Epic Game Store’s free giveaways just cause a huge spike in Steam sales, reveals New Blood CEO
7 months ago by RetroGoblet79 to c/games
Indeed, I suspect the sales funnel is like this: one person picks it up for free on EGS and then annoys their friends to get it as well for multiplayer, but those friends rather buy it on Steam than to bother with installing another (bad) store app. At least I had that happen to me a few times.
Under Linux, running a game on Epic is a pain next to Steam, so if the game is good enough...
I swear by Heroic for the other launchers now I'm on Linux
I, for the life of me, cannot figure out how to set up just the UnrealStore, FAB, whatever its called now, on Bazzite.
My latest attempt saw me setting up a Debian container and ending up with 100GB of trying to compile Unreal from scratch.
As far as I can tell, if you are running an atomic linux distro, it is onerous to be able to figure out how to just download like, a free material set or model from FAB.
I've barely managed to get it reliably working for Unity... and then Unity goes and basically merges with Unreal and FAB.
Yeah like, Heroic works for playing a game, but fuck you, apparently, is Unreal's stance on trying to access content I legally own that isn't a game.
Sometimes the DLC for the free game on epic costs the same as the full package on steam. So epic is an extended demo really
An Epic win for Steam!
The current free game are the two Styx games. I grabbed them on Steam when I saw they went 90% off so I'd have an easier time running them on my legion go and my Android phone. I learned of the games because of them being the EGS free game and the game looked up my alley
I had no idea this existed(I never even look at EGS), thanks. Now I can live out my WoW Goblin Rogue fantasies.
While I do like the first 2 Styx games (the 3rd one is out soon-ish? if not now?), they are quite the "quicksave/quickload trial and error patience games" and quite deep in the eurojank spectrum. The climbing in the first one is pretty jank, and in both games the character breaks 4th wall deadpool-style pretty often, enemies are dumb as bricks but will absolutely murder you once alerted enough.
But on the upside, it's one of those rare stealth games where murder is not penalized at all.
That said, the games are great!
What's eurojank?
(video games, slang) Video games from Europe (especially Eastern Europe) with ambitious concepts but lacking in execution and sometimes exhibiting unintended glitches.
as per Wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Eurojank)
I was under the assumption the Styx -devs were german, but apparently the studio is French. Either way. I also don't recall any specific glitches, but the first game has a bit stiff climbing mechanics where you can (and will) do some unintended jumps to void etc.
Basically "AA game" instead if "AAA big budget game"
(the 3rd one is out soon-ish? if not now?)
End of Feb (the 26th?), these sales seem to be to promote the launch of Part 3.
I played the 2nd one with a friend for a few hours last night. I appreciate the humor, the music selection is above average, the movement feels good and every time we died it was due to us being dumb. No bugs (playing on Linux, with GE-Proton10-27), runs great on maximum settings.
We were having an easy time by going on a murder spree, then we noticed that the game gives you rank medals for speed, avoiding kills and avoiding detection so we started playing to maximize the end-score. Those constraints make the puzzles a bit harder and I can see wanting to run a level multiple times in order to get it right.
Overall, it's a fun experience, does the stealth thing competently and the graphics/music/animations/dialog is good.
heh, yea, my approach is also full on murderhobo in Styx, but I do it so nobody notices anything if at all possible. Levels can take several hours with this method so ... uh, it's not really optimal way to play but damnit that's how I roll. Admittedly the near constant presence of the void/cliffs/etc bottomless pits makes it fairly easy to get rid of bodies.
Never really felt the need to chase the time bonuses, just collectables etc are enough for me. Admittedly I have not finished either of the games, but played pretty darn far in both.
“Styx” just reminded me Song of Syx, which is an awesome (dwarf) fortress-like indie game. You can give it’s sales an uptick instead while Styx giveaways goes on:
By the time a game shows up on a giveaway it has been out long enough that there’s lot of discounts for it
That's often but not always the case. For example, the first ever giveaway in Dec 2018 was Subnautica, which was released in Jan that same year. Occasionally other stuff has only been out a couple years, which means it's showed up with discounts before but probably not deep ones.
Yeah, you need to install the Heroic launcher. Download the game, then in steam, add it as a non-steam game. This will let you access it from the nice UI.
I've installed games from both Epic and GOG on my steam deck via Lutris, and after it's installed, it just takes a few clicks to have it visible in non-desktop mode. A little tedious sure, but not terrible.
It's easy, but at least for me Epic forces me to login again on deck frequently, which is very annoying for quick sessions while commute.
Doesn't happen on desktop, which is weird
Sure, try the buggy Epic version then buy the usable Steam version.
Also, imagine making a launcher that is so trash people will buy games on other platforms just to not deal with it.
I bought a game on steam once that I already had on epic for free. It was on sale for like $5 on steam(Hunter: Call of the Wild), and I was curious if all the shader pre-caching and optimizations steam does with the Steam Deck would have it run better with the steam version, compared to the epic games version.
Edit: my bad you guys. YES. It does run better. The pre caching steam games have is noticably gets rid of stutter. Mildly noticeable in a slower paced game like Hunter. Very noticeable in Borderlands 3 that's higher paced.
Did it run better?
This is just the PS3 vs Xbox 360 game wars but worse. Stop being loyal to corporations you imbeciles, of course a dev will say whatever makes him more money. Including appeasing the fellating steam fanboys. The game could have gone completely unnoticed if it wasn't on epic, barely any sales, and even a minor bump in visibility would have created more steam sales regardless if users knew if it was available on epic for free. Unless I see numbers I don't care what this dev says and you shouldn't either.
But you're all rabid to hate on epic when both stores are just bum ass corporations and will circle jerk each other off on why your team is better.
But you're all rabid to hate on epic
If I had to pick between buying a game on Steam or Epic, I would pick the one which did some good things for consumers over the one that stuck their middle finger up at us.
There's no denying that Valve's contributions to DXVK, WINE, KDE, and Linux are a self-serving way to ensure Steam remains relevant after Microsoft locks Windows into a walled garden. Even so, the end result was an overall benefit for consumers. We would have had something like Proton eventually, but it would not have come nearly as quickly without their financial backing.
What has Epic done? A bunch of free games that I still don't have enough time to play and would not have picked up anyways, great. That doesn't make up for the rest of their wannabe-monopoly, anticonsumer practices like making exclusivity deals to railroad people into using their store by making sure consumers are denied a choice.
Fuck Epic, and fuck Tim Sweeney's self-aggrandizing attitude. If he actually gave a shit about anything other than his ego, he would have spent his time leading Epic Games to challenge "the Steam monopoly" by providing a better customer experience, not posting on Twitter acting like the messiah of PC gaming.
You make some good points about Valve's bread crumbs, but my point still stands that this is an article with no other purpose than to reinforce the opinions of those who already had their minds made up about this. The dev possibly included, or inciting the opinions of those who have.
It's a circlejerk post and article. Just because Valve sucks slightly less doesn't mean we need to treat them like god's gaming storefront. If people weren't already on the "fuck Epic" bandwagon this is a non-story.
Agreed on both points.
If it was GOG and not EGS, the reaction would probably be very different. But, because people already hate Epic (for good reason), writing an article that appeals to schadenfreude makes for some easy ad revenue.
People also shouldn't be idolizing corporations. They're not our friends; we're only a means to an end for them. The best case scenario for us is mutualism, and the worst case is parasitism. All it takes is a change in leadership or a change in circumstances to go from one to the other, and a constant need for growth encourages the parasitic enshittification we're well acquainted with.
Been saying this for years.
Valve has brainwashed gamers and gained a monopoly using the same tactics people decry Epic for using.
You couldn’t pay me to play a game on epic. It’s not even a boycott. They just suck and I’m not broke. I can buy my own games and I’d rather pay than put their software on my pc let alone play on their platform.
I think the store and the library search sucks on EGS. You can't even tell what games you have purchased and for what platform (pc/ios/android). Best you have is the purchase history on their website and app.
I use Heroic Launcher (on Arch btw and Bazzite for kids) and that luckily works really well for displaying games that you have bought on PC. But there's no such alternative for iOS or Android, and even Heroic doesn't show you what games there are in your library for mobile.
This is the same effect which makes piracy beneficiary for developers. The EU financed a big study on it, expected to confirm claims that i causes high losses for creators. After they got unwanted results they shelved it silently. The Pirate Party then brought it to light.
Free advertising is always good and many people who have a no hassle option to own the game and to reward the creator will do so.
I've said this in the past but I think it's worth restating. I'm amazed that EGS is willing to even front the cost of these free games. Like I would expect some form of arbitrary restriction like requiring periodic actual money purchase to be eligible. They have posted income reports that state the free program just isn't working. Sure it's increasing numbers, but that isn't very helpful when your revenue is still decreasing ontop of the cost of the program. I mean it does help that its a flat cost and not a cost per install for them, but still.
for perspective: my last purchase was void train in super early stages of the game (2021 I think?) and prior to that was satisfactory somewhere around 2018 or 19. Meanwhile I have collected a lot of decent games from the program. And I'm one of the better cases. I have /tons/ of friends who have zero intention of ever actually buying anything on the shop, they only use it as a log in, claim the weekly freebie, log out or play the freebie game. Heck, there are programs that are dedicated exclusivley to log in as you, and claim the weekly freebies so you never even have to log onto the storefront. It isn't a sustainable model.
I feel like they would be better off forcing an annual payment history check on the platform, something stupid small like "if total paid is > 5$" or something cheap, or even like how steam does it where once you purchase something once everything unlocks. From a financial/business mindset, I don't get their intent on the current program. It only encourages people to grab games and never actually spend money on the sinkhole.
I said this when they first started the free game thing: Instead of giving games away they should subsidize their prices in certain regions to get loads of customers in poorer countries. If they built a massive community around the world the rest of us would be incentivize to participate to play with our friends around the world and we would happily spend money on the platform that made our friends happy.
That would cause compliance issues on steam though publisher wise. They would need the title to be off steam since one of steams publisher terms is that the sale price of an item must be at least equal to the lowest price available on other platforms. Meaning that if you have a deal like described there, steam would be the higher price and it would violate their publisher terms.
edit: looking into this it looks like it might only be for steam keys, so actually they may be in the clear here.
Okay that makes a bit of sense. I said what I said was from when they announced free games on epic the consensus was that it was anti-competitive business practice so I was trying to find a middle ground. But if steam is going to be anti competitive too I am not going to care what their competition do.
I wonder why they can sell games for $0 tho because you go through the process of a checkout, you don't simply redeem a code or something.
yea looking into it, the steamworks policy doesn't mention price parity outside of product keys via steam being sold on other storefronts, being said it does look like steam has submitted to the courts evidence of them communicating via email threatening studios that if they actually went through with it, that steam would just choose not to sell their game at all, this was uncovered during deposition during the Wolfire & Dark Catt’s U.S. antitrust lawsuit against Valve. They went on record admitting to the email and explaining that the steam key page was meant to be for all products as a whole. It sounds like it's a situation where on paper they have it one way, but in practice it's meant to be the other.
Eeeeehhh, I don't even have the Epic Launcher installed. I keep claiming the freebies out of the habit, but I can't remember what games I have there. Last time I checked you can't even see your library via the website.
Fun thing: Kind of the same thing happening to me with Xbox Game Pass. Try out games, buy it on Steam later on sale
Steam is a self perpetuating monopoly because people love having all of their toys in a single place. Just one more confirmation that it’s pointless to try to compete until regulators take a look at this situation.
Every other platform is simply worse. The only one who even tries to be better is GOG, of which they do a good job for DRM free, which gets sales from me.
My question to you is: why would anybody buy something other than on those two platforms? There is not a single advantage to Epic's or Amazon's game store I can think of. They don't have good Linux support, they don't have a good review system, they don't have forums, they don't have mod delivery systems, they don't have any better sales, they don't have family sharing, they don't have in-home streaming.
Edit: And don't get me started on the Microsoft store....
About the linux support, not only its bad, they seem to actively hate it. Some games after getting bought by epic(like rocket league) lose their Linux support
Saw this today from the guy that did the WINE development to get the Adobe creative suite installers working
Valve is a private company. Are they going around buying out competition like an end game capitalist?
They are where they are at is because they do what they do well and people have voted with their wallets.
One of the few times capitalism has “worked” and all because it’s not a publicly traded company.
I really wonder where we would be if most big companies were not on the stock market as opposed to being on it.
They don’t have to. You don’t need to abuse your monopoly to be a monopoly (although Valve does in different way). Valve enforces same pricing on all stores a game is available on so EGS can’t compete on price despite having lower cut. In the end customers and developers lose.
There's also the question of what happens when Gabe dies or retires. Unless he's a secret communist and has plans in place to make it into an employee coop it'll be sold by his estate to private equity.
He's definitely not a communist, but there are other ways to choose a successor for a company.
Valve enforces same pricing on all stores a game is available on so EGS can’t compete on price
Obvious falsehood. Did you just choose to omit relevant nuance? The post is literally about games which are free on EGS and non-free on Steam.
I wouldn't mind using other services if any of them were competent. Steam gives me one-click Linux support for Windows titles, massive control reconfiguration capabilities, and a full suite of the normal expected features: achievements, cloud saves, forums, etc. Name me any competitor who even comes close. They dominate because they put in the work. Everyone else wants their slice of the pie but won't bother to develop features worth using.
GOG. If you’re a solo player, this is the place, for no other reason than their highly principled mission to do DRM free games. No, it’s not all the games, but even so. That and supporting CDProjekt appeals, to me anyway.
Dec 2025
Yeah it totally has nothing to do with proton, steam input, steamvr, mods, remote play / together, family library sharing, flexible refund policies, or the multitude of other things that other stores don't do.
flexible refund policies
That thing they had to be dragged kicking and screaming to enact under threat by the EU?
Can you please outline for me what the policy was before and after the EU intervention? It's my understanding that it changed nothing about the actual refund process, which has always been flexible, but was purely about the wording during checkout. Correct me if I'm wrong. I can't remember a time when I couldn't refund a game that I played less than 2 hours, and I've been on steam for 17 years.
Edit: Looking at the EU regulation, it appears they don't actually require Steam to offer refunds once you download/play the game. So their longstanding global policy is better than what is required by EU law. I believe they EU action just forced them to parrot the stricter EU refund guideline (14 days without downloading) during checkout, meanwhile they still provide their regular relaxed policy of allowing you to download and play for up to 2 hours and still refund it within 14 days.
I'm in France. Local implementation of the EU law may be different in other countries (that's how EU laws work) but here every digital content store, including Steam, just has you ticking the box that says "You agree to no use your legal period of 14 days to cancel this purchase", and then they can do whatever they want.
Steam's refund policy is their own. And though it's mostly a good thing for customers, in my opinion, it's also an attempt to defuse some valid criticism. Easier to keep not controlling any of the broken or zero effort unity tutorial/asset flip shit that gets released on the store routinely if you can tell people "just refund".
Before? Their policy was: we don't issue refunds.
Maybe if you had an egregious example of a game not functioning at all, they might issue a one off. But I was denied one trying to refund one of the cod black ops games that crashed within 10 mins of starting a match for weeks until they finally patched it.
And even that was an upgrade from: never.
They've been doing way more than employing 3 Linux devs.
I wonder what the regulator will make steam do.
"no, you can't have community page! Stop developing Proton and Lepton! You have to stop doing sales and deny more game from being sold in your platform and be generally shitty to your customer just so Epic Gamestore can catch up!"
I epic hasn't done anything but the bare minimum plus trying to buy their way into the market. Additionally, I don't trust them a single bit. If they actually managed to get market share they should enshittify before you could blink.
I have even less nice things to say about all the other publisher run marketplaces.
GoG is cool because of their DRM policy and preservation. Steam provides labels for anticonsumer practices so consumers can be informed and does the cool stuff for Linux compatibility.
What exactly are you wanting regulators to do that you think will make people want to use EGS?
EGS is used as an example. They don’t charge devs until they earn $1M so you’d think games would release there at least but we now have many many Steam exclusives. It’s gotten to the point where indie games release demos on Itch.io but don’t release full games outside of Steam because they need algorithmic momentum there.
Check out EU DMA and how it impacts gatekeepers like Valve (even if Valve somehow dodged that label, probably because their finances are private).
Would you buy a game on EGS instead of Steam? And why?
Why do you think epic gives games away for free? They thought this was the main factor so they decided to build a library for you to not want to leave, but it turns out that it isn't the only reason people like steam. I have a huge library on epic now (99% free giveaways), but I still would prefer to buy a game on steam especially if they utilize the steam workshop.
If epic put money into bringing linux gaming decades ahead of where it was instead of hating on it I would have jumped ship even if they didn't make linux supported hardware that lives on my recliner.
and the bulk of the users can enjoy being forced to upgrade to hardware with even more spying being the only difference just to run a shittier version of their old operating system rental cloud compute and game streaming. I'll reassess when gabe dies or if they start firing off u.s. politics level red flags but worst case I have drm free/stripped copies of every game I might play again or recommend on offline hdd and tape.
GOG recently got on my radar since I heard they'd be focusing more on Linux support
The only better alternative (for me) would be a bunch of DRM free stores feeding their catalogues to an open source front-end that has everything that Steam already does.
Like Heroic, Lutris, Playnite, etc. But way more developed features and with official vendor support and a built-in unified store that supports all catalogues in the same view, like a federated marketplace.
That would be the only thing capable of moving me away from Steam completely.
I hope their Android store offers a good experience and succeeds since Play Store just sucks. But Valve pretty much made Linux gaming, if you saw what it looked like before they got involved you would understand. And they are the only big video game company that still does some good stuff in addition to the bad stuff.
Epic burned 95% of their good will among gamers, if not all of it. They allowed play 2 earn and other crypto shit just to be contrarians, delisted and ended support for old Unreal games and are pretty much just The Fortnite Studio at this point, which itself is seen as an amalgamation of everything wrong with gaming by some, they struck exclusivity for highly anticipated games so that people have to buy it from them, stories of crunch and Tim defending and supporting every new technology gold rush including Grok producing fucking CSAM.
It's not hard to see why people have so much animosity towards them.
I saw what it looked like. We had native ports and Wine (rebranded as Proton by Valve so that it looks like their own product).
EGS is just one store. Devs don’t even bother releasing games outside of Steam and you can’t make the same argument against GOG or Itch.io.
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@sh.itjust.works
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
- News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
- Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
- No humor/memes etc..
- No affiliate links
- No advertising.
- No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
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- No politics.
Comments.
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My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
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That's incredible.
I have a lot of free games on Epic. But when I want to play with my gaming group, we're using Steam. It's just where everybody is.
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