Well, physical media breaks, discs get scratched and you might no longer find the updates.

This is true, but, and maybe I’m weird, I’ve lost more games due to account issues / services shutting down than I have from damaged discs. Plus, it’s fair use (in most countries) to make disc images of your own discs, so you actually have an option to legally preserve your games beyond the life of the media.

I agree about GOG.

Not totally true, it’s allowed to bequeath your account to someone through your will. At least for your Steam account. Of course you have to take care to do that before you die…

No exception was provided for this last time I looked through the subscriber agreement. I’m not real keen on reading through it again. Can you share the relevant portion?

And even if Steam has to shut down, Gaben at least made the promise to give you downloads for all your purchased games. You can decide how much that’s worth.

I tried to track down the source of this comment years ago, and I’m not convinced he ever said it. It goes back to someone on the Steam forums saying that he said it. Others on Reddit tried to track it down and I’m not aware that anyone ever succeeded.

Yes, for some people.

Which game did EGS make people rebuy? I know they moved Rocket League, but it went F2P when they moved it.

They did that with Half-Life.

This has not been my experience at all. The vast majority of my PC games from 1998 to 2010 are still working well. Yes, it is sometimes a pain to find updates, but my experience has been that many games from that time period worked acceptably well straight off the disc. And most games I want to play I can still find legal copies of on eBay or elsewhere.

In contrast, a number of newer games have already been delisted from Steam and are only available to pirates or people who bought them before they were delisted.

Also, preservation isn’t just about keeping it running right now. You can’t transfer licenses of Steam games. Anything that’s delisted will, outside of piracy, die when the account holders die. In contrast, I can buy legal physical copies of games that haven’t been sold for 20 years.

I guess I’m struggling to understand why you’re specifically mad at Epic for this behavior. Why not be mad at Steam? Because it was longer ago?

Valve also spent money to force customers to move games they’d already bought over to a different launcher, though. This is standard practice in the world of launchers. Users were happy playing Half-Life and the original CS outside of Steam. Then Valve decided to spend a shitload of money building Steam, and, one release, they announced that anyone who wanted to keep playing Half-Life or CS would need to start using Steam. Users were furious because Steam was fucking awful at the time. It got even worse when Half-Life 2 came out because Valve’s services were constantly down. Computer Gaming World or one of the other gaming rags at the time ran a story about it talking like 2 days to install Half-Life 2. And they were installing from disc. It had to connect to Steam to download patches / decryption keys.

I know you guys love Steam and hate EGS, but, honestly guys, they’re starting out almost the exact same way. Steam was shit. EGS is shit. Steam infuriated people by forcibly moving existing games over to Steam. EGS infuriated people by forcibly moving existing games over to EGS. Steam infuriated people by not having all the features that the old platform did and generally being shitty. EGS is doing the same. Steam forced people to use it by having exclusives. EGS forced people to use it by having exclusives.

People did not trust Valve for pretty much the same reasons they don’t trust EGS now. I boycotted Valve for something like 15 years because I lost an account that had several of my games when their password reset feature didn’t work for a months long period (and support never responded).

I understand Valve had redeemed themselves in a lot of people’s eyes, but if it’s okay for Valve to be completely inept, force people to move to a new launcher, and not be trustworthy in the early days, isn’t it okay for Epic too? Alternatively, maybe it wasn’t okay for Steam to be so shitty early on. Would we be better off today if gamers had more backbone and boycotted Steam so hard that it failed?

To put it another way, being a shitty company early on benefited customers in the long run one time (at least, according to many). Could it a second time?

I’m guessing it disappears. Is it possible to family share a game and then get a refund / remove it from your library? I’m guessing whatever happens in that case is the same thing that would happen here.

How does it compare to Mojeek? Some of my friends were frustrated with most of the big players until they tried Mojeek, and they’ve been happy with it.

As I said, it’s a problem with digital distribution generally. It’s killed physical copies. Even physical copies of PC games that do still exist are mostly just Steam or EGS installers and a CD key.

EGS has been improving, though. And Steam was bad for a really long time. The idea that it was steadily improving all along the way is even debatable. There was like an 8 year period where offline mode didn’t work. It took them something like 10 years before they added the option to get a refund for a game. For a long time, they would routinely ban entire accounts for issues with PayPal, even if the account holder hadn’t done anything wrong. Steam had substantial security issues for years, until security researchers finally wrote an open letter begging Valve to improve their security practices. There was at least one issue that was reported and they refused to fix it until it was actively exploited. I’m pretty sure that’s actually happened more than once.

EGS started with a ton of stuff working that it took Valve years to do, including better security practices, refunds, etc. And they’ve been improving, probably at a rate faster than Steam did in the early days.

I understand that the exclusivity thing pisses everyone off, but that’s not even an EGS-specific issue. I wanted to play Borderlands 2 without having a Steam account, but that game was exclusive to Steam for 7 fucking years. If I can wait 7 years to pay BL2 outside of Steam, you guys can wait 6 months to play BL3 outside of EGS or a year to play Metro outside of EGS.