Oh, it’s still hated.

Epic couldn’t make a superior product, so instead they bribed lots of game developers to make things Epic exclusive.

On top of that, even after being around for years, the Epic software is missing tons of features that Steam has had for years.

Epic bleeds obscene amounts of money to build a separate set of infrastructure, rather than actually trying to improve things for gamers.

Epic’s ostensibly biggest benefit is that it charges less money per transaction to developers. But Epic has, at this point, given away hundreds of free games, and Steam has so many more people with a long history of buying games. So there’s an argument to be made that Steam is still the better value, because it provides better exposure and a larger paying player base.

Epic made headlines when Metro Exodus that was set for a steam launch and even had physical copies with the steam logo, abruptly decided to pull their launch after entering into a deal with Epic.

https://old.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/aqyjac/physical_copy_of_metro_exodus_for_pc_has_a/

Then came the contracts to not release on Steam. And from the DARQ dev turned out that also included GOG too.

I was contacted by the Epic Store, proposing that I enter into an exclusivity agreement with them instead of releasing DARQ on Steam. They made it clear that releasing DARQ non-exclusively is not an option. I rejected their offer before we had a chance to talk about money.

https://medium.com/@unfoldgames/why-i-turned-down-exclusivity-deal-from-the-epic-store-developer-of-darq-7ee834ed0ac7

Free games are nice, but that doesn’t guarantee affection when it comes to paying customers. It wasn’t like this was some small indie company but another billion dollar company trying to pull a Walmart, so some people just weren’t won over by the free games into being happy with the exclusivity deals. Those people weren’t happy having choice forced away.

I still haven’t spent money on epic but I do claim the free games. Yet I will probably never spend money there even though I’ve spent money at GOG, uplay, bnet, and origin because the first impression and approach they took rubbed me the wrong way. So even people who don’t only buy from steam were turned off with the strategy they took.

Now some people don’t care and will buy from there, so this just the point of view of people who dislike Epic.

I bought Alan Wake 2 because I read it’s drm-free which is sort of true. I bought it and I even bought the deluxe upgrade only to realize the game will refuse to recognize the dlc unless it’s launched though the EGS launcher which I refuse to use. Conveniently they won’t refund game add-ons. Fuck Epic Games, they can suck a fat one.

When Epic first launched, they didn’t have payment processors in a number of countries. Want to play that Epic exclusive game? Well too fucking bad because you can’t buy it. That one frustrated me as someone who lives outside of some of the major countries. Also, the people behind it are absolute tools in my opinion and I’d rather not support them.

1. It was insecure. It leaked credit card numbers and personal information like a sieve.
2. It used CCP money to bribe companies into throwing away sales. An act that while was short term good for the companies, permanently poisoned them afterwards.
3. They didnt have basic functionality like preloading games. They had to pay Gearbox to do that for them
4. They still dont have feature parity with Steam, even for the few features they have

Gamers are a bunch of entitled babies