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It's still funny to me that they would rather burn 9 figures in cash on these silly deals to try and 'trap' gamers on their platform instead of just... I don't

by Ethee 6mo ago

It's still funny to me that they would rather burn 9 figures in cash on these silly deals to try and 'trap' gamers on their platform instead of just... I don't know... making a better platform? 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. It's not that hard, stop trying to 'force' me to use your platform. Just make it a nice experience.

yoyohello13 6mo ago
> Just make it a nice experience. Haven’t you been paying attention? That’s not how we do things in business anymore…
- red-iron-pine 6mo ago
  only if you're publicly traded
- lacy_tinpot 6mo ago
  It's truly incredible how difficult business people make doing business. 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.
  - joe_mamba 6mo ago
    >It's truly incredible how difficult business people make doing business. And they're the ones making the most money and avoiding the layoffs.
- malfist 6mo ago
  Well, we might make it a nice experience until we've attracted enough of you people to have a network affect. And then it's a steady march of price increases, additional revenue streams (including selling your data!) and reduction in features because they were "too expensive to maintain"
- uyzstvqs 6mo ago
  Steam does. That's why they're the undefeated king. 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.
  - troosevelt 6mo ago
    Steam has a lot of issues but there are too just lots of areas where better products don't win out over inferior products, that's just not how the world works for lots of reasons.
    - storus 6mo ago
      Updating games on HDDs on Steam takes ages; I often see the download complete but then wait another 30 minutes for their diff to complete; and that happens with 10-20 games every week when they have big updates (10GB+). Just for this one thing I would switch elsewhere.
  - jrozner 6mo ago
    People hated steam when it launched but you needed it to play CS 1.6. It made installing mods easier. Then HL2 released, orange box, and they were able to get a critical mass as they provided platforms support for other games. Steam got better. It’s still not great but they have so much market share that basically any PC gamer already has it. Epic wants some of that money. The problem is nobody wants to install another store and they aren’t doing anything to improve gamer’s experience other than giving away games and having some exclusives. They’ll never hit the critical mass needed that way.
    - pas 6mo ago
      it was pretty meh back then, so people had pretty understandable reasons. it made LAN parties harder for example :) 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.
- DANmode 6mo ago
  Not with that attitude! Demanding it is how Steam came about!
zer00eyz 6mo ago
The irony here should be lost on no one. The the lawsuit with apple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._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/fortnite-video-game-maker-epic-games-pay-more-half-billion-dollars-over-ftc-allegations 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.
- slumberlust 6mo ago
  I think sweeny is an awful person overall. The lawsuit against apple and google is a net positive for consumers though. Having someone as big as Epic stand up to these digital silos is a good thing.
  - zer00eyz 6mo ago
    Assume for one moment that they were all great people over there. 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.
  - johnnyanmac 6mo ago
    I think he's still at heart a developer. That's why all his initiatives that aren't Fortnite are so developer friendly. 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.
glenstein 6mo ago
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.
- bigfishrunning 6mo ago
  My guess is it doesn't go well -- with Gamepass they've taught Xbox gamers not to buy games, and with Steam integration they've given Xbox gamers a competing place to buy games (where Microsoft will pay a percentage to steam!) It'll probably turn a division of Microsoft that usually loses money into one that loses...more money.
- hiccuphippo 6mo ago
  I can run Epic and GoG games in Steamdeck. All Steam had to do is not block them.
  - glenstein 6mo ago
    Right and itch.io and much besides. However, these integrations are janky and not built in as first class console experiences. Not that they need to be necessarily, I think having the steam store is enough in many respects. But for me, the dream is being able to browse and install games from itch.io with the same convenience as steam itself. So there's at least notionally and unclaimed lane for providing that kind of experience. It's the only available Lane that I can think of for out-Steaming Steam.
    - hiccuphippo 6mo ago
      Does Itch have a CLI for installing the games? From Heroic's FAQ, that's the first step for adding support to the store. https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher/issues/4605 https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher... Not exactly first class, but one step away.
brendoelfrendo 6mo ago
> 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.
- tayo42 6mo ago
  Why did they need to make a store? Seems like there was no need for it...
  - saalweachter 6mo ago
    Maybe they saw the 30% cut Apple and Google were taking on their app stores and wanted in on the action?
  - brendoelfrendo 6mo ago
    Why does anyone need to make a store? Walmart and Target both exist. Generally, consumer choice and industry competition are considered good things that drive innovation and the nicer experiences we're talking about.
    - kgwgk 6mo ago
Hamuko 6mo ago
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.
- tcmart14 6mo ago
  And lets not forget Tim Sweeney's dishonest representation. Sure, Steam can take a 30% cut, but they also offer a lot of avenues to avoid that. With Steam, a publisher can get a ton of activation codes and sell those activation codes on their site and not get hit with the 30% cut. No fee on in-game transactions, and as you build a user base for your games, Steam also lowers the 30%.
keyringlight 6mo ago
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.
- surgical_fire 6mo ago
  They could totally carve their niche if they focused in making their store better. 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).
  - keyringlight 6mo ago
    IIRC GoG has a pretty poor history in actually turning a profit with the exception of when CD Projekt release on of their own games, and even then they do the vast majority of their business on steam or the console stores. If GoG was a decent money-spinner then CP projekt wouldn't have split if off. Even a niche has a cost to operate, and that's with GoG being a pretty plain service on top of game downloads.
    - chupasaurus 6mo ago
      GOG was bought out by the founder precisely because it became a decent money-shredder after CD Projekts were merged.
  - jamesfinlayson 6mo ago
    Yeah GOG for me fills a niche - old/classic games with no DRM. I realise that I can get them mostly from Steam but I support GOG and their goals.
tcmart14 6mo ago
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.
- 9x39 6mo ago
  It does use Chromium. Any web browser can seem slow vs a native app, though.
ericd 6mo ago
I think you’re massively underestimating the network effects in play. Steam has an enormous moat.
mort96 6mo ago
> 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.
- zem 6mo ago
  agreed, the epic games store is crappy enough that i will not use it even for free and/or exclusive games. I might have if it was marketed as a clean, unobtrusive experience, but we all know that will never happen.
- TulliusCicero 6mo ago
  It's both things, really. 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.
- Aeolun 6mo ago
  If Steam was run by EA I’d abandon it in a second though. All those games that are left behind aren’t super relevant since I already barely play them.
- wongarsu 6mo ago
  Another big thing is trust. With any of these digital markets I'm not truly buying games, I'm purchasing a revocable license. That requires a certain amount of trust that the platform isn't going to screw me over. 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."
johnnyanmac 6mo ago
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.
- Ethee 6mo ago
  I don't disagree with what you're saying. But for technical platforms it needs to be a combination of both. Discord is the perfect example of this, plenty of people I know of were completely fine with their Mumble/Teamspeak/Ventrilo setups, and in a lot of cases some of those were better than what Discord was offering for individual features, but the overall feature set and platform ease-of-use that Discord was offering drew in a large initial user base which then created the network effect you describe. A lot of my friends feel 'locked in' to Discord now and with their age verification roll out fiasco a lot of people want to leave, but there isn't a single offering that matches Discord's platform features and integrations. There definitely needs to be an incentive to leave sometimes and break away from that network effect, but if there's no actual competition then obviously yeah you're always going to be stuck.
motbus3 6mo ago
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?
Morromist 6mo ago
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.
TitaRusell 6mo ago
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.
- drnick1 6mo ago
  I don't care about my Steam profile. I do care about the convenience of having all games in a single "launcher" and seamless Linux compatibility through Proton.
ikiris 6mo ago
The main feature they don't want to add is making it easy to tell when games are crap by user reviews
- TitaRusell 6mo ago
  I bought a game on Epic once but I ran into some problems. Epic doesn't have a community so I had to ask for help on the Steam forums.. Can't escape the feeling that Epic just want to sell games without engaging with their customers much.
llyama 6mo ago
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!
- antonhand 6mo ago
  That isn't true though. The only restriction is if the thing you're selling on that other store is Steam Keys themselves.
- imtringued 6mo ago
  Are you seriously blaming Steam for game developers setting the price of their games the same on all platforms? They're the ones pocketing that 18% difference by the way and that 18% difference is literally the selling point that is supposed to lure in game developers to the epic games store. There has never been a promise of cheaper games. 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.
  - llyama 6mo ago
    The problem is the Steam Distribution Agreement isn't public so I don't have a way to prove if this is true or false. At the same time there are articles like this https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2g1md0l23o 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 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.
pjerem 6mo ago
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.
GreenVulpine 6mo ago
Last I checked the Epic Games Store doesn't even support Linux - the new gaming frontier.

by Ethee 6mo ago

yoyohello13 6mo ago

> Just make it a nice experience. Haven’t you been paying attention? That’s not how we do things in business anymore…

red-iron-pine 6mo ago
only if you're publicly traded
lacy_tinpot 6mo ago
It's truly incredible how difficult business people make doing business. 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.
- joe_mamba 6mo ago
  >It's truly incredible how difficult business people make doing business. And they're the ones making the most money and avoiding the layoffs.
malfist 6mo ago
Well, we might make it a nice experience until we've attracted enough of you people to have a network affect. And then it's a steady march of price increases, additional revenue streams (including selling your data!) and reduction in features because they were "too expensive to maintain"
uyzstvqs 6mo ago
Steam does. That's why they're the undefeated king. 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.
- troosevelt 6mo ago
  Steam has a lot of issues but there are too just lots of areas where better products don't win out over inferior products, that's just not how the world works for lots of reasons.
  - storus 6mo ago
    Updating games on HDDs on Steam takes ages; I often see the download complete but then wait another 30 minutes for their diff to complete; and that happens with 10-20 games every week when they have big updates (10GB+). Just for this one thing I would switch elsewhere.
- jrozner 6mo ago
  People hated steam when it launched but you needed it to play CS 1.6. It made installing mods easier. Then HL2 released, orange box, and they were able to get a critical mass as they provided platforms support for other games. Steam got better. It’s still not great but they have so much market share that basically any PC gamer already has it. Epic wants some of that money. The problem is nobody wants to install another store and they aren’t doing anything to improve gamer’s experience other than giving away games and having some exclusives. They’ll never hit the critical mass needed that way.
  - pas 6mo ago
    it was pretty meh back then, so people had pretty understandable reasons. it made LAN parties harder for example :) 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.
DANmode 6mo ago
Not with that attitude! Demanding it is how Steam came about!

zer00eyz 6mo ago

The irony here should be lost on no one. The the lawsuit with apple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._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/fortnite-video-game-maker-epic-games-pay-more-half-billion-dollars-over-ftc-allegations 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.

slumberlust 6mo ago
I think sweeny is an awful person overall. The lawsuit against apple and google is a net positive for consumers though. Having someone as big as Epic stand up to these digital silos is a good thing.
- zer00eyz 6mo ago
  Assume for one moment that they were all great people over there. 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.
- johnnyanmac 6mo ago
  I think he's still at heart a developer. That's why all his initiatives that aren't Fortnite are so developer friendly. 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.

glenstein 6mo ago

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.

bigfishrunning 6mo ago
My guess is it doesn't go well -- with Gamepass they've taught Xbox gamers not to buy games, and with Steam integration they've given Xbox gamers a competing place to buy games (where Microsoft will pay a percentage to steam!) It'll probably turn a division of Microsoft that usually loses money into one that loses...more money.
hiccuphippo 6mo ago
I can run Epic and GoG games in Steamdeck. All Steam had to do is not block them.
- glenstein 6mo ago
  Right and itch.io and much besides. However, these integrations are janky and not built in as first class console experiences. Not that they need to be necessarily, I think having the steam store is enough in many respects. But for me, the dream is being able to browse and install games from itch.io with the same convenience as steam itself. So there's at least notionally and unclaimed lane for providing that kind of experience. It's the only available Lane that I can think of for out-Steaming Steam.
  - hiccuphippo 6mo ago
    Does Itch have a CLI for installing the games? From Heroic's FAQ, that's the first step for adding support to the store. https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher/issues/4605 https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher... Not exactly first class, but one step away.

brendoelfrendo 6mo ago

> 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.

tayo42 6mo ago
Why did they need to make a store? Seems like there was no need for it...
- saalweachter 6mo ago
  Maybe they saw the 30% cut Apple and Google were taking on their app stores and wanted in on the action?
- brendoelfrendo 6mo ago
  Why does anyone need to make a store? Walmart and Target both exist. Generally, consumer choice and industry competition are considered good things that drive innovation and the nicer experiences we're talking about.
  - kgwgk 6mo ago

Hamuko 6mo ago

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.

tcmart14 6mo ago
And lets not forget Tim Sweeney's dishonest representation. Sure, Steam can take a 30% cut, but they also offer a lot of avenues to avoid that. With Steam, a publisher can get a ton of activation codes and sell those activation codes on their site and not get hit with the 30% cut. No fee on in-game transactions, and as you build a user base for your games, Steam also lowers the 30%.

keyringlight 6mo ago

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.

surgical_fire 6mo ago
They could totally carve their niche if they focused in making their store better. 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).
- keyringlight 6mo ago
  IIRC GoG has a pretty poor history in actually turning a profit with the exception of when CD Projekt release on of their own games, and even then they do the vast majority of their business on steam or the console stores. If GoG was a decent money-spinner then CP projekt wouldn't have split if off. Even a niche has a cost to operate, and that's with GoG being a pretty plain service on top of game downloads.
  - chupasaurus 6mo ago
    GOG was bought out by the founder precisely because it became a decent money-shredder after CD Projekts were merged.
- jamesfinlayson 6mo ago
  Yeah GOG for me fills a niche - old/classic games with no DRM. I realise that I can get them mostly from Steam but I support GOG and their goals.

tcmart14 6mo ago

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.

9x39 6mo ago
It does use Chromium. Any web browser can seem slow vs a native app, though.

ericd 6mo ago

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

mort96 6mo ago

> 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.

zem 6mo ago
agreed, the epic games store is crappy enough that i will not use it even for free and/or exclusive games. I might have if it was marketed as a clean, unobtrusive experience, but we all know that will never happen.
TulliusCicero 6mo ago
It's both things, really. 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.
Aeolun 6mo ago
If Steam was run by EA I’d abandon it in a second though. All those games that are left behind aren’t super relevant since I already barely play them.
wongarsu 6mo ago
Another big thing is trust. With any of these digital markets I'm not truly buying games, I'm purchasing a revocable license. That requires a certain amount of trust that the platform isn't going to screw me over. 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."

johnnyanmac 6mo ago

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.

Ethee 6mo ago
I don't disagree with what you're saying. But for technical platforms it needs to be a combination of both. Discord is the perfect example of this, plenty of people I know of were completely fine with their Mumble/Teamspeak/Ventrilo setups, and in a lot of cases some of those were better than what Discord was offering for individual features, but the overall feature set and platform ease-of-use that Discord was offering drew in a large initial user base which then created the network effect you describe. A lot of my friends feel 'locked in' to Discord now and with their age verification roll out fiasco a lot of people want to leave, but there isn't a single offering that matches Discord's platform features and integrations. There definitely needs to be an incentive to leave sometimes and break away from that network effect, but if there's no actual competition then obviously yeah you're always going to be stuck.

motbus3 6mo ago

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?

Morromist 6mo ago

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.

TitaRusell 6mo ago

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.

drnick1 6mo ago
I don't care about my Steam profile. I do care about the convenience of having all games in a single "launcher" and seamless Linux compatibility through Proton.

ikiris 6mo ago

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

TitaRusell 6mo ago
I bought a game on Epic once but I ran into some problems. Epic doesn't have a community so I had to ask for help on the Steam forums.. Can't escape the feeling that Epic just want to sell games without engaging with their customers much.

llyama 6mo ago

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!

antonhand 6mo ago
That isn't true though. The only restriction is if the thing you're selling on that other store is Steam Keys themselves.
imtringued 6mo ago
Are you seriously blaming Steam for game developers setting the price of their games the same on all platforms? They're the ones pocketing that 18% difference by the way and that 18% difference is literally the selling point that is supposed to lure in game developers to the epic games store. There has never been a promise of cheaper games. 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.
- llyama 6mo ago
  The problem is the Steam Distribution Agreement isn't public so I don't have a way to prove if this is true or false. At the same time there are articles like this https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2g1md0l23o 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 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.

pjerem 6mo ago

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.

GreenVulpine 6mo ago

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