Epic Games Store

[+Zagadka Subscriber²]

Thought we could kick off a discussion like this (didn't see this addressed in the rest of this forum)

 

On the surface, I like the idea of competing with Steam... but only if the experience is actually better. And not just for devs. The only thing the Epic Games Store actually has going for it is the publisher cut being a good deal better. There are already a bevy of "competitors" with Steam (Origin, Uplay, Battlenet, Bethesda, Galaxy, the recently closed and ill-advised Razer Store, hell, the Windows Store, even Twitch and Discord are trying to be clients, etc etc) that are basically just paid walled off gardens.

 

Because like those systems, the Epic Game Store is, essentially, feature incomplete. I have no idea how they launched it expecting to compete with Steam. No cloud saves, mods, reviews, community hubs, social elements, achievements, control and hardware options... about the only feature the Epic Store actually has is keeping the games updated. The prices (for the consumer) aren't even any better. At its launch, there are a small number of titles, a trait which has, in the past, tanked console launches. I think the Uplay and Origin stores are actually better than Epic, ungodly forces of EA and Ubisoft's little self-contained universes they are. At least they actually integrate with Steam. Epic is basically a webpage in a wrapper. A lot of people knock the push it is making for "exclusives", which is a dirty word in PC gaming, but I don't see it as much better or worse than Origin or Uplay - but that is just that, Origin and Uplay are mostly useless steps people have to go through to launch games.

 

Steam has problems (mainly its bulk and shite indie dev spam), but it works really, really well. The client itself is even pretty good, not taking too much in performance. Competing with it and its decades of accumulated data is going to take some doing for a starter, and the Epic store is just... devoid. The Epic Store may start out are more "curated" than Steam, but every other game platform is also "curated". The most annoying thing about Steam is how it puts game data in /common  that is a pain to dig through to install mods or whatnot.

 

I really don't like to praise Steam too much, especially when GOG exists, but it really is just better. The best result from this entire mess may be Steam adjusting publisher revenue percentages.

 

I was initially excited to see where an independent, major publisher would go to compete with Steam in the same way Valve originally made Steam ubiquitous, but the result has been a letdown - at the very least, incredibly rushed, and at the most, useless.

 

Plus, Epic forced me to install Fortnite. Who needs ~50 gb, anyway. I ended up uninstalling it, since the only use I had for it was Unreal Tournament.

[+virtorio MVC]

I think they're very different things. Steam is a platform (which games can integrate with) and the Epic Game Store is a store and a launcher (I don't think there's even a Steam-like DRM layer on games bought from the EGS, making it closer to GOG Galaxy).

 

For me, I only use Steam to buy, install and launch games, so the main thing missing for me is user reviews (and the way Steam reviews are, I don't know that I care). I'm sure they're working on a bunch of those missing features.

 

It's biggest drawback is that there are like 20 games on it, so until that changes, it's basically pointless (but I don't think they're even taking developer submissions until later this year, so I'm sure that'll change).

 

It also didn't force me to install Fortnite, so not sure what happened there.

 

Edit: I just wanted to add that their policy of manually curating what actually offered for sale I find very appealing.

Edited February 20, 2019 by virtorio