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.
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."
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.
What you do need is to avoid tying your game socialisation to a _store_. Some day, Steam will be enshittified too.
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.
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.
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.
Demanding it is how Steam came about!
It'll probably turn a division of Microsoft that usually loses money into one that loses...more money.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
No but it has to be at least nicer and they didn't manage that.
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.
Valve has created a kind of gaming Facebook.
You can't replace that.
Can't escape the feeling that Epic just want to sell games without engaging with their customers much.
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.
> together with over $500 million of identified cost savings in contracting, marketing, and closing some open roles puts us in a more stable place.
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.
Epic's employees reaped the gains while it rained in the form of paychecks. While it sucks that people are losing their jobs, those individuals received (much of) the upside of this investment and their jobs never would have existed in the first place had the investment not been made. Their paychecks are not being clawed back. Shareholders (including executives who are largely paid via out-of-the money options) are bearing the costs. Consumers also benefit from increased competitive pressure on Valve and subsidized game prices.
Would it be "better" if Epic had not invested in the Epic Game Store and paid a dividend or conducted a share buyback?
IMO investing in a marketplace was fine, but hemorrhaging money for 7 years on non-performant software + free game bundles is probably not defensible from an executive standpoint.
I launched EGS just now to time some comparisons and it's a black rectangle on my screen with no GUI (probably self-updating). I had to kill the process and restart it.
The Look and Feel for the EGS client just feels slow. Not that Steam is always amazing in this regard either but it's way better than EGS. Go to your EGS library and click between "favorites" and "all games". Switching from favorites to all games takes me ~4 seconds, every time (if you have any meaningful number of games).
The search/sort is slow. Steam's feels instant.
The library list has a ton of wasted space. In terms of vertical space, the Steam library lists three games for every game EGS lists.
The EGS social features compared to Steam are downright anemic (and Steam is pretty bad compared to something like Discord). You can't even set an avatar in EGS. Even EA's Store app (whatever they call Origin now) lets you do that.
I'll stop there. I could rant for much longer.
if you have the time, try to find a game on nintendo vs on steam. Don't google for the pages, go to their base shop page and start from there. Try to avoid directly searching the title, instead search for keywords as if you're a gamer trying to recall a game suggestion you heard from a friend like 2 weeks ago. You'll notice the plethora of differences that combined puts steam on a whole other level of sales and content distribution if you go about it like that
Steam is always going to be my first choice because Linux support is better. If I buy on Steam I know it's going to work.
I fear for valve in a post gaben world, and they certainly aren't blameless. They also aren't a monopoly. Hell, steamOS is the opposite of a locked ecosystem.
It has 90% marketshare and has been shown to use its monopoly uncompetitively to force price parity on devs. Textbook definition.
>People would be excited for EGS just like they are for GoG,
People "like" GOG. I woildnt say they are "excited for it". The revenue of GOG these years don't reflect the supposed enthusiasm.
>EGS has a track record of anticonsumer behavior.
Anticonsumer isn't anti competitive. Especially not as a new player in the game. They can't brute force this stuff with money like a trillion dollar company could.
> Hell, steamOS is the opposite of a locked ecosystem.
I'll believe that when they release a full distro with all the feature the Steam Deck enjoys.
Epic garnered a lot of ill will with all the early exclusives. If I have part 1 and part 2 of some franchise on Steam, and then part 3 comes out as an Epic exclusive, it's going to irritate me.
None of those languages were familiar to me, and there was no VPN/proxy/etc involved.
Looks like they have finally fixed lag and freeze jank that occured on every action, blocked scrolling, and etc.
Unfortunately just clicking on the "Featured Discounts" items on the store home page.. 3-4+(more like 4-5+ on further testing) FULL seconds of blank until the game details load. An ecommerce site where the items take 3-4 seconds to display!? I flipped over to Steam and everything in the store loads "instantly".
Sigh, I'll check back in 2028.
Edit: It boggles the mind and defies reason that they can't get a handle on table-stakes UX after all this time, energy, and hundreds of millions of dollars sunk into it. Nepotism; gotta be, yeah?
User reviews, guides, discussions, workshop and shared screenshots and videos: bold social features that are an incredible source of agony for mediocre and bad indie games.
It is a monopoly but that can be a good thing sometimes. Steam is really good! Is it 30% cut good? Maybe not but I do think Valve has managed to keep Steam good for a very long time and if they lose their monopoly they're going to have a strong incentive to fuck things up.
Another example is WhatsApp. Sure, sucks for Google and Apple that WhatsApp have a watertight monopoly in most of Europe (and probably much of the rest of the world; I haven't checked). But it's pretty great for actually users. We've had at least a decade of totally free messaging that everyone has with no ads and e2e encryption.
Meta are just about starting to fuck it up but it's been a pretty great run.
Epic likely has talented devs and clearly invests a lot of money into all of this, but it took them years to finally implement a cart. It's not the end of the world to not have one, but not if you are a digital store!
It doesn't even have (or at least didn't the last time I checked) a review system. Steam isn't just a store anymore- it's closer to a social network with communities, discussions, mod workshop (which makes it stupid easy to install mods if a game supports this). With forums dying and reddit turning into whatever it is turning into, Steam forums is IT for a lot of gamers. If I see a game on sale the first thing I turn to is a review section- more often than not it's enough to gauge whether I'll buy this thing or not. And it's a nice place to ask whenever something in the game bugs our or doesn't work, or to just vent.
EGS is (or least was) really damn slow to start (never mind to launch an actual game). Linux support is non-existent.
Sure, it is extremely difficult to tackle a leader when a headstart is this large, and when people already have massive libraries of their own on Steam, but it's been what- 7 years of development? Epic had a clean slate, no compatibility to worry about and all the features their main competitor had, mapped out to copy- and they didn't even try to reach feature-parity.
Giving out free games only takes you so far when people lack the necessities to stay at your platform
Among other vanity projects, they hired Simon Peyton Jones, long the most prominent developer of Haskell, to build "Verse", Tim Sweeney's hobby language [1].
I'm sure SPJ isn't that expensive, but still, it's pretty far from Epic's "core mission."
Epic are trying to break into what is nearly a monopoly.
On one hand, I admire their chutzpah. The App Store model has weighed down the entire software industry and has prevented entire categories of new products from growing out of infancy due to anticompetitive practices. Everyone, Apple and Google included, would actually be better off without the App Stores in their present form, and I’d love to see them weakened or eliminated.
But on the other hand, Epic actually accomplished very little in their war, and nowhere near what being unavailable on mobile platforms for years cost them.
Additionally, their refusal to go after Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch never made any sense to anyone except for those with a financial interest in those arrangements. The rest of us were just confused — the console App Stores are the exact same model as the mobile App Stores.
I suspect Epic’s actual reason for not going after the consoles was a bit of realpolitik or cowardice depending on how you look at it. They couldn’t afford to be locked out of the mobile and console stores at the same time, so they invented some tortured rationale for why they could pay the console vendors their 30% but not the mobile vendors. But, this muddied their message and they came up mostly empty handed in the end, and here we are today.
No? Epic charges 12% (with the first $1m free) vs. Valve’s frankly extortionate (i.e. industry standard) 30%.
This is just wrong. You portray people as being irrational / "emotional", but Steam was actively bad when it first launched. The fact that people changed their opinions on it when it later became actually good is not emotional, that's in fact exactly rational.
The Epic Game Store doesn't need to fix "perception", they need to fix their actual product instead of trying to take shortcuts to gaining users by burning hundreds of millions of dollars per year on exclusivity deals, which are extremely anti-consumer, and will obviously result in rational backlash against somebody blowing money to attempt to force people to use their product for access to a completely unrelated product.
Steam with thousands of games, that regularly has (or had) massively deep sales that let you get games for cheap, barely uses resources (most players are not struggling now to run games), and run very smooth. Is a very different beat. Valve earned trust.
EGS is currently bad and trying to position themselves as a Steam alternative when they simply are not even close to the same quality.
How on earth will epic win without exclusives? It's like launching some Facebook competitor "but you get two profile pictures". Noone would switch.
All these geeks singing steam and lamenting competition. Competition bad for me mkay, steam good.
/me shakes head
For Sony, I get it. I want to play Demon Souls, I buy a PS5, now I own a PS5 I'm gonna buy more games for it.
But for EGS this doesn't make sense. It costs me nothing to install both stores on my PC. I buy Alan Wake 2 on EGS, great, that doesn't make me any more likely to buy the next game I want there. Nothing about the platform is sticky or requires a sunk cost.
Unless they're making enough money on the exclusive games to justify the deals on their own (which, given this announcement, seems unlikely) I don't see how they or you think it could work.
But you wouldn't bother unless you have a reason to. I put off buying games I wanted to for months because I'd've had to install a new store. No-one is going to install a store for nothing.
> I buy Alan Wake 2 on EGS, great, that doesn't make me any more likely to buy the next game I want there.
Now every time you launch Alan Wake 2 they get a chance to sell you another game. If you see a game you like, why wouldn't you buy it on EGS now that you've installed it and know it works? They've got your email address now and can send you recommendations or tell you when there's a sale on.
Sure, it's still going to be an uphill struggle. But if they can't get you to install the store then they can't even start.
Or at least, that's how it worked 20 years ago. Thing is, games got so diverse, as well as the rise of "forever games" that there's fee actual "systrlem sellers" these days. It's really just GTA that comes to mind now.
A good competitor would not come from a game publisher. It wouldn't collect any more data than it needs and wouldn't use your data for marketing or sell it to anyone else. It also wouldn't be able to remove your ability to access and play the games you've already purchased for any reason.
Bad products/services that are more trouble than they are worth do not magically become good because they might compete in some ways with something else.
GoG is the closest thing to a steam competitor right now and even in that case I have zero incentive to install their client.
Two anti-consumer products is probably better than one, but I also hate Epic as a company, so I would just prefer for Steam to win. At least I like half-life.
Neoliberalism at its finest. The world moving towards conservatism has left us with this model: The working class takes the hit of each crisis from small to big.
It is not a sustainable model.
But instead of focusing, you know, in making their story desirable to use, they focused on shit like exclusives. And for that, they should fail.
I prefer GoG over Steam, even while I am super grateful for Steam making gaming on Linux possible. And GoG didn't need to rely on exclusives for this.
