Seriously!!

The best part to me is that this is a former “principal animation engineer,” and they still have no self-awareness about why Epic sucks.

It reminds me of an old saying that really good people hire really good people… but mediocre people often hire those that are worse than them to look better. That is, “A” people hire “A” people, but “B” people hire “C” people, and the team (or company) declines.

Essays like this make me wonder if Epic has hired many good people over the years.

It’s not a good sign that the cult of entitlement at Epic is so strong, even their most experienced former technical staff still write entitled essays after they leave. And they post them on X.

they bought a game I liked after it was released and now I can't play it, because I don't internet without VPN. I'm very upset with them about this.

because they own it now.

and they want my money.

I was gonna say, isn't this just the "free market" at work? Consumers chose the superior product and the inferior products decided to whine and bitch rather than put time into making their product worth a consumer's money, attention, and time.

He argues if a better launcher emerged it "would still be of no interest to Steam users"

What part of that sounds like “no reason” to give such a service money? If the guy in the article was talking about Epic I’d be inclined to agree with you, but he’s talking about a hypothetical service that’s better than Steam. I’m inclined to agree with him too, it would be very difficult to make a better service than Steam (he’s obviously wrong for thinking you could vibe code such a thing) but even if someone did at this point I have so much of my gaming life on Steam that it would be difficult to switch.

It reads to me like you’re arguing with Tim Sweeney more than the guy in the article you’re responding to.

They are too busy to monetize their userbase.

They're trying, that's why the keep suing

Give it a generation or three, but yes.

Companies that "haven't gone evil" yet are like dynasties that aren't ruled by a mad king, yet.

It turns out "some other company will make more money" isn't a compelling sales pitch for your store. Who knew

It took Steam so long to add a shopping cart, because there weren't many games in Steam at that time anyway. And it took so long for Epic Games to add a shopping cart, because nobody wanted to buy many games on Epic anyway (due to either Fortnite only play or just to grab Free Game giveaways).

No wonder they think its impossible, because they vibe code everything now.

What do you mean? They tried the most capitalist of solutions, buying themselves into the space free games and exclusivity! It's a shame it takes a bit more than just being able to click "play" (and not even that in Linux) to have a shop front people want to use.

They could, but they won't.

The major way they broke capitalism was by not going public. Gabe has to answer to nobody, so the usual gang of corporate fucking idiots can't force him to do short sighted shit to make a short term squeeze at the cost of long term viability.

This is the key. It's the WHOLE thing. A runaway cap table destroys companies, always. Investors have different exit horizons and they are fundamentally incompatible with long term viability.

All you need to do to compete with a publicly owned company is capitalism is wait for their investors to get too greedy.

Fixing those problems wouldn't get anyone to move over. It's another launcher and store. Who the fuck wants that? Until GabeN dies, Valve is taken public, and things get straight up shitty on Steam, nobody's going to start buying games on another platform.

I'm liking itch's new launcher too

They are ignored in conversations like this because their existence undermines the monopoly accusations aimed at Steam. Talk like this isn't about the reality, but trying to tear Steam down so Epic can compete without having to actually provide a good product.

Sorry home slice, but those facts you're dropping are a little too accurate for ol' Timbo's liking.

I don't find the ubiquity of Steam as strong as it was say 15 years ago. People are far more open to having their games on different platforms, they just don't particularly care for the Epic Games store.

I think the argument you are making is the right one though: you need to offer something different. Serve a different segment, and have some nice features to attract people. That's kind of it.

The performance complaints were also stupid.

Valve had their boot time fixed in beta channel for weeks

Only an idiot would have put out a marketing blitz about it when the sword of Damocles is swinging above them.

I probably have 30 free games on Epic. I have literally ended up buying some of those same games on Steam because the user experience of Epic is so bad.

Yours is definitely the best explanation of the circumstances. Epic saw games as the product they were selling. Gamers can pirate games, so the free game you want with some hoops to jump through vs a free game you didn't ask for with some hoops to jump through is a weak value proposition. Valve sees Steam as the product. It's not just a good library manager, it's a store with decent discovery and relatively accurate user reviews, and a moderately useful multiplayer experience. If they had felt the pressure to incorporate TeamSpeak, then Discord wouldn't even exist, but that was money Valve didn't have to spend to still be more convenient than piracy.

I don't make a lot of money, so I've gotten value out of the free games on Epic, but their launcher is terrible for figuring out what I'd like to play next. Playnite has ended up being an incredibly useful launcher, because it can consolidate launcher libraries, then show me which games I haven't played, then sort them by critic score or user score.

It's like Walmart vs Costco.

To be fair, by nearly all accounts, Valve treats (and compensates) their employees very well. I think that compensation may also include profit-sharing but I might be wrong.

-Supports open source
-Doesn't try to fuck up their customer base
-Produces nonrestrictive hardware
-Invents things to make gaming better
-Their own games actually optimized and work on older hardware
-Optimizes the gaming experience and helps 3rd party developers to be successful (literally opposite of Nintendo)
-Customer support actually work
-Non invasive opt in data collection / telemetry to make products better
-Filters away the adware customer is product bs
-Supports older hardware by updating drivers that original manifacturer doesn't anymore (less evaste, more opportunities to game)
-Developed SteamOS (Linux distribution) to keep Microsoft from Vendor locking gaming

If you add 2 spaces before using a line break markdown will preserve your formatting. Alternatively, if you add a space after the hyphen you can make a bullet list which will also keep your line breaks.

• Supports open source
• Doesn't try to fuck up their customer base
• ...

Or maybe they broke capitalism in the sense that they are showing that the shit they teach MBAs isn't the only or even the best path to profit and if enough people adopt (or return to) that way of doing business, they can dominate their markets and compete directly with the venture capital class that tries to compete with its financial weight more than whatever products or services it is currently peddling.

I mean, this part is so obvious to me right now. With all the complete shit products out there that have so many anti-features that I often just stop looking for things rather than get enticed by the good features, I think that competitors that come in with the intent of making good quality shit people want (where "good" can even just mean "doesn't try to spy on you") could similarly dominate their markets. And if people don't chase empires to become billionaires, I think there's a lot of room in all markets even when certain players come to dominate their local area (considering physical markets more than digital ones, since they scale very differently, though I do think that some thought could be put in to how to do this for digital markets, too... Maybe some drastic changes to IP laws).

He's just a guy looking for free marketing. Just ignore them, CEOs have a shorter attention span than a toddler.

To be fair, he's kinda right about it. You can't JUST make a better product and hope gamers will move to your platform. Everyone's got dozens if not hundreds of games on Steam and nobody wants to sit in two gardens.

To get people to move over, Steam would actively have to turn shit too. There's nothing you can do to make a platform so much better than Steam currently is that it would entice people to move over. Perhaps if it sucked your dick while you're playing?

That's a separate point from Epic itself being shit.