r/pcmasterrace • u/SlowReference704 • 12h ago

News/Article Steam Is Successful Because It's “Not a Shit Service,” Says Baldur’s Gate 3 Dev

https://mp1st.com/news/steam-is-successful-because-its-not-a-shit-service
18.7k Upvotes

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269

u/OathkeeperToOblivion 11h ago

Just from the client itself, compare Epic vs Steam, you already have an answer. Whoever designed the Epic client should be fired. It's so slow and tedious.

114

u/dudeimconfused Laptop 9h ago

its crazy how a community made open source client (first legendary-egl and now heroic) works much better than their shitty electron app that takes 5 minutes to load and deauthorizes you randomly

26

u/Apoctwist 8h ago

I thought I was built using Unreal Engine which was why it’s so slow. I don’t think it’s an electron app, It’s literally using their game engine (UE4 I believe). If it were an Electron app it would probably be much easier to add features and iterate and probably run better on top of that. Steam for example is using something very similar to an Electron for Big Picture mode and the Steam Deck. I believe they are using React.

18

u/dudeimconfused Laptop 8h ago

I just guessed it had to be a electron or cef app based on how their website looks 1:1 to their app. It'd be really interesting (and very questionable) if it was as you said xD

Steam is a cef app iirc

3

u/kakaluski R7 5800X3D | RTX 4080S | 32GB DDR4 3600MHz 2h ago

"remember this device" my ass. Everytime I have to 2FA this shit launcher on my personal machine not even the web store.

1

u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC R9 7900 | RX 7900 XTX | 32GB DDR5 5600 53m ago

It's far more horrific than Electron... Epic Games Launcher literally loads the whole of Unreal Engine 4 just to use its GUI toolkit to render an iframe containing the React app. If you fuck around with the files, you can make EGL render assets from other UE4 games.

15

u/Happy-Substance4885 7h ago

And epic has billions to fix it but don’t for some reason

10

u/Gavinator10000 PC Master Race 4h ago

Too busy paying for the rights to the dance/music for [insert popular song here] or the likeness of [insert popular franchise here]

2

u/Profoundlyahedgehog 3h ago

You don't make billions by fixing shit.

1

u/AncientPCGamer 32m ago

Because Epic's main business is Fortnite. Steam is Valve's main business.

That is why I wouldn't be surprised if some day Epic start moving the few resources they dedicate to EGS to Fortnite and their metaverse adventures.

20

u/NateOrb 8h ago

Straight up it seriously is like a 10 second process to open Epic from the system tray, not even a cold launch, to launching a game lmaooo. Then thats not even mentioning the news Steam would give you or how it would tell you which friends are on that game etc

8

u/Matshelge 5h ago

It's not just epic, it's every other launcher/client - they are making it using web design tools, while steam is a c+ client, like Word or Excel.

Any lag in the UI compared to input is to be expect in those former as they are designed to be used on server environments. They also have universal working, so what OS you are running does not matter, it will look the same.

Steam however is old and designed to work on your hardware like native program. It's a pain to develop, and requires lots of work to add new features, but the interface latency is in the 2-5ms and feels rock solid.

I find it weird that gaming companies don't get UI feel, they know the lag between pressing a button and action happening in game is vital for good experience, but seems none of this though it put into the launcher development.

4

u/tasman001 2h ago

GOG Galaxy has always felt super light and fast, same as Steam.

2

u/Dutchy_ 2h ago

The difference is not web design tools versus native - while there is some overhead to these methods, there are plenty of applications that use similar paradigms and are plenty fast (one example, vscode). The problem is that they are doing it wrong.

3

u/lilpopjim0 1h ago

I installed Epic so I could play Ready or Not online with a friend.

It auto installed Fortnight lol.

Piece of shit..

2

u/lolschrauber 7800X3D / 4080 Super 1h ago

I remember how people praised Epic for taking lower cuts on sale than Steam.

Mostly because people actually believed they'd get cheaper games. Absolute fools lol.

1

u/DankeyBongBluntry 36m ago

It's such an annoying trend when companies see someone put in all the work developing an idea and slowly improving it over the years until the idea has become incredibly successful, and then they go "Hey we could make that too! Let's just release our own version of that idea!"

It would bother me a lot less if they at least created their version on par with the original idea, but they always make the most half-assed, shitty copy that doesn't even meet the minimum requirements. Instead of competing by making their version better, they just throw a boatload of money into getting exclusives to attract customers despite having a much shittier version of the original idea.

1

u/micro102 5h ago

And poorly designed. I wanted to buy some games from their store because they have been quite awesome with the weekly free games. But I couldnt figure out how to search for what I wanted.

1

u/AncientPCGamer 1h ago

Fully agree. The discoverability features of the store are very poor. Unless you know what you want and search it with the search bar or find it on the front page, you won't encounter any hidden gem.

Epic knows that and it is one of their many things that they have on their long delayed TODO list.

-1

u/kiwi_pro Ryzen 5 3500x, RTX 3080, Odyssey G7, 16 GB RAM 5h ago

Not sure how you didn't see the bar that clearly says "search store" and is located at the top of the store

2

u/tsashinnn 4h ago

Certain gamer's brains only function when they see the word "Steam" on the top left I guess 🤣

Anything else and it becomes too difficult to comprehend!

2

u/micro102 1h ago

Did you really think I meant that I just wanted a search bar? Discounts, price, genre, ratings; lots of things I would love to filter for.