdpr didn’t make it exclusive, they just said “if you like us as a developer buy it here so we keep 100% of the purchase” which seems very reasonable to me.