The Epic Games Store catch-all

We need a place to discuss the Epic Games Store, in much the same way we discuss Steam, GOG, Origin, etc.

This is not a venting ground. Both previous EGS threads were locked. Even if you don't agree with Epic's policies, PLEASE keep this thread civil.

Third time's the charm?

Epic news today. Weekly free games will continue throughout 2020, and some impressive figures released.

merphle wrote:

Epic news today. Weekly free games will continue throughout 2020, and some impressive figures released.

Interesting stats drop:
108 million customers
$680 million spent

So, $6/customer on average?

Seems that hella lot of those "customers" are just there for the freebies....

Jonman wrote:

Seems that hella lot of those "customers" are just there for the freebies....

I would question that. They had 200 million free games claimed. That averages to 2/customer. But there's confounding factors such as Dauntless and Fortnite being free. I'm assuming the $680 million doesn't include Fortnite revenue because it has it's own "store front" in-game.

Was really cool to see a lot of indie and smaller titles in the most-popular section! A lot of my favourite games of 2019 came from the EGS

True dat. TABS was phenomenal! I shudder to think how many hours I will sink into it when they release a unit editor.

I think I paid for 3 games on Epic Store last year and with all the free give-aways, I ended up with an Epic library of somewhere around 80-something and still growing. I will probably never play the large majority of them, but there's been a few gems and I've enjoyed most of the ones that I did play. I'm still not ecstatic about yet another game store and launcher, but I've actually been a lot happier with Epic than I expected to be. I'm certainly far more positive about it than I was for the first couple years after Steam launched with Half Life 2.

Please, people, don't get this locked like the last one.

I'm in the same boat as vypre; I bought a handful of games last year, amidst "buying" the 70-odd free games they gave away. I also wasn't thrilled with having to deal with another store/launcher, but there's some ways to mitigate this: the GOG Galaxy 2 launcher (yeah, yet another launcher ) integrates in with Steam, Epic, and just about all of the other platforms, and gives a decent combined listing of all of your libraries together -- including the ability to launch games. It's not perfect, but it helps.

And I kinda like seeing such a carefully curated list of games on the Epic Store. There's only about 225 games in total on the platform (including some not-yet-released titles), and they all look to be pretty decent and popular.

I think you two are examples of exactly the kind of customer Epic are looking for. The free game strategy has to be geared at least in part towards building enough of a local machine presence to make people boot the EGS either with or instead of Steam more often than not. That's all they've got to do to start dissolving 15 year's worth of Steam accretions on the big consumers (i.e., those that have big libraries). Spend will come once they are at eyeball-parity, so they really are playing a smart long game... Whether or not they've got the runway to hit long-term sustainability is another question but it looks like they are heading in the right direction.

merphle wrote:

And I kinda like seeing such a carefully curated list of games on the Epic Store. There's only about 225 games in total on the platform (including some not-yet-released titles), and they all look to be pretty decent and popular.

This is one of the biggest assets EGs has going for it, for me personally. It's a store that I can browse. I feel reasonably confident in the average quality of the games in the store, too.

The only other platform I feel comfortable browsing like that is the heavily curated selection of games on Xbox Game Pass. Every other storefront and platform feels overwhelmed by the glut of releases. I know some people like that open-floodgates feel where anything and everything goes, but I don't.

I'm curious to see if that feeling fades from EGs over the course of the next year as the catalog continues to grow. I can't imagine that they'll delist anything, so eventually the catalog will also grow unmanageable just more slowly.

The funny thing is, I can't think of anyone I know (personally or through internet ramblings) who actually enjoys the uncurated storefront experience. Sure, there seems to be a lot of advocacy for an open approach, but I see very few games consumers going on record to say it's a better experience overall.

I just don't browse anymore, anywhere.

Honestly, scrolling through Epic's carefully curated store is still basically a Big List Of Things I Don't Want To Play (or already have played). Sure, they're much higher quality games I don't want to play than your Steams or eShops, but so what?

My to-purchase list is sourced from games media, friends and community, for the most part. Between that and The Pile, there's just no value in browsing for me anymore.

You guys are silly. I hear about a handful of great little games a month and I know where I can go get them. The steam store feeds more curated stores like humble bundle. Even though I hated trying to get noticed in the constant stream of garbage at least there's a reliable place to go when your buddy evangelizes this awesome new thing.

That said I also like the epic store. They're literally giving us (and devs) their Fortnite money when they do those sales with the extra ten dollars off. But I think the only game I've played a lot of has been Satisfactory.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
merphle wrote:

And I kinda like seeing such a carefully curated list of games on the Epic Store. There's only about 225 games in total on the platform (including some not-yet-released titles), and they all look to be pretty decent and popular.

This is one of the biggest assets EGs has going for it, for me personally. It's a store that I can browse. I feel reasonably confident in the average quality of the games in the store, too.

Same here. I don't think I've even taken advantage of the free stuff at all, but navigating a storefront that doesn't assault me with noise is nice. I also suspect that X years from now EGS will be its own kind of nightmare. Its what companies do.

By then hopefully Valve has figured out how to filter garbage by machine learning analysis of asset flip screenshots.

I’ve spent about £70 on 8 games but that includes the Outer Wilds which was just about full price. The rest were in the sale with an extra £10 off which I thought Was an excellent way to discount and developers still get their cut.

I’ve got another 25 or so free games, and I keep going back to see what is what. The small number of games is good imho, Steam has thousands and it’s an absolute chore to search through generally rather than for a specific title, even with filters on.

All good so far for me.

Sometimes I hear about a specific book that intrigues me, so I’ll seek it out directly. Amazon has me covered there.

But sometimes I just want to ogle some book covers and maybe flip through a few pages. A quality local bookstore (or library) satisfies this need in a way that Amazon doesn’t.

I see this dichotomy In much the same way as I see Steam vs Epic. Both are useful, and serve different needs for people at different times.

DC Malleus wrote:

The funny thing is, I can't think of anyone I know (personally or through internet ramblings) who actually enjoys the uncurated storefront experience.

It's good for small indie devs since a lot more people know about Steam than Itch. And it's ignorable if you have some other means of discovery and are doing targeted searches for specific things you've heard about.

But I don't think I've met many people whose idea of fun is combing through the pages and pages of nearly identical new releases every day or week. I'm sure they're out there, and they're the groundbreakers who find all the gems the rest of us hear about, but there aren't many of them.

Every so often I go through the Steam Discovery queue, and it's still such a mess that I mostly rely on word of mouth to advertise games to me. It's probably also tied up in the fact that my backlog is large enough that I feel no particular need to browse for quirky indie titles as much (as I even have a backlog of those).

So I haven't done much of that in the Epic store either. Have used it to buy a few games, claimed free games, and starting to hope that the library can be sorted soon.

The only things I'm missing, is my local currencies.

I don't mind another launcher. Heck, I love what they did with the discount tickets they were offering.

I seems to fit in the model discribed so far at first.

So far, I'm happy to see a thread discussing discounts, as I was off the radar for a few months in my purchases.

Anyone help me with a question - if I were to, say, give a trusted friend my Epic login, could they log in as me, install games from my library and play them?

The Epic Games Store client doesn't provide any kind of built-in DRM, so I don't see why not. Individual games might have DRM, but most of the games sold are DRM-free, as I understand it.

Edit: I know that you can install most of the games and then completely uninstall the EGS client and the games will still play without any issue, so I think what you're asking is technically feasible.

As long as you don't try to log in at the same time, I don't see why that wouldn't work. You'd probably have to check your email (or phone) and do some verification if there's two factor or trusted device stuff that needs to be cleared. There's a chance it may even work if both of you were logged in at the same time and were both in offline mode. I haven't spent enough fiddling with the Epic launcher to know for sure, however.

I should probably just pull out my old laptop and do a test run on that and my desktop, really. Thanks for chiming in though, folks.

Jonman wrote:

Anyone help me with a question - if I were to, say, give a trusted friend my Epic login, could they log in as me, install games from my library and play them?

Seems a bit more complicated than your trusted friend just paying the developer for the game through the Epic Games Store or Steam or, if available, directly on the developer's website....

Edgar_Newt wrote:
Jonman wrote:

Anyone help me with a question - if I were to, say, give a trusted friend my Epic login, could they log in as me, install games from my library and play them?

Seems a bit more complicated than your trusted friend just paying the developer for the game through the Epic Games Store or Steam or, if available, directly on the developer's website....

My trusted friend just lost her job thanks to COVID, so doesn't have money for videogames, is worried for her own future, and I'm trying to offer her something to take her mind off the sh*ttiness of her situation, so no, no it isn't.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Edit: I know that you can install most of the games and then completely uninstall the EGS client and the games will still play without any issue, so I think what you're asking is technically feasible.

That seems...not well thought through?

charlemagne wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:

Edit: I know that you can install most of the games and then completely uninstall the EGS client and the games will still play without any issue, so I think what you're asking is technically feasible.

That seems...not well thought through?

Why? It's not a DRM platform. It's not Steam and isn't meant to be.

True. I guess I'm surprised that they don't want to restrict it somehow.

I know I can launch the EGS executables from Steam without launching the EGS client. My theory was that the EGS client was 'blessing' them somehow so they would only run on the computer they were installed on, regardless of whether the launcher was running or not.

Now I'm kinda curious to put a game on a USB stick and try to run them on my other computer...

I tried opening a couple of games on my regular PC, while the Epic client was fully closed (not quietly running in the systray), and they wouldn't launch. YMMV, etc.

Untested whether it works, but in theory if another user uses Offline mode it wouldn't kick the "signed in" user off their account. Not sure if it works! Just putting it out as an idea.

Edit: Logged out of my account and into "Offline mode" 8/10 games I currently have installed were able to launch. Control weirdly didn't allow launch in Offline. And neither did the Cycle but that's an online game so makes more sense.