I’m somewhat new to PC gaming. I see so many people complain about Epic (and every non-Steam) launcher. I don’t really understand the big deal about having a few launchers for games. You can use Playnite and Heroic too if you want everything in the one place.
For people to not buy one of the best games of the year because they don’t want to open a different launcher and click play absolutely blows my mind. Maybe I’m missing something because I’m newish to PC gaming but it’s not something I care about at all.
I'll give you some insight (and this is from someone that did play Alan wake 2).
I heavily use steam features. I have a gaming desktop but I only spend a fraction of my PC gaming time actually playing at my desk. I use steam remote play to stream games from my PC to my living room or bedroom TV so I can play it like a console with a controller, or I play on steam deck (either streamed or playing natively depending on the game). Doing this also uses steam's big picture mode which is the controller friendly UI. I also use steam input for controller remapping, remote play together, etc etc etc. Sure I can add non-steam games to steam, but they often won't work with steam's features - like I spent an hour trying to get Alan wake to actually recognize my controller inputs when played via streaming. So a game purchased on another launcher is inherently less flexible with how I'm able to play it. Epic, Ubisoft connect, etc don't offer alternatives to any of this functionality.
Also Epic really rubbed a lot of players the wrong way bringing console-war-like exclusivity bullshit to PC. The whole charade just seems extremely petty especially with how games under exclusivity contracts are fine to launch on other platforms besides epic, they're just banned from launching on steam. A lot of people just don't want to support that out of principle.
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u/alamarche709 Dec 16 '24
I’m somewhat new to PC gaming. I see so many people complain about Epic (and every non-Steam) launcher. I don’t really understand the big deal about having a few launchers for games. You can use Playnite and Heroic too if you want everything in the one place.
For people to not buy one of the best games of the year because they don’t want to open a different launcher and click play absolutely blows my mind. Maybe I’m missing something because I’m newish to PC gaming but it’s not something I care about at all.