Frankly I'm almost in the opposite camp now - why would I buy anything on Steam when it's clearly being left to rot.
So it has cloud saves and you can buy games to send as gifts?
They have the “Buy game > download game > launch game” flow working, but there’s a heck of a lot of catching up to do. Frankly I’d say that cloud sync for game saves is table stakes for a game store in 2019. If Epic weren’t throwing around millions of dollars on exclusives and discounts, no one would use it.
I’m sure there are other missing features, the ones mentioned above are just what came to mind from when I looked into EGS after Borderlands 3 was announced as an exclusive.
They might be on track to catch up to Steam sooner or later, but it’s far to early to say they’ve done it.
There was this amusing incident not long ago, where the store's fraud prevention mechanisms were blocking users who bought five or six games quickly in a row. There were many, many blocked users, because at that time, the Epic store happened to have a "mega sale" event going, where many games were discounted. In a store without a shopping cart feature, that translates to lot of purchase transactions, one following quickly after another.
https://www.pcinvasion.com/epic-store-blocking-users-purchas...
If only they invested slightly more money into their store implementation, and less into buying expensive exclusive game releases, right?
In a few years, if the store is good, nobody will care about the growing pains. The bad old days will be forgotten like Diretide.
That's funny, recently numerous users were also blocked from purchasing the Valve Index VR system on Steam because of fraud prevention mechanisms.
To their credit Valve did later offer an opportunity for people who ran into this to buy a kit in the first wave of shipments.
a) some 300-400 games in my library, picked up over more than a decade, and probably 95% purchased on sales. There always seems to be a sale. This offsets the price of a computer as opposed to a console.
b) Steam Link, which lets me play those games in the living room using a regular Xbox One controller. The Link has recently migrated from being a hardware device to being software that runs on your TV (I have a Samsung TV) and now recently on iOS (iPhone/iPad/Apple TV).
Link works very well and has effectively moved me to the living room for enjoying games.
It has also made my game library available to my wife, who wasn't going to sit down in front of a computer to play games any time soon, but who has found some games she really enjoys playing by virtue of the simpler, more direct interface that is Steam's big screen mode.
While Steam the desktop app is a horrible, ancient mess, the big screen interface is surprisingly decent.
Wait what? I have a hardware Link and a Samsung tv. Are you saying I can dump the hardware? How do the controllers connect?
Amusingly, there's also a version for the Raspberry Pi 3B: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=6153-IFG...
Yeah, so due to how bluetooth works on the Samsung, some controllers work well and others don't. I set up VirtualHere[1] on the router (which is pretty close to the TV), and connected a USB bluetooth stick to the router. I have a wireless Apple keyboard, a Logitech mouse, and two Xbox controllers connecting through the bluetooth stick, and it works flawlessly. No discernible input lag.