Five years after it took on Steam, Epic Games Store is yet to make a profit

Whenever I open the Epic Store, I'm in disbelief that the company behind Unreal Engine is okay with having such a sluggish piece of software.

It has a fraction of a fraction of Steam's features, and yet feels 10x bloated. The visual response to clicking anything in the interface takes what feels like hundreds of milliseconds. It feels worse than any Electron app I've ever used, and I can't imagine why. I know that's not a main reason of why it's floundering, but I also wonder if it's a bigger turnoff for the average PC player than Epic's willing to admit.

Good. Anything to dissuade a future computing dystopia where every application developer has its own "store" that you need to install in order to get their applications which are exclusively offered on their store. I don't want to have to install N stores to obtain (approximately) N applications.

Ideally, I don't want to install a "store" onto my PC at all! I already have an application that allows me to download bits from your site: A browser.

To this day, and for close to 20 years, Steam is one of the only applications I allow to run in the background (of my Windows PC). It's always been a remarkably lightweight application. It seamlessly keeps itself and my installed games up to date. And the 'workshop' is fantastic for most modding needs. Hard to think of a complaint really, aside from the occasional pop-up ad, but those have never been too obtrusive and they haven't gotten worse over the years.

It’s super popular to hate on the Epic Store for a bunch of reasons, but let me break from the crowd and give them some credit: directly due to Epic competing with Steam, Steam actually improved drastically over the last 5 years. For almost a decade before that Valve had been asleep with the monopoly, I’m personally grateful someone forced them to improve.

And it will continue to be unable to do so because they are only targeting making it a better experience for developers, not consumers.

The app is less usable than Steam (in general), and most user's experience with it is just being forced onto it because certain devs hopped over on an exclusivity contract. So it's already soured in most people's mouths. No one is interested in investing in another walled garden when they've invested thousands of USD in one that generally works better.

When it launched all I can remember from the press was ‘steam takes too much money from developers and we will take less’.

That’s not really a selling point for me, the person who buys games to play them.

To this day I can’t name a single gamer-facing feature epic game store has over Steam that would entice me to give up 20 years of built up trust. I buy games on GOG a bunch, I buy games primarily on Steam and have a steam deck. What’s in it for me on EGS?

Epic game store is a weapon for attacking other game developers. It was never to make a profit. It's just to provide an sealed off area for Epic to buy competitors/etc and cut them out of more open competitor ecosystems. Like when they bought Psyonix, said they wouldn't change anything in Rocket League, then 6 months later unreleased(!) the game for multiple operating systems removing all online play (the only real game mode). They claimed this was because of Direct X transition problems. But they still support Playstation which uses the same old Direct X. It's all lies.

And lets not forget the innumberable times Epic has cloned games made by other companies in their engine and released them for "free" on "epic game store".

I haven’t bought a single game from EGS yet I get the free games every week. I wonder how much profit they would make by turning off the free game spigot.

5 years and it still lacks some of the basic features that steam has (some by choice, who wants to moderate forums)... They got landlorded by apple and valve and got bigmad and tried to landlord .. but their landlord game is weak.

I have conflicting feelings about the Epic Games Store. On the one hand, Valve definitely needs to have competitors to avoid the kind of "enshittification" we see in other tech products. On the other hand, Epic's tactics - especially securing exclusives - have been quite anti-consumer. Epic's Fortnite has also popularized a bunch of monetization tactics that, frankly, suck.

I guess what I'm saying is: use GoG whenever possible.

i like steam and gog the best. also i like itch, gamejolt and glorious trainwrecks. i really like finding indie game sites to see what's there

First phrase in title is a bar.

Not too much new info here.

It's been interesting to me to watch this "fight" from a user perspective. I say fight in scare quotes because it seems to mostly be EGS whinging and splashing about and Steam just ignoring their existence entirely.

But it's interesting to me because I've always felt like Steam's moat was weird. I mean, it's PC. There's no moat in the same way that Android or iOS have. Prior to steam, people just put their items on their dang desktops, for crying out loud. Still can. Still do, for most software that's not games. And there's obviously ~0 cost to installing multiple launchers. It's what, a few bits of disk space (nothing compared to the size of even a small indie game, which will easily be 1GB nowadays) and an icon in your app tray, if you even let it run on startup.

AND people already use multiple launchers! It's not an fdroid vs playstore scenario, where grandma isn't going to install fdroid. Grandma is already installing random exe's from all over the internet. And gamers already have company-specific launchers - battlenet, EGS for fortnite, and so on. And they have an existing install base, from fortnite! Though I suspect most of their users are mobile. But it's a big leg up vs trying to crack the chicken and egg problem of no games = no installs = no games.

And yet, here we are. They can't even hardly give away games for free! They offer half the fees and frickin pay popular up and coming double-A titles for exclusivity. And yet still Steam is huge and games will release on EGS and on Steam and literally (there's a tweet with an example somewhere) games will see <1% of sales come from EGS.

So - what's Steam's moat? It's CLEARLY there. And I think it's simple that it's just brand and trust. Gamers (sorry, forgive me use of the term) are used to being jerked around and treated like crap, and they're tremendously suspicious of big game companies, since they're so good at ruining everything just to eke out more profits even if it kills the dang thing long-term.

But Steam has their trust because 1) they have a very good track record of not f'ing people over and 2) people trust Gabe because they know Valve is privately held and Gabe is in control. So there's this capitalist/shareholder capriciousness that's simply not a factor in Valve's business but is literally the entire business of EGS. Do people think Valve is here for charity? Certainly not. And yet there's absolutely this perceived difference between Valve and Epic where Valve is the "I make money by making customers happy, just like I have done for twenty years" type of money-making company and Epic is clearly driven in a much more stereotypically slimy sort of capitalist fashion.

I'll throw in one random anecdote: I'm sure everyone else saw the HN threads about the OLED Steam Deck? Where they're like, making screws easier for people to tinker with in the newer revision? That's the kind of thing I'm talking about with Valve. Gamers love Valve and Valve loves gamers loving valve (especially since it drives so much revenue).

epic has one good multiplayer game, steam has none. both are doodoo platforms, and only run on a doodoo operating system that serves you ads before it’s finished booting. we can definitely do better.

in the mean time, i’m glad for steam and epic and windows. at least we have one good game to play while we build a better tomorrow.

you can’t just code 24/7. it’s not healthy.