I don't agree. The reason I personally prefer Steam is that all my existing games are on Steam so if I keep buying on Steam I don't have to make and maintain accounts on other stores, if I keep buying my games on Steam I can keep using Steam as my only game launcher, and all my friends are on Steam so games with Steam multiplayer integration are easier to play if I too play it through Steam.
The Epic Games Store client and game integration could be significantly better from a technical perspective in every possible way, and I would not be interested in moving to it. Steam is good enough and switching has a massive cost. I can't really imagine much that would make me use the Epic Games Store other than exclusivity or the promise of free games. Though I would be more likely to just not play a particular game if it's only available through the Epic Games Store.
But other platforms really are rather pathetic in terms of feature set compared to Steam. Steam has a bajillion features, and it looks like other platforms aren't even trying to compete to provide a good user experience.
Steam isn't perfect: they initially had to be forced to offer refunds, and their item economy enables barely disguised gambling. But by and large they have behaved very predictably and consumer-friendly. Sometimes by outright consumer-friendly policies like generous refunds or labeling games with AI assets. But usually by just not doing anything greedy. Or as the meme goes: "Gabe does nothing. wins."
But we'll see. I hope it doesn't come to that. That said, I'm trying to change my purchase habits over to GOG because even if Gabe's successor doesn't screw over the Steam customers, eventually someone will. With GOG there's no possibility of the games I pay for being taken away from me.
That being said, I believe that Gabe is taking his "succession planning" seriously, so I'd be fairly optimistic for the next decade at least.
He probably already has a will set up that details how ownership should be transferred.
[1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/trump-adm...
Even if you "buy" a physical "game", you are just buying a license.
What you do need is to avoid tying your game socialisation to a _store_. Some day, Steam will be enshittified too.
The ideal number of app stores I want installed on my computer is ZERO. I don't want to have to load a damn "store" just to obtain and run your game. I am willing to angrily live with ONE store on my computer, Steam, but no way in hell am I going to tolerate having to have an Epic Store and a Microsoft Store and an Activision Store and a goddamn Rockstar Store and an Ubi Store and a fucking Adobe store for Photoshop. I don't want to have to install store after store for each damn app developer on my computer, yet that's the way the industry seems to be headed.
Having a separate company focus on distribution sounds more ideal.
Epic Games had an opportunity here to erode the app store margins through standardization, instead, they've become a copycat of what they resented with a slightly smaller cut.
Just install the damn game, ask if you want icons on the desktop as well as in the start menu.
OS handles it all for you.
Perhaps some multiplayer functionality and such makes sense to share cross-game, but I miss the bad old days of every game having a bunch of privately maintained servers and its own server browser list etc. You could eventually find a few servers that fit your playstyle and make online gamer friends that way.
The only benefit steam brings to the table as far as I can tell is making it easy to reinstall your library on a fresh PC.
I still prefer to buy on Steam if I can, because using the EGS sucks in every way possible compared to using Steam. If I want to sit to rest I can do it on a cold and irregular rock, but if there's a bench right next to it, then I'll use the bench.
That said, you can do a lot worse than EGS. MS Store I'm looking at you. In the above metaphor, you'd like sitting on the wet and muddy ground.
It's definitely not about lock-in for me. It's everything from local streaming, to linux support, to cloud saving working properly, to 100s of other things that become apparent if you try to do anything other than launch a game in a bog standard way on a windows machine.
Epic have had decades to get any one of these right, and yet they refuse to meet us even half way on a single point.
Haven’t you been paying attention? That’s not how we do things in business anymore…
Doing business is very simple, easy, and straightforward, but I suspect in a lot of cases the individual behavioral aspects of the executives get in the way of doing good business.
Direction and leadership is something that these companies never seem to get right.
And they're the ones making the most money and avoiding the layoffs.
This applies to everything. If you see a product category where users are legitimately unhappy; then enter it, build something actually good, you'll be the biggest and richest in no-time.
but it got a lot better.
Epic had more money and time compared to Valve. and their store is still worse.
sure, Steam has an enormous moat, but that won't be the case forever, Epic should be ready with a nice platform to exploit niches that Valve misses
instead they hemorrhage money on things that does not make their fundamental position any better.
Eventually like it comes to all of us, there will be time to a new generation of game stores, or gaming devices.
I thought CSS was the first release on steam beta? I remember playing the crap out of it, then the actual steam release happened, and it somehow turned into a laggy buggy hunk of crap for months.
Counter-Strike Source was launched some time in 2004 and then Half-Life 2 came along in November 2004.
Then steam reviews are the most accurate reviews there are for how likely you are to be happy with the purchase. I am much more hesitant to spend money on a game where I can't see the steam reviews for, so there is basically no way I'll buy a game on epic store that doesn't exist on steam since I am basically buying it blind.
And all game controller even works!
Steam is a serious value add on Linux.
Simply getting installer would not be option for most games.
With the added downside of less choice and/or delayed releases
I started using Steam in 2007 and it was fine. In 2006 there was still some residual animosity towards it but I think the tide had well and truly turned since the early days (and I think there were a handful of third party games on it by then too which I guess was something of a vote of confidence - a few were Source engine titles so they may have got a discount or kick-back from Valve, but not all were).
It being a good service is secondary.
I don't see it going down any differently with Steam. It may take a dent and open up a competitor, but it won't do a move so catastrophic that it losses its leader status from that alone.
If steams fumbles as hard as microsoft did with internet explorer they too could be mostly gone in 3 years, replaced by a giant competitors product.
And yes, chrome is a great example. That came right on the legs of Microsoft losing an anti trust case. For something that seems so quaint in 2026. I miss when regulations had teeth.
We could also call those squeezers "optimists", and publicly traded implies ownership by the most optimistic (well, the most optimistic who have money to invest). Leading to behavior patterns that could be described as suicidally chasing the most unrealistic money making projections. (and founder majority stakes are surprisingly susceptible to falling in line with those optimists, because those owners still don't want to see their valuation going down, doubly so of they ever started borrowing against their stakes)
In what role-playing game?
Demanding it is how Steam came about!
I feel like this is good advice, and should still be a pillar of building a business: prioritize customer satisfaction, and your happy customers will become repeat customers. But I don't think it's enough. Epic tried to launch a store in 2018, 15 years after the launch of Steam. That's 15 years of customers buying their games on steam, building a friends list, and getting used to making Steam their PC gaming "home." How do you convince someone who might have hundreds of games tied to one online account, that it is in their interest to open a new online account with a new merchant and start over from scratch? Your experience can't just be nicer, it needs to have some level of appeal that convinces customers to peel themselves away from whatever platform is their current default.
I don't have a good answer for how to accomplish this. Epic tried it by paying devs for exclusives and freebies, litigation, and a PR campaign that Valve and Apple and Google were ripping people off. Their approach was hostile and didn't prioritize making a nice experience, and it seems to have failed. But I think these platforms are sticker than we give them credit for, and just making a nice experience isn't enough.
No but it has to be at least nicer and they didn't manage that.
If Epic games really wanted to start eating away at steams market share, they would do one thing. Make EGS not shitty for the user
There's so many people who aren't even your market, they are an "one game player". You can't target that realistically unless that one game shits the bed.
Roblox is in some ways there, I think Epic thought fortnite could have competed. IMO they made a strategic mistake in shackling their game-as-a-platform to Fortnite. I thought the music fortnite thing looked interesting, but I have negative interest in installing Fortnite.
Call it something else and make it literally the first thing you see on epicgames.com, have it work on mobile, and maybe things would be different today.
(Aside: Roblox wins because I can go from typing in roblox.com into my browser and be playing a game with a friend in under 20s)
Snapchat was a Facebook killer until Facebook bought a VPN service and tracked every user without consent then stole half its features
I guess you could say LoL is a DOTA killer since its significantly more popular now, although some of that is likely to do with the Russian/Ukraine war
Giving actual compelling reasons to get users on your platform is the only way and the best way and that isn't really a function of time. TeamSpeak, Ventrilo and Mumble got eaten up by Discord and also most game forums
One of the biggest issues with all these stores that are other than steam is that they suck in terms of UI/UX and they are HUGE resource hogs, I am more inclined to kill off the epic games launcher from running in the background because it taking up gigabytes of my system memory and that annoys me
>Giving actual compelling reasons to get users on your platform is the only way
And sometimes there is no compelling reason. People may only want 1 or 2 things and they bias towards what they are familiar with.i suspect that's why Twitter is still technically a market leader (despite falling apart behind the scenes).
I also think it's really funny that talk about offering a good platform then mention an example where the market leader just gobbles them up.
I don't buy a lot of games, but when I do, I don't usually look at Epic. I'd rather buy on GOG or Steam. Steam is probably from inertia, but if Epic provided a better than Steam experience on the games I've gotten for free, than I might consider it. I don't really know what would qualify as better than steam though... maybe faster startup, less dumb prompts?
I don't even consider buying games on the Microsoft store though, so Epic has a leg up --- if it's sale season, I will look to see if Epic has a bigger sale than Steam.
But it seems that gamble slowed as the economy did. Worse yet, China and Korea have gotten much more attractive to get people into their casinos. Competition is stiffer than ever.
I haven't play a PC game in a long time, so don't have any experience with the modern game stores and playing downloadable games.
I understand that these stores are more than just places to buy games--they also include extensive social media aspects.
But surely you don't have to give up one store if you make another account on another store? If you are on Steam and have a large friends list there and want to try a game that is only on some other PC game store couldn't you send a message to your Steam friends saying you are going to try that other game and asking if anyone else wants to come play with you?
If you meet people in that new game and want to be online friends, just point them to your Steam account and say that's your main gaming social media site, or point them to some non-gaming social media if you actively use any and they aren't also on Steam.
It'll probably turn a division of Microsoft that usually loses money into one that loses...more money.
From Heroic's FAQ, that's the first step for adding support to the store.
https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher...
Not exactly first class, but one step away.
The SteamOS is capable of getting out of the way, which is something Microsoft is pathologically incapable of designing Windows to do. And these days I think Linux and the Linux desktop are just objectively better than Windows, and the days where Windows embodied what it meant to have when anything goes PC are long gone.
So you're left with limited options. I think a first class console experience for a wide range of storefronts is the best bet to out-steam Steam but it assumes a degree of execution capability that I don't trust Microsoft to have.
Any web browser can seem slow vs a native app, though.
For example. I search for "roguelike" and it brings up 1 single game (which is coming soon). There are few tags on games. No way to refine a search. In fact they have a category called "rogue-like" which has a lot of games, but somehow the search just misses them. There's no way to refine results by popularity or most sales.
I suspect this is all an intentional design philosophy of epic, a way to have a lot more control over what the user sees than steam, because its so bad it doesn't make any other sense.
Also for some reason their store takes a LOT longer to load than steam. The game library UI is much worse. Pretty sure there's no easy way to mod games through the epic store or see dev updates or talk on a forum or submit bugs. Just so bad.
Could it surpass Steam? Probably not. But you don't need to surpass Steam to have a viable, profitable store. GoG is the alternative that proves the rule - it is smaller, but they have their niche offering.
EGS is shit, and relied on exclusives (which everyone typically hates, especially on PC).
The steam chat app is kind of terrible and there was a Linux UI bug that caused UI lag a few years ago. Epic Games just can't replicate the goodwill.
The the lawsuit with apple:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Apple
The massive set of fines...
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/...
> Just make it a nice experience.
That might get in the way of greed and hubris.
I suspect that they would STILL be in the same boat that they are in. You see a silo where I see a service provider.
Does apple make money on doing what they do.. You bet.
But the lesson here is that they make that money because of scale, and without it replacing payment processing, fraud management, and the customer service you need with it is a HARD problem. Epic needs more than Fortnite to justify running all that on their own or it's going to turn into a black hole: because payment processing for "digital goods" is a nightmare.
I suspect that both apple and googles extension into payments at point of sale, has contractual ties to their App Store payment processing. Something Epic will always lack.
The real pain in the ass here is the incumbent card processors, and their fee structures.
I suspect that the industry is going to need to go back and re-visit micro transactions in the coming years.
But he still is a CEO. So there will naturally be some evils he seeps into to make the company (and himself) richer. He still has his own interests, but my second hand experience is that even these layoffs are relatively respectful compared to most of the industry.
I recognize that CEO side. But it's a real shame many people mostly turned on him in order to defend Steam. Steam sure isn't a saint either.
> together with over $500 million of identified cost savings in contracting, marketing, and closing some open roles puts us in a more stable place.
But they are the Amazon of gaming : it’s a no brainer to buy games because you know you won’t get issues being reimbursed if it’s needed. Also SteamOS/Proton/Steam Deck are nice.
And EPIC managed to do worse than that.
I do feel GOG Galaxy could become a threat to Steam someday if they added official Linux support and a full screen version but last time I tried it it was pretty buggy.
But once I saw the interview with the guy from epic or someone big there, I don't remember and they said the money for developers was from marketing campaigns which makes sense to me. They said that they wanted to make a better experience so the developers themselves would try to help being people to the platform but that never happened.
It seems that the technology behind the epic store is, epically broken, pun intended. I've read somewhere that they tried to decouple chunks of the store and restart but the thing was so poorly done that it would be more expensive than just let it fade away and at some point they had a new epic store 2 created from scratch but to develop it to the end would be too expensive.
As a swe myself, maybe they were trying to scale to steam level before being steam? I don't know.
My last experience trying to use epic was trying to buy a game. But being greeted by a store login, then a loader of a store then a initial store that tried very hard to sell me call of duty and EA stuff. I found whatever I was trying to buy but I couldn't due to some bug in the payment.
And never again. Not for any particular reason. I just didn't spend more time there.
And now, with these layoffs what are they going to do? Are they revoke all the licenses for the games they gave and sold?
Can't escape the feeling that Epic just want to sell games without engaging with their customers much.
Valve has created a kind of gaming Facebook.
You can't replace that.
If you don't sell your game on steam you are missing 90% of the market. So as long as Valve continue to make steam good enough, nobody has an incentive to switch.
It's an abusive monopoly. Steam take 30% of revenue from developers and Epic take 12%, but the prices can't be 18% cheaper for the consumer without giving up 90% of the market!
The "most favored nation" pricing you're complaining about being abusive refers to Steam key sales on third party platforms and that pricing exists for a blatantly obvious reason. How much of a percentage does Valve get from that sale? 0%. Absolutely nothing. The developer generated keys are free and Valve will still pay the distribution costs (storefront, downloads, multiplayer, etc) for you. If it was possible to sell a Steam key cheaper on another platform, then nobody would buy Steam keys from the Steam store anymore, which means their revenue would tank to zero, which in turn means they would have to cancel free steam key generation, duh. Valve is being extremely accommodating here and you're twisting it into its opposite, which is pretty disgusting.
At the same time there are articles like this https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2g1md0l23o on the bbc claiming a tribunal ruled a case can continue against Valve for "forcing game publishers to sign up to conditions which prevents them from selling their titles earlier or for less on rival platforms".
The website for the law firm clearly states the price parity is not just for steam keys https://steamyouoweus.co.uk/the-claim.
If there was no evidence it would be thrown out. But until it concludes who knows what the truth is.