Comment by vaer-k | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vaer-k | Hacker News Reader

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Because it's a terrible client with virtually no features, yet their business tactics strongarm players into using it. Nobody likes to be forced to use a certain product. EGS doesn't even offer a fraction of what Steam can do. Here's what I can come up with off the top of my head; I'm sure others can chime in with more.

Steam has a robust marketplace, with user reviews and a slew of sorting and shopping cart features.

Steam has friends, chat, voice chat, and group chat.

Steam has built-in, turnkey stream broadcasting of games.

Steam allows friends to drop in and play a game cooperatively with you, even if they don't own the game too.

Steam has remote play with friends.

Steam has remote streaming to devices around your home, and big screen mode so you can plop on the couch and enjoy an optimized UI and a gamepad.

Steam has robust gamepad support and configuration.

Steam has industry-leading Linux support.

Steam has VR mode, with custom spaces, interfaces, and a market of useful tools and mods to enhance the experience.

Steam has a music player and a built-in web browser.

Steam lets you add non-steam games to your library for convenient access.

Steam has customizable user profiles and fun social features, like card trading.

Steam has experimental mods and features via Steam Labs.

Now, ask yourself, how does it feel when EGS coerces players into using their inferior storefront through strongarm business practices.

Well, Steam also started by strongarming players into it if you want to play Half Life 2. Also Steam is still strongarming players by Steamworks integration. Half of AAA games use Steamworks, and if you don't want to use Steam, you can't play the game, even if you buy a boxed copy.

Asking genuinely, what are these AAA games that require Steamworks? None of the big publishers require use of Steam (EA / Ubisoft / Activision), most of them have their own launchers that get launched anyway when you open their games via Steam.

A hugely important addendum: Steam is owned by Valve, which is not a publicly traded company. GabeN's private hat empire can do whatever it wants.

This feels like a positive, to me. After watching so much quarterly profit chasing races to the bottom across so many aspects of the economy.

Oh, absolutely! It's fantastic; Valve and Steam regularly do things that The Shareholders would never allow.

(Not the person you're replying to) These are all reasonable complaints! I, personally, barely care about _any_ of them (in particular, I don't think I've ever read a review on Steam, I almost-never play multiplayer or modded games, and I would hate to stream my games), so, for me, Epic is exactly as fully-featured as Steam is - but these are reasonable reasons why other people might feel a gap.

(EDIT: in particular, I always find the complaint that Epic lacks a shopping cart to be hilarious, because I hadn't even noticed that Steam _has_ a cart until that was pointed out. I can't imagine ever wanting to buy more than one game at once!)

That's all well and good, and if you like EGS, that's your prerogative. My response is to a question of why people don't like EGS. The point is not even that Steam is better (it is); instead the point is that nobody likes to be forced to use a platform they don't prefer, and this is made especially onerous when the forced platform is so very, very inferior.

> My response is to a question of why people _don't_ like EGS

Yep, and you communicated that very well, and I appreciate it - thank you! Apologies for giving the impression that I was disagreeing with you - I was giving another perspective, while recognizing that I'm in the minority and that your points are valid.

No, my apologies if I came off defensive or aggressive. I just wanted to clarify. Thanks for your comment.

EGS still doesn't have a cart?!

IMO it speaks to a disturbing implication of priorities on the part of EGS. The concept of a cart isn't exactly groundbreaking in ecommerce, and its absence suggests to me that the store's primary purpose isn't to easily allow humans to purchase games.

Exactly right. This is it right here. It's openly hostile to users, especially considering the broader context of Weeny's pejorative comments about his customers.

I respectfully disagree. I'd bet a large amount of money that an overwhelming amount of video-game purchases on Steam etc. are single-item purchases - that is, in the vast majority of cases, adding a cart doesn't help the user experience (and, without the presence of a one-click-add-and-checkout button, actually slightly harms it by adding another step in the purchase flow). So, for most users/use-cases, a cart is much lower priority than many other features.

There may be many other gaps that indicate a nefarious or incompetent direction to EGS' development (and, indeed, vaer-k listed many) - but "The absence of a cart implies that EGS are not prioritizing making it easy to purchase games" does not hold.

I don't see why. You haven't provided any reason for this other than your insistent assumptions about the needlessness of carts in digital purchases -- but all other digital games stores have them, as well as almost all other ecommerce platforms. If literally all your competition are doing something, and you're not, that's probably meaningful.

>"The absence of a cart implies that EGS are not prioritizing making it easy to purchase games"

Despite your use of quotes, I didn't write that. I said "its absence suggests to me that the store's primary purpose isn't to easily allow humans to purchase games", which is entirely different. Don't put words into others' mouths, or don't feign respect.

I was using quotes to indicate a sentence that I was referring to[1] as an example of a particular position, not to attempt to indicate that you'd said those exact words. I apologize that that was unclear - and I'm particularly sensitive to being misquoted, so I also apologize for giving the impression that that was what I'd done.

That said, I still don't see the functional distinction between the example position I described, and your statement. Are you saying that there is an effective difference between those two, or simply calling out (correctly) that what I wrote was not a direct quotation of what you wrote? What is a situation that would be described by one but not by the other?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinctio...

Can you imagine wanting to buy a game and its expansions together?

That's a great example, thanks! I don't think I've ever done so (usually I'm buying games late-enough that they're being sold as a single bundle), hence why I didn't think of it - but that totally makes sense, thank you!

I mean, I remember back when people were outraged that they had to install steam. Relax and take the free stuff.

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