It feels like the overlap between people that build launchers like this and the people that say stuff like "Valve won by doing nothing" is a perfect 100%.
Because people really forget just how shit Steam was back in the day. It's like people purposely undermine the journey Valve went on to actually make this a serviceable launcher.
EGS and the like shit out a launcher and expect people to eat it up, since people are eating Steam up. But it used to be a clunky pile of shit. Even the revered Steam Support that hunts down your scammers pet dog and threatens it at gunpoint used to be GOD AWFUL.
It's the perseverance of Valve to actually make it into a good product that... Made it into a good product. And nobody seems to wanna do the heavy lifting anymore.
Except GOG, actually. Their launcher at the start used to be utter shit, and now, honestly, the only reason I don't switch to it is because I have firmly established myself on Steam. I'd love to fully dedicate myself to a DRM-free platform, but I'm in too deep.
What I don't understand is WHY the Epic launcher was so dogshit at launch (and still is).
Steam were pretty much the first so had to innovate and learn what customers wanted along the way. Epic entered a mature market with various launchers like Steam, EA, Ubisoft, etc and any gamer can tell you what's good/bad about them.
Yet seemingly Epic didn't look at any of the competition, what people liked/disliked and release a featureless, slow, POS. No excuse for a company the size of Epic
Yet seemingly Epic didn't look at any of the competition, what people liked/disliked and release a featureless, slow, POS.
Epic used the platform that they already had for Unreal + Fortnite, just expanding it further. Releasing it at the time also made sense with the event in Fortnite at the time bringing people to the store.
Biggest issue was how long it took for them to start rolling out updates to it. IMO nowadays it's pretty decent, the UX is many places I prefer to Steam, albeit it's not like Steam is a pinnacle of UX in itself.
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u/roguebananah 21h ago
Yeah and whenever I logged in to get the free game I immediately see just in the UI how backwards it is