I think they just made a lot of good PR moves early on after running up against a lot of outrage over their always-on DRM client model, with their regular big sales that got meshed into events and minigame things. They've gradually gotten worse since then, but they still haven't really crossed any major lines that would turn people against them.
What's really funny is the sheer frothing hatred a bunch of nerds have for Epic, who go so far as to performatively buy games on Steam when they're released for free on Epic. It's kind of weird that Epic hasn't managed to gain the same sort of following with their model of giving away 1-3 free games every week. Their storefront is worse (by design, since they've actively removed features since it first launched and it's complete garbage compared to the dev asset storefront that's also in the launcher), but the overall client is just as bad as Steam and nowhere near the flaming trainwreck that is uPlay or Origin, which both completely fail to do the one thing they exist to do (download and run games) regularly.
Haven't looked into it for a while but one of the big problems with epic was it would scrape your computer for everything and regularly/constantly send that information back. That's the reason I refuse to touch it. But if you're using windows that's already happening so not sure what the average person's problem is.
People didn't care about Tencent ownership until the whole Epic store launch somewhat coinciding with the anti-China propaganda in the west.
Epic was never going to develop a following now that people automatically think anything to do with China = bad. Unlucky for them because the money flowing to small devs is a great improvement from Steam.
But gamers will jump in front of a bus before admitting that dirty Chinese money is arguably being used for some good initiative like funding small indie exclusives, you know curse you it was supposed to be a free market etc and then they would wonder why almost every indie dev prefers Epic deals compared to Steam.
I think they just made a lot of good PR moves early on after running up against a lot of outrage over their always-on DRM client model, with their regular big sales that got meshed into events and minigame things. They've gradually gotten worse since then, but they still haven't really crossed any major lines that would turn people against them.
What's really funny is the sheer frothing hatred a bunch of nerds have for Epic, who go so far as to performatively buy games on Steam when they're released for free on Epic. It's kind of weird that Epic hasn't managed to gain the same sort of following with their model of giving away 1-3 free games every week. Their storefront is worse (by design, since they've actively removed features since it first launched and it's complete garbage compared to the dev asset storefront that's also in the launcher), but the overall client is just as bad as Steam and nowhere near the flaming trainwreck that is uPlay or Origin, which both completely fail to do the one thing they exist to do (download and run games) regularly.
Haven't looked into it for a while but one of the big problems with epic was it would scrape your computer for everything and regularly/constantly send that information back. That's the reason I refuse to touch it. But if you're using windows that's already happening so not sure what the average person's problem is.
I'm a gog enjoyer
People didn't care about Tencent ownership until the whole Epic store launch somewhat coinciding with the anti-China propaganda in the west.
Epic was never going to develop a following now that people automatically think anything to do with China = bad. Unlucky for them because the money flowing to small devs is a great improvement from Steam.
But gamers will jump in front of a bus before admitting that dirty Chinese money is arguably being used for some good initiative like funding small indie exclusives, you know curse you it was supposed to be a free market etc and then they would wonder why almost every indie dev prefers Epic deals compared to Steam.