> The reason nobody competes with Steam is simply the sheer number of integration and platform features that make it easy to buy, play and share games with my friends.

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.

> Just make it a nice experience.

Haven’t you been paying attention? That’s not how we do things in business anymore…

> It's not that hard, stop trying to 'force' me to use your platform. Just make it a nice experience.

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.

One of the more fascinating parts of the Xbox plan of attack for its new console is its apparent marriage of Xbox, Steam, and Epic among possibly others in a unified console experience. Having a true console like experience with a variety of PC game stores plugged in I think is a rare lane available for Xbox to try and do something other than reproduce Steam but worse, and I'm curious how it's going to go.

As much as I love steam, some of this isn't even a high bar. I've always had issues with stuff loading slow or odd behavior on the steam store tab in the application. My understanding is it's because the store tab in the steam application is essentially a web browser, and it sorta works like ass.

I like having a huge library of games on epic-store but when I try to buy a game there - because they're having a sale - its a pain to find games. Steam's search isn't top-notch either, but its 1000x better than epic's.

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.

I can't help thinking the battle was lost before it even started, no matter how good the offering was because the PC and mobile platforms (where epic operate their store) have 99.9% already decided who owns them. The way I see it Epic wanted to copy what Counter-strike and HL2 was to Steam, but using Fortnite to push their store for a fresh generation of gamers. The problem is they couldn't replace or exist alongside the incumbents while trying to bring in more than a trivial amount of income. The only way I can see the outcome being different is if they were in the position Valve were in around 25 years ago with a fresh or poorly served market or something other than video games, few remember Stardock Desktop as a place they got their games.

Steam is actually not that good as an application. It’s slow, it’s full of ads, the UI is complex …

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.

The irony here should be lost on no one.

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.

Last I checked the Epic Games Store doesn't even support Linux - the new gaming frontier.

Not only does Epic refuse to make their game store any better, Tim Sweeney will continue to whine about how Steam's 30% cut is way too much. Surely if it's too much, Epic Games should be able to provide the same service for their cut? But no, they continue selling a moped while saying how all of the motorcycle manufacturers are ripping you off.

Network effects disagree, sadly. You don't get market share from the leader by simply "being better". There's way better netowkrs than Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit out there. But some habits are as harder to break than they were to form.

Let me make a disclaimer, I don't if it is true as CEO speech truthfulness seems to be made by ai.

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?

The main feature they don't want to add is making it easy to tell when games are crap by user reviews

I think you’re massively underestimating the network effects in play. Steam has an enormous moat.

Steam has been around for 20 years and gamers really, really care about their Steam profiles.

Valve has created a kind of gaming Facebook.

You can't replace that.

A big reason it feels like nobody competes with steam is that if you want to sell your game on steam it can't be cheaper elsewhere. So any other store can't compete on price.

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!

For what it’s worth, Epic is a private company and employee upside has been capped in the sense that compensation has been mostly cash (and not Netflix tier cash). Exposure to equity may been a better way to share in upside and ensure some buy-in.

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.

Nearly every time I add the free EGS games to my cart the checkout fails. I frequently have to restart the EGS client for checkout to work (and even then it fails often).

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.

One thing that steam does better than any other place is create an incredible store experience to sell games on. I don't think any other game distributor has an algorithm as good as theirs, and all the integrations and hookups that come with it. For example, Nintendo's shop page for each game is sparse in detail and lacks so much information buyers have access to in that game's Steam page counterpart. The store search and other store views display games far more efficiently than nintendo's search and store views, making it much easier to find what you're looking for in fewer clicks and fewer minutes.

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

EGS doesn't even have a Linux version.

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.

How is steam a monopoly? People would be excited for EGS just like they are for GoG, except EGS has a track record of anticonsumer behavior.

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.

> Gamers' vehement defense of what is effectively a monopoly continues to confuse me.

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.

People are generally okay with monopolies as long as they feel they're benefiting from the monopoly instead of being taken advantage of.

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.

In my experience, the Epic downloader would frequently lead to degraded performance and/or system instability when I'd leave it running; I've never noticed such problems at all with the Steam client.

For about two months Epic Games Store kept switching me to a different language and currency.

None of those languages were familiar to me, and there was no VPN/proxy/etc involved.

If this were true than Epic would have eaten Steam's lunch.

I try out the Launcher every couple years to see if it's improved. I just installed and logged in for the first time since 2023.

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?

The major feature that EGS lacks and which makes it appealing to indies and repulsive to gamers is user reviews. User reviews are a major influence on consumer choice; and Steam even shows recent vs long term, which signals if a recent change was received well or not.

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.

Gamers complain about layoffs, but the largest invisible cause behind them is Steam’s 30% cut, which nobody acknowledges.

Exactly. Their holy war on the App Stores blunted Fortnite’s momentum at its apogee.

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.

I certainly still hold a grudge against tim sweeney for saying piracy made them not release stuff on pc and after a while going back to releasing on pc while whining about valve fees and then launching epic games with similar fees and way worse service for the developers...

> there’s a huge component to gamers that they are emotional and resistant to change.

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.

How do they win with exclusives? The strategy is nonsense.

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.

I'd love steam to have some competition. epic isn't it though. Epic sucks up your personal data to sell to advertisers and "marketing partners", the client itself is trash, it's just one more middle man to get in your way (https://old.reddit.com/r/EpicGamesPC/comments/zc5ri3/playing...) at inconvenient times.

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.

Competition is good, the EGS is bad and anti-consumer.

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.

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