Still not worth getting Epic. I’d literally rather pay for my games.
When a company’s products are free then you’re a free product for the company.
Says the dude using a free lemmy account.
Why even complain about this? Paid products are also harvesting your data for resale. This isn’t a unique feature of Epic.
Because Epic’s store is bad and rather than trying to compete on quality, they use anticompetitive practices such as paid exclusives to force you to use their inferior app store.
The free games as bait pulls in people to inflate their user counts artificially for investors, because from what I’ve read devs aren’t seeing a lot of purchases from their store.
And they are trying to force these terrible practices into the iOS ecosystem by abusing the legal system in multiple markets.
At the end of the day Epic’s attempt to purchase market share has already been bad for me as a consumer on one platform and it seems like they’re going to cause that same harm on another.
It’s not comparable to lemmy, which is FOSS and supported partially through donations. It’s entire existence is to avoid the problems that Epic-style companies cause. They are the reddit version of App stores.
They’re free games though. You may be on a crusade against the epic store and I don’t like multiple stores/launchers/exclusives either, but it’s pretty shitty to begrudge people for downloading and playing free games just because you think it’s counterproductive to the progress of your pet issue. The Outer Worlds is a good game with a compelling story, and your average person who would like to play that game doesn’t have a bunch of spare cash available to buy it when the option of getting it for free is available and extremely easy.
People have the choice between supporting Epic or sailing the high seas.
I would argue that the latter is the more ethical option.
I’m not averse to donning my hat and eye patch every now and then, but Epic is still more convenient. Maybe the high seas need their own front end…
Honestly, I bet it would have better features and still somehow make more money for indie developers than the Epic store!
Unfortunately I suspect that the legality of actually putting it together would somewhat interfere with the technical aspects needed to make it good.
Some people have that choice, sure.
You just said free games were bad 3 times with no justification lmao. Like you said it as a building block to a larger point that never landed, then described it as a horrible practice. What horrible practice are you specifically complaining about?
A loss leader is standard business practice across all businesses. Steam became the defacto pc game page by the use of extreme sales, undercutting their competitors. Do you think they are equally evil?
Loss leaders aren’t bad.
Epic games is bad and their loss leaders support them, which is bad.
You’re raging about a publisher providing deals to games that are done selling and helping them get some extra coverage.
Your solution is how you would rather people steal from the developers because that is a better way of supporting them. Your reasoning is that Epic under pays them, while your solution is to pay them nothing.
The irony in this tantrum hurts to read.
My solution is to pay for the games I want on Steam. Which is only possible for me when Epic doesn’t force exclusivity.
Other people can choose as they like.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch unless it’s FOSS.
I had no idea this would be controversial on lemmy.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch unless it’s FOSS.
They said from their free Lemmy account lmao
And I absolutely love the bit about them invading the apple ecosystem. You have the strangest loyalties on who is allowed to abuse capitalism.
