For anyone wondering if it's that bad, I played it when I got it on Steam and it ran just fine. Then patched it no problem through the either the Workshop or the Nexus Mods manager like three months later
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.
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.
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.
Epic games store is honestly quite decent m8 I've been using it since 2020. Some of the good things I've noticed on epic games is
free games
alot of the sales for games can be cheaper than steam sales
It's hardly no different to steam gog or any other game launched out there although it lacks official linux support which is a negative in my books when it comes to privacy I'll argue they're both as bad as each other if you think your being smart by avoiding epic games because it's owned by tencent and your concerned for your privacy then you should stop using steam ubisoft ea gog and the many other launchers as well they're both as invasive when it comes to your privacy as the other plus hear me out.. YOUR NOT THAT IMPORTANT I'm not sure the feds are coming after a 32 year old IT tech support worker because he said wrongthink on a tiny social media network
If your still super paranoid first uninstall all your game launchers then maybe pirate and look into foss alternatives or try GOG out you can install games on the Web without a launcher and the games don't have invasive drm
You're calling out the wrong people, completely missing the point of everything privacy or why the epic store is a bad thing and being an idiot and asshole.
Sadly the checkout dialog has CORS violations that they probably don't care to fix.
Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at ‘https://payment-website-pci.ol.epicgames.com/purchase/xsrf?purchaseToken=XXX&flow=PURCHASE’. (Reason: Credential is not supported if the CORS header ‘Access-Control-Allow-Origin’ is ‘*’).
Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at ‘https://talon-service-prod.ecosec.on.epicgames.com/v1/init’. (Reason: Credential is not supported if the CORS header ‘Access-Control-Allow-Origin’ is ‘*’).
Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at ‘https://bam.nr-data.net/1/93a8bd5691?a=27815142&v=1.249.0&to=MlxXbUBZWkJUAkVQCgsWcktTUVhCdg5asdfKVVlcQBdEUEwMVFcRSklUQF9dWkU%3D&rst=1610&ck=0&s=67133c36f4b2d060&ref=https://store.epicgames.com/purchase&ap=271&be=712&fe=717&dc=347&fsh=0&perf=%7B%22timing%22:%7B%22of%22:1703387184928,%22n%22:0,%22f%22:712,%22dn%22:712,%22dne%22:712,%22c%22:712,%22s%22:712,%22ce%22:712,%22rq%22:712,%22rp%22:712,%22rpe%22:712,%22xx%22:1056,%22ds%22:1057,%22de%22:1059,%22dc%22:1428,%22l%22:1428,%22le%22:1429%7D,%22navigation%22:%7B%7D%7D&fcp=963’. (Reason: Credential is not supported if the CORS header ‘Access-Control-Allow-Origin’ is ‘*’).
Probably can use it to feed the ttw mod for new Vegas that combines the two into a single game. I used gog versions to install the mod on steam deck and uninstalled fo3 after.
I recommend a significantly stronger CPU computer for the TTW installer though as it converts the audio to be the same format as nv and it took like 5 days on the deck.