The Valve comparison is apt. The difference is Valve built Steam as infrastructure first, then quietly stepped back from games. Epic did it backwards — they built the game first, then tried to force the infrastructure (EGS) into existence with money. Much harder to do it that way.

> Epic did it backwards — they built the game first, then tried to force the infrastructure (EGS) into existence with money.

Didn't Valve push Steam through HL2? It's a different kind of forcing of course, but still.

I remember when Steam was just something I had to crack to play HL2 as a broke uni student. In the intervening decades I’ve shelled out for over 500 games on Gabe’s little experiment. Wild.

Valve built more games than Epic in the past 10 years. Epic essentially only released Robo Recall and Fortnite + extra content, plus a spinoff of Rocket League which was an acquisition. Valve released a couple of duds (Artifact, Dota Underlords) but also some good games: Half-Life: Alyx, Counter-Strike 2, and Deadlock. They also did "The Lab" and "Aperture Desk Job" which, while not full games, were quite good as demos for their hardware.

Valve built games first, and then a distribution platform for their games, and then opened it to others.