Darwinia was eventually released in March 2005, but despite a strong opening weekend, sales soon slipped too low to sustain the company. Within six months, the developers were back on UK government benefits until November, when they contacted Valve “on a whim”[10] to try to set up a digital distribution deal on their Steam platform. Valve responded enthusiastically and, following a 14 December 2005 online launch, digital sales, which exposed the game to a new, global audience, kept the company going through to the release of their third game, DEFCON.
Valve didn’t reach out to Introversion to make demands, they actually saved the company. For a game basically no one had ever heard of and abysmal sales for were about to make the company go bankrupt. Valve didn’t pay for this exclusivity. It is however true that 18 years ago, they had an exclusive game.
This is a big difference compared to Epic paying 2K for exclusive access to Borderlands 3 so they can secure the profits of a huge franchise. Epic pays big companies big money to secure early profits to exclusive titles. Valve may have technically had an exclusive game, but Epic’s business model is literally paying for exclusive access to the biggest games they can get, so they can get the biggest cut of the sales at the highest price point, before discounts.
Only one of these two companies is trying to “Pay 2 Win.”
There really isn’t. This is personal opinion.
Some of us just have issues with Epic Games. Some others have issues with Valve.
No private company is really “good.”
But the argument with Epic is things like:
They brought “exclusives” to PC gaming for the first time. Previously, a PC game was a PC game, and it didn’t matter what storefront you bought it from, because it was available at all storefronts. Epic chose to pay companies to restrict their titles just to Epic, in an attempt to move the market towards them.
In a similar vein, trying to fight Valve’s dominance, they started giving away free games. They have been firing people left and right because their financials are in the toilet, and yet they’re still pissing away money on free games and exclusives to their store.
People who care about access to music and paying artists hate them because they have effectively put a death warrant on Bandcamp, buying them for two years, doing nothing with the product, and then selling it to Hedge Fund fuckies who already shitcanned half the staff and the site is officially on life support. They basically killed the last place you could buy music and make sure all the proceeds went to the artist and not a middle man (Bandcamp Fridays).
During all of this, they refused to spend any money on actually improving their fucking game store. Things that have been staples of Steam for a decade now are still on a waiting list of features to be added. The User Experience for Epic Games Store is just bad, bad, bad, bad. There’s no excuse for it, especially when they chose to piss money away on exclusives and free games instead of paying people to produce a better product than Valve has. They refused to even try to release a better product, believing they could buy their way to dominance.
Do you really want to support a company that doesn’t give a flying fuck about your user experience as a customer and has such bad business plans that they’re letting go tons of staff? It’s bad enough that they had a bad business plan, but it also seems like they’re not very good to their employees, either. Compared to Valve’s “flat” management where there are no managers, or where Newell famously paid the writer for Portal to “be sick” for two years while he had a serious disease. “Your job here at Valve is to get better.” This was before he wrote Portal, no less.
One company clearly cares about the user experience that their users experience, and one clearly cares about using every tool at their disposal to be the top of the market, everything from paying for exclusives and free games to suing in court to try to carve out a niche for yourself where you don’t have to pay vendor fees.
Of course, I also encourage you to do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Valve offers a better product, better user experience, and treats their employees with more respect, but it doesn’t mean Valve hasn’t made their own share of anti-consumer decisions.
An important detail regarding exclusivity. What made a ton of people pissed off (and justifiably so, in my opinion) is that they bought exclusivity for games that were kickstarted which resulted in the option for Steam keys being removed for these games.
They brought “exclusives” to PC gaming for the first time.
Please stop with this horseshit. Valve and GOG had both done third-party exclusives before EGS was even a thing. Epic absolutely in no way "brought [them] to PC gaming for the first time.
Yes, they did make them a pillar in their strategy to try to enter a marketplace that was dominated by an 800-pound gorilla - which is a perfectly legitimate approach to take - which neither of the other two did, but they 100% categorically did NOT bring the practice to PC first.
they refused to spend any money on actually improving their fucking game store.
Wow, you’re just full of misinformation on this post. They have constantly been updating their store since day one. No, it’s not on parity with Steam (and it likely never will be), but to just flat out say that they haven’t spent anything on improving it when there has been a steady stream of improvements over the years is ignorant at best and actively disingenuous at worst.
And before you even go there, yes, it was a long time ago, no, they haven’t really done it since then. But the discussion here is about whether or not Epic did it first, which they did not. By about a decade and a half.
Darwinia still sold copies through their site. Steam didn’t even support macos or linux back then yet the game did and that was how you got those versions. It wasn’t exclusive.
Tell me you didn’t click the link without telling me you didn’t click the link.
Darwinia still sold copies through their site.
Straight from the linked forum post:
As part of the launch and Steam’s exclusivity, we will no longer be offering Darwinia as a download option from our site, although it will still be possible to purchase shipped boxed copies. At Valve’s request we will also be removing the demo from our site for about a month.
So, yes, they were still selling boxed copies - because it was 2005 - but Valve made them stop selling digital copies from their own site and even made them take down their own demo.
It wasn’t exclusive.
Again, same quote as above:
As part of the launch and Steam’s exclusivity
Not sure how you’re getting “it wasn’t exclusive” from a post that explicitly says that they signed their game up for Steam exclusivity.
How was it exclusive if it was available to purchase in two separate places? Maybe if your comment had a qualifier like “digital download version exclusive” it could be considered correct
What’s your point though? Every one of Epic’s exclusivity deals is done with the consent of the game publisher. Does it matter who makes the offer? Do we even know that there aren’t cases of publishers reaching out to Epic?
Are we pretending publishers not bothering putting their games on every storefront is the same as paying publishers to not put those games on competing storefronts?
For real, Steam literally took off because they made HL2 exclusive to it. It doesn’t matter that it’s a first party game, the effect and intent was identical. They could’ve made it generally available but chose not to. They forced people to use their proprietary product to install a game.
It’s crazy how many people shill for valve on Reddit and lemmy when they’ve already done most of the shit Epic gets accused of.
So unless you bought a physical copy of this game and kept it off the internet (not sure if anyone is collecting any data through FO3 itself), or got it gifted to you through GOG and you don’t have an account there, you’re in the same boat. Except you paid for the game with money in addition to data.
I was going to say. This is probably the opposite. Unfortunately once epic goes down. Because of their awful launcher you won’t actually be able to use it
It’s not a free game. It’s a license to access a file through the epic launcher. They really shouldn’t be able to sell it as a game. It’s inaccessible without epic.
But it’s not a sale. It’s a game, and it’s provided for free, and as of right now there is no end date where your access to the game will expire. No money leaves your wallet.
I still don’t understand.
Is this some sort of coping mechanism by people who paid for the game 10 years ago?
… because unless you bought it from GOG over Steam (which is my preferred place to buy digital games, not Epic), you’re in the same boat: Haven’t bought a game, you’ve bought a license. Except with Epic, it’s $0.00 today.
Ultimately, if you want a free game and have no issues with Epic, then hurray, you get a free game. Some of us don’t like Epic and prefer to give them nothing (including our data), even if it means passing up on free games. I have no shortage of games to play, so I won’t be missing a free copy of FO3 or whatever else they decide to offer up.
Mate I got it. I have all the free games from epic.
My point was that it’s not a “game” in the traditional sense. Anything online that requires a launcher is a licence.
Similar to me “purchasing” a film on prime. I don’t actually purchase the film, I purchase a license to access the file solely through their system.
They can revoke or lose that license and I lose access. Different to me buying a DVD and I can use it whenever I want as long as I have a DVD player.
I agree. I was just following on the point from above. It is shit that we can’t buy from company. I bought the game 10 years ago. Bit of double dipping. I’ve rebought a bunch of older games.
It’s definitely a game in the modern sense. If you want games in the traditional sense, your choices are pretty much GOG and physical copies. And even those aren’t a guarantee, with things like…
“Physical copies” that are really just download codes or a DRM key on a disc
Day one patches
Patches that make the game drastically different than it was on launch, particularly when the game was drastically different (aka. shittier) on its unpatched launch
Games that require proprietary servers to run the game properly, and won’t be kept alive after a certain date because they won’t release the required code for fans to run their own servers
For a lot of gamers, “licenses to games” or any of the above cases make up the majority of the games they play. Yet we still call them gamers, we still call them games, and we still call it gaming.
Tell me you don’t understand business terms like “license” without telling me you don’t understand business terms like “license.”
Also:
Valve has made clear that if they ever go out of business, they will transfer a copy of each game you have a license for to you (providing they still have distribution rights).
This isn’t even a problem with GOG because they still distribute games in the old way where you can download a standalone installer and keep that copy of the game in perpetuity.
Again I don’t disagree. I think untill gamers or consumers lobby the industry, we will keep getting shafted. None of those things listed help the consumer. Maybe patches and new updates but not if it doesn’t ship with a completely unbroken game
I really don’t know what to say about the modern pcgamer, at least the terminally online one like this.
I don’t want to being whataboutism into this, but you likely support many companies that do truly terrible things every day, but this one is a bridge too far? This one? It’s wild.
Eh, you always can. But that’s beside the point. The point I’m making is not that you don’t boycott other things, it’s that this is the only thing you choose to. Which is just a symptom of being online in toxic places waaaay too much. You just shouldn’t care this much about a mostly harmless video game company. It’s super weird.
It’s like when those weirdos keep voting EA as the worst company of the year every year, like EA? Really? Okay, that’s where your priorities are.
But it does. You’re still giving them your data, which they can use for all manner of things. If that’s something you don’t care about, then more power to you - enjoy your free game.
If you really think you’re less clever than an entire industry that has been built up around tracking people and keeping ghost profiles on them, go ahead and keep patting yourself on the back, bud.
They know who you are, that’s not anywhere near as clever as you think.
I guess things like Speech Pattern Analysis don’t exist then, nor has Big Data ever been known to sift through data to connect data points.
Like unless your job is director of IT Security for Microsoft, I doubt you have the credentials to be as anonymous as you think you are.
On top of the fact that most people know that the more you try to anonymize yourself, the more you actually make yourself unique in terms of data because very few people use obfuscation techniques, and those techniques are well known. Thus, if they think you’re obfuscating your identity, you’re now just thrown in the “people who like anonymity” bag of data, which when connected with previously collected data on “people who like anonymity” can be used to create a profile on you, specifically.
If I believed Epic was really that good at making money by secretly collecting data, I don’t know why I’d believe they need me to download their launcher to do it. They’re either cartoon supervillains or they’re not.
They own Easy Anti-Cheat, which has kernel level access and collects data as part of its user agreement but these people keep regurgitating the debunked claim of the launcher being spyware. Occam’s razor, anyone?
Literally the only data they can get is basic hardware info and your e-mail address which is easy to fake. You can even use an alternate launcher like Heroic and give them basically nothing. The point isn’t to “take people’s data”, they give away games to try to generate interest in EGS and get people to download it and spend money on the store. You lose nothing by redeeming the game.
Sure, their primary focus is most likely generating interest and usage of their platform, but they’ll also use analytical and statistical information to influence their business decisions.
If that’s something you don’t care about, then more power to you - enjoy your free game.
On a personal note, I made the decision as a consumer to not interact with them as much as possible. Even when I did have an account to collect free games years ago, the only thing I actually played was a Satisfactory alpha/beta event. I have more than enough games to play, so I am not concerned with collecting their free games.
This is literally a bog standard privacy policy. Any closed source website or app you use will also track analytics and usage, and basic hardware info like I mentioned. You might as well go on a crusade against Steam for doing the same thing. You and people like you making these comments act like Epic, specifically, is bad for privacy as if nobody else has trackers. You’re misleading people.
Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear. I am not against Epic because of their privacy policy. I don’t like Epic because of their business practices and owners, and don’t want to give them anything, even if it’s just a bogus email address and a few clicks or whatnot. And no, I never tried to imply other companies don’t do the same thing.
Here’s the bottom line, as far as I’m concerned:
I don’t like Epic, and want nothing to do with them. If others want to interact with them, even if it’s just for the free games, that’s their decision to make.
You can use legendary worth heroic as a user interface (both open source projects) to download and play games you own on epic, no need to install their software.
Or you can get it for less than $7 dollars from a reputable game service, unlike the fucking joke that is Epic Games Store.
I mean, it’s not like you’re actually going to play it, either way.
“For the next 24 hours, pay for Fallout with your dignity!”
“The last laugh is mine, I don’t have any dignity!”
I don’t get it. What’s wrong with a free game from Epic?
EDIT: RE: Valve and Darwinia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introversion_Software#Financial_history_and_independence
Valve didn’t reach out to Introversion to make demands, they actually saved the company. For a game basically no one had ever heard of and abysmal sales for were about to make the company go bankrupt. Valve didn’t pay for this exclusivity. It is however true that 18 years ago, they had an exclusive game.
This is a big difference compared to Epic paying 2K for exclusive access to Borderlands 3 so they can secure the profits of a huge franchise. Epic pays big companies big money to secure early profits to exclusive titles. Valve may have technically had an exclusive game, but Epic’s business model is literally paying for exclusive access to the biggest games they can get, so they can get the biggest cut of the sales at the highest price point, before discounts.
Only one of these two companies is trying to “Pay 2 Win.”
There really isn’t. This is personal opinion.
Some of us just have issues with Epic Games. Some others have issues with Valve.
No private company is really “good.”
But the argument with Epic is things like:
They brought “exclusives” to PC gaming for the first time. Previously, a PC game was a PC game, and it didn’t matter what storefront you bought it from, because it was available at all storefronts. Epic chose to pay companies to restrict their titles just to Epic, in an attempt to move the market towards them.
In a similar vein, trying to fight Valve’s dominance, they started giving away free games. They have been firing people left and right because their financials are in the toilet, and yet they’re still pissing away money on free games and exclusives to their store.
People who care about access to music and paying artists hate them because they have effectively put a death warrant on Bandcamp, buying them for two years, doing nothing with the product, and then selling it to Hedge Fund fuckies who already shitcanned half the staff and the site is officially on life support. They basically killed the last place you could buy music and make sure all the proceeds went to the artist and not a middle man (Bandcamp Fridays).
During all of this, they refused to spend any money on actually improving their fucking game store. Things that have been staples of Steam for a decade now are still on a waiting list of features to be added. The User Experience for Epic Games Store is just bad, bad, bad, bad. There’s no excuse for it, especially when they chose to piss money away on exclusives and free games instead of paying people to produce a better product than Valve has. They refused to even try to release a better product, believing they could buy their way to dominance.
Do you really want to support a company that doesn’t give a flying fuck about your user experience as a customer and has such bad business plans that they’re letting go tons of staff? It’s bad enough that they had a bad business plan, but it also seems like they’re not very good to their employees, either. Compared to Valve’s “flat” management where there are no managers, or where Newell famously paid the writer for Portal to “be sick” for two years while he had a serious disease. “Your job here at Valve is to get better.” This was before he wrote Portal, no less.
One company clearly cares about the user experience that their users experience, and one clearly cares about using every tool at their disposal to be the top of the market, everything from paying for exclusives and free games to suing in court to try to carve out a niche for yourself where you don’t have to pay vendor fees.
Of course, I also encourage you to do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Valve offers a better product, better user experience, and treats their employees with more respect, but it doesn’t mean Valve hasn’t made their own share of anti-consumer decisions.
An important detail regarding exclusivity. What made a ton of people pissed off (and justifiably so, in my opinion) is that they bought exclusivity for games that were kickstarted which resulted in the option for Steam keys being removed for these games.
Heard this had even killed projects
Please stop with this horseshit. Valve and GOG had both done third-party exclusives before EGS was even a thing. Epic absolutely in no way "brought [them] to PC gaming for the first time.
Yes, they did make them a pillar in their strategy to try to enter a marketplace that was dominated by an 800-pound gorilla - which is a perfectly legitimate approach to take - which neither of the other two did, but they 100% categorically did NOT bring the practice to PC first.
Wow, you’re just full of misinformation on this post. They have constantly been updating their store since day one. No, it’s not on parity with Steam (and it likely never will be), but to just flat out say that they haven’t spent anything on improving it when there has been a steady stream of improvements over the years is ignorant at best and actively disingenuous at worst.
Which games did valve pay to be exclusive to steam?
Darwinia.
And before you even go there, yes, it was a long time ago, no, they haven’t really done it since then. But the discussion here is about whether or not Epic did it first, which they did not. By about a decade and a half.
Darwinia still sold copies through their site. Steam didn’t even support macos or linux back then yet the game did and that was how you got those versions. It wasn’t exclusive.
Tell me you didn’t click the link without telling me you didn’t click the link.
Straight from the linked forum post:
So, yes, they were still selling boxed copies - because it was 2005 - but Valve made them stop selling digital copies from their own site and even made them take down their own demo.
Again, same quote as above:
Not sure how you’re getting “it wasn’t exclusive” from a post that explicitly says that they signed their game up for Steam exclusivity.
As you said, it was 2005. Physical sales were the norm.
Since you are being a bit nitpicky here: The people you replied to did say „exclusives“ and „games“, so…
Careful you don’t throw your back out helping them move those goalposts!
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https://forums.introversion.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=40203
What do I win?
How was it exclusive if it was available to purchase in two separate places? Maybe if your comment had a qualifier like “digital download version exclusive” it could be considered correct
Based on the other poster above, it was the Darwinia devs who reached out to Steam. So Darwinia isn’t a particularly good example either.
What’s your point though? Every one of Epic’s exclusivity deals is done with the consent of the game publisher. Does it matter who makes the offer? Do we even know that there aren’t cases of publishers reaching out to Epic?
A large chunk of steam games can’t be brought elsewhere.
Are we pretending publishers not bothering putting their games on every storefront is the same as paying publishers to not put those games on competing storefronts?
The end result is the same for the consumer.
Intention matters too.
It really isn’t.
In one case a publisher is choosing to publish where the customers are. If consumers don’t like that service they are free to publish somewhere else
In the other case a company is trying to force consumers to use their service, instead of providing a better service that they would want to use.
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All the same to me. I have to install a specific client to play a game.
For real, Steam literally took off because they made HL2 exclusive to it. It doesn’t matter that it’s a first party game, the effect and intent was identical. They could’ve made it generally available but chose not to. They forced people to use their proprietary product to install a game.
It’s crazy how many people shill for valve on Reddit and lemmy when they’ve already done most of the shit Epic gets accused of.
I don’t think getting freebies from them counts as supporting them
You have to create an account to get them.
If you don’t think data harvesting to sell the data isn’t part of that equation, you’re just a little bit naive.
Of course it’s part of the equation.
It’s part of the equation on Steam and GOG, too.
So unless you bought a physical copy of this game and kept it off the internet (not sure if anyone is collecting any data through FO3 itself), or got it gifted to you through GOG and you don’t have an account there, you’re in the same boat. Except you paid for the game with money in addition to data.
Yeah, but the argument was “does taking a free game help them or not” not shifting goalposts to whether Valve does it, too.
I think it’s funny how people create accounts only to never actually spend any money on this platform
I do. Some examples off the top of my head:
There are probably other ways in which it supports them. Those are just the first ones to come to mind.
Ok, but they give free games so it’s cool. They’ll surely make a lot of money off of my “never pays us” behavioural data
I was going to say. This is probably the opposite. Unfortunately once epic goes down. Because of their awful launcher you won’t actually be able to use it
It’s not a free game. It’s a license to access a file through the epic launcher. They really shouldn’t be able to sell it as a game. It’s inaccessible without epic.
But it’s not a sale. It’s a game, and it’s provided for free, and as of right now there is no end date where your access to the game will expire. No money leaves your wallet.
I still don’t understand.
Is this some sort of coping mechanism by people who paid for the game 10 years ago?
… because unless you bought it from GOG over Steam (which is my preferred place to buy digital games, not Epic), you’re in the same boat: Haven’t bought a game, you’ve bought a license. Except with Epic, it’s $0.00 today.
Ultimately, if you want a free game and have no issues with Epic, then hurray, you get a free game. Some of us don’t like Epic and prefer to give them nothing (including our data), even if it means passing up on free games. I have no shortage of games to play, so I won’t be missing a free copy of FO3 or whatever else they decide to offer up.
Mate I got it. I have all the free games from epic.
My point was that it’s not a “game” in the traditional sense. Anything online that requires a launcher is a licence.
Similar to me “purchasing” a film on prime. I don’t actually purchase the film, I purchase a license to access the file solely through their system.
They can revoke or lose that license and I lose access. Different to me buying a DVD and I can use it whenever I want as long as I have a DVD player.
I agree. I was just following on the point from above. It is shit that we can’t buy from company. I bought the game 10 years ago. Bit of double dipping. I’ve rebought a bunch of older games.
It’s definitely a game in the modern sense. If you want games in the traditional sense, your choices are pretty much GOG and physical copies. And even those aren’t a guarantee, with things like…
For a lot of gamers, “licenses to games” or any of the above cases make up the majority of the games they play. Yet we still call them gamers, we still call them games, and we still call it gaming.
Tell me you don’t understand business terms like “license” without telling me you don’t understand business terms like “license.”
Also:
Valve has made clear that if they ever go out of business, they will transfer a copy of each game you have a license for to you (providing they still have distribution rights).
This isn’t even a problem with GOG because they still distribute games in the old way where you can download a standalone installer and keep that copy of the game in perpetuity.
Epic has no such plans or guarantees.
Make of that what you will.
Again I don’t disagree. I think untill gamers or consumers lobby the industry, we will keep getting shafted. None of those things listed help the consumer. Maybe patches and new updates but not if it doesn’t ship with a completely unbroken game
Found an interesting post from steam steam support stating contingency plan for users ive also seen another post that was in a discussion outlining the same contingency plan
That doesn’t seem to be a contingency plan; just a claim that there will be one.
I totally disagree with the exclusives point.
So, so many games can only be brought on steam. It’s always been that way.
It’s just terminally online redditors bringing their anti-Epic circlejerk here. There’s nothing wrong with collecting free games from the EGS.
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Feel free to boycott it. Just don’t go around telling others which store they should be buying from like you did at r/pcgaming.
Literally nobody in this thread told you that you couldn’t. You’re not a fucking victim here. I had an opinion and I expressed it.
If people online telling you that you’re wrong influences you so much, I’d say that’s a personal problem.
“Why can’t you just boycott silently?!”
Issue comes up when people start praising Valve as some godlike entity in comparison.
In comparison they are.
I really don’t know what to say about the modern pcgamer, at least the terminally online one like this.
I don’t want to being whataboutism into this, but you likely support many companies that do truly terrible things every day, but this one is a bridge too far? This one? It’s wild.
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Eh, you always can. But that’s beside the point. The point I’m making is not that you don’t boycott other things, it’s that this is the only thing you choose to. Which is just a symptom of being online in toxic places waaaay too much. You just shouldn’t care this much about a mostly harmless video game company. It’s super weird.
It’s like when those weirdos keep voting EA as the worst company of the year every year, like EA? Really? Okay, that’s where your priorities are.
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Or you can take it for free and just not spend money on EGS? It’s not like taking it would be supporting them.
But it does. You’re still giving them your data, which they can use for all manner of things. If that’s something you don’t care about, then more power to you - enjoy your free game.
Oh no, now they know the one-off email address I used for my Epic account!
If you really think you’re less clever than an entire industry that has been built up around tracking people and keeping ghost profiles on them, go ahead and keep patting yourself on the back, bud.
They know who you are, that’s not anywhere near as clever as you think.
You realize IP addresses exist, right?
IP address? Oh, you mean the thing that rotates every 24 hours?
I guess things like Speech Pattern Analysis don’t exist then, nor has Big Data ever been known to sift through data to connect data points.
Like unless your job is director of IT Security for Microsoft, I doubt you have the credentials to be as anonymous as you think you are.
On top of the fact that most people know that the more you try to anonymize yourself, the more you actually make yourself unique in terms of data because very few people use obfuscation techniques, and those techniques are well known. Thus, if they think you’re obfuscating your identity, you’re now just thrown in the “people who like anonymity” bag of data, which when connected with previously collected data on “people who like anonymity” can be used to create a profile on you, specifically.
👍
If I believed Epic was really that good at making money by secretly collecting data, I don’t know why I’d believe they need me to download their launcher to do it. They’re either cartoon supervillains or they’re not.
They own Easy Anti-Cheat, which has kernel level access and collects data as part of its user agreement but these people keep regurgitating the debunked claim of the launcher being spyware. Occam’s razor, anyone?
Literally the only data they can get is basic hardware info and your e-mail address which is easy to fake. You can even use an alternate launcher like Heroic and give them basically nothing. The point isn’t to “take people’s data”, they give away games to try to generate interest in EGS and get people to download it and spend money on the store. You lose nothing by redeeming the game.
They collect and use quite a bit more than that, it’s in their privacy policy:
https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/privacypolicy
Sure, their primary focus is most likely generating interest and usage of their platform, but they’ll also use analytical and statistical information to influence their business decisions.
On a personal note, I made the decision as a consumer to not interact with them as much as possible. Even when I did have an account to collect free games years ago, the only thing I actually played was a Satisfactory alpha/beta event. I have more than enough games to play, so I am not concerned with collecting their free games.
This is literally a bog standard privacy policy. Any closed source website or app you use will also track analytics and usage, and basic hardware info like I mentioned. You might as well go on a crusade against Steam for doing the same thing. You and people like you making these comments act like Epic, specifically, is bad for privacy as if nobody else has trackers. You’re misleading people.
Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear. I am not against Epic because of their privacy policy. I don’t like Epic because of their business practices and owners, and don’t want to give them anything, even if it’s just a bogus email address and a few clicks or whatnot. And no, I never tried to imply other companies don’t do the same thing.
Here’s the bottom line, as far as I’m concerned:
I don’t like Epic, and want nothing to do with them. If others want to interact with them, even if it’s just for the free games, that’s their decision to make.
You can use legendary worth heroic as a user interface (both open source projects) to download and play games you own on epic, no need to install their software.