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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

>the Epic store is every bit as good at this point

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.

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You're completely correct. Epic store is just a bare-bones program, it lacks features which we consider completely basic and natural in modern online marketplaces, such as a shopping cart. Yes, you have to buy and pay for games one by one.

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?

> 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.

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.

I have faith that the developers at Epic can improve their store. It's a purely technical problem, and an easy one compared to creating the Unreal Engine.

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.

If it doesn't take several seconds to load up a game's page, and if it gives me a way to look at multiple games from a recommended list without having to go one at a time, then it's already ahead of Steam in the ways that matter to me. Steam's store UI is astonishingly slow and cumbersome for what's essentially an embedded web browser. It reminds me of iTunes on windows.

Valve has an almost 2-decade head start. I’m sure Epic will continue to improve their store/platform at a fair pace.

Maybe most of the monetization "features" are regarded as a CON by most players? Just because sb develops this and his lifelihood depends on it, does not make something good or important in the customers 's eyes.

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