The other platforms on PC, for example Steam, itch, gog, all do better things.

Itch really supports game jams, which in turn supports smaller devs and puts out a lot of unique stuff, much of which is free. They also allow devs to choose what percent itch gets with even zero as an option.

Valve is a massive contributor to open source projects and the game dev community. They have contributed a ton to SDL which is used to make many games and engines, and Proton is rocketing wine development forward. Steam also allows adding non-Steam games and even lets you run them with Proton just as easily as Steam native games.

GoG is DRM free, enough said. That in and of itself is one of the most pro consumer stances.

The only plus for Epic is they give out free games, no other redeeming qualities or features.

Don’t forget the beauty of PC is that it’s an open platform, and Epic does nothing to support that.

Sweeney (the CEO of Epic) says that he wants competition with Steam, but many of his actions point toward that he really just wants to be the guy at the top (ie, he wants to be the monopoly instead of Valve). He’s taken a fair number of anti-consumerist stances, which vary from understandable to clearly anti-competitive.

Epic is known for making exclusivity deals with 3rd party studios in which Epic bribes the studio with money, and in exchange, the studio does not release their game on Steam for 1 year.

At several points, this occurred after a studio already said that they will release on Steam, and the studio would have to walk back and delete their Steam listing.

Iirc, at one point Epic bought out a studio and had them remove the Steam listing for an already-released game, causing the game to be unplayable for people who had already bought the game

Edit: this apparently happened twice (Unreal Tournament and Rocket League), but it appears that the games still work for the people who bought it. I think the concern was actually that Steam players would lose functionality due to not being supported anymore after the unlisting

The Epic Game Store released in a non-functional state, and development on it is extremely slow. The first impression of the broken store likely still influences many people’s impression of the store. But it’s still missing many features that many gamers want to see in a store.

There were various rumors when the store first launched that it contained spyware. My understanding is that those rumors never fully got disproven, especially since some of the claims were supported by at least some evidence

Epic does not support Linux, and Sweeney has openly said that he does not plan to support Linux until it becomes more popular. He did immediately jump on board with supporting Arm though, which caused a lot of Linux gamers to think that he just doesn’t want to support Linux

Sweeney is a pretty abrasive person and iirc he made a lot of concerning statements on his social media. Several of them (as mentioned above) indicate that he wants to dethrone Valve so that he can be the monopoly instead

Overall, many gamers are in support of more competition in the game store space. Unfortunately, many gamers also think that Epic is an untrustworthy competitor, and they believe that Epic has a serious chance of making the gaming industry worse if they become more popular. As a result, many would prefer for Steam remain the monopoly rather than to take a bet on Epic.

It’s been I think about 7 years and it’s not feature competitive for end users with 2011 Steam even though they definitely make more money than 2004-2011 Valve and by 2018 had 14 years of history to look at and feature target based off what competition offered

The CEO was regularly on Twitter complaining about Windows but refused to help grow Linux adoption. Valve has been doing that since like 2012. He constantly talks about standing with small developers but then in the Apple court case admits they would have been quiet if Apple gave them a special revenue split deal. He complains about Steam and mobile store cuts but doesn’t complain about consoles having the same.

Exclusive deals in lieu of providing a better experience for the end user. Talked up so much about being superior because they’re developer focused; didn’t have self publishing tools until the end of 2023 - 5 years after EGS launched. It’s been 7 years. They haven’t made PC gaming any better. They made it worse for a time when they were throwing cash at exclusives rather than store platform feature development

Recent example of how bad they are with pushing minimal viable products. EGS mobile store was launched the beginning of this year with no library view. You just scroll up and down, side to side looking for games you own mixed among games you don’t own. Their concept of minimal viable product is insanely mediocre for how vocal the CEO is and how much money they make and their turnaround time on improving these stores is awful.

There are numerous Android storefronts that don’t have Unreal Engine and Fortnite money keeping the companies funded and somehow Epic comes out the gate mediocre again where its marketing is free games but it’s mobile games so what’s available is way less headline worthy. They learned nothing from 2018 about the difference between what they consider a minimal viable product and what the market would consider a market competitive minimal viable product

Years ago Epic put out a kanban board to display a public feature development tracker to assure people they were working on improving the store. They abandoned that quick and I’m pretty sure what few they had on that, most still haven’t been implemented

Their support for handheld is at the level of GOG which barely markets itself and is pretty low revenue as it rarely gets any games that aren’t years old. Whether Windows or Linux, Epic for all their billions haven’t created a gamepad/TV centric interface. EGS is about at the level of GOG Galaxy which because of its DRM free policy will probably never be a big money maker. That’s just insane to me how badly managed EGS is to have so much more money backing it and so little to show for it in the product

The CEO is a regular blowhard virtue signalling about liberty/freedom on Twitter but can’t be bothered to try and pioneer anything for users as a storefront. Since 2018 EGS has been so stagnant while Valve has been expanding Steam as a platform, that EGS is less relevant to me today than when they were throwing out major free games every month. I have no faith in the platform to integrate WINE/Proton, put together a TV/gamepad interface, do something like Steam curators, comparable user review system, crowd sourced game tags - a lot of useless stuff makes it in those but I find them regularly useful at a glance as it’s usually pretty obvious which are probably jokes and which are probably legit, user gamepad mapping repository, I’ve used the guides before. Steam forums are not a place to browse, they’re a place to find when you Google a question and the answer is in a Steam forum thread Google/other shows you

I’d be happy with a suitable competitor. It’s just EGS has been terrible at it. I was sad that GameStop did nothing with Impulse. I had higher expectations for EA Origin. Ubisoft/UPlay was always garbage from day one AC2 always online DRM nonsense. I was hyped on GFWL before I learned they were charging for online multiplayer until that failed, also the install limits GFWL had where you had to call support when you reinstalled the game too many times. I was even excited for Windows 8 store until it was eating up peoples storage only reclaimable with a reformat of the drive

Only GOG exists with a unique selling point, DRM free. Every other competitor has existed just to try and have exclusives to make more money rather than try to attract users with a good service. In the end it turns out there’s so many solid to great games released every year that exclusives aren’t such a great point anymore. There’s not enough of them and exclusives not varied enough to make a storefront platform better than the total Steam package

Big issue for me is the direction towards incentivised exclusivity. I can tolerate it on consoles (barely nowdays) because you’re paying someone to use your hardware instead of another, and you have to specifically develop for console hardware. That takes time and effort.

Different distribution platforms do not have such issues, and I don’t want exclusivity anywhere near PC gaming, unless you’re self publishing. Frankly if they weren’t banging on about steam using the industry standard % take, while they themselves are trying to undercut and use garbage tactics, I would have absolutely no problem with them, same as Ubisoft and EA’s garbage store.

Epic makes their money off microtransaction stores and they bought exclusive rights to a bunch of titles a while back, meaning you could ONLY play them on Epic.

There are worse companies, though.

I hate it because it’s like they’re trying their hardest to make a shitty storefront.

It’s awful.

I get almost none of the information I need when on a game’s store page. Meanwhile, I get all the info I need and then some on the same game’s Steam page.

It’s like they don’t want to sell their product.

I do definitely appreciate the weekly free games. Sometimes, like this week, they have solid offerings. It’s Dead Island 2 this week, btw.

I don’t like the Epic Game Store because Epic has turned it’s back on Linux. Their client doesn’t run on Linux which is where I do all my gaming. I also recognize the economic fuckery they’re doing to gain popularity. They’re spending their Fortnite war chest money on subsidizing games to give them away for the purpose of monopolizing their game store. It’s not fair for other game stores like GOG who can’t just buy game licenses for everyone to become popular.

I hate console gamers as they’ve perverted the FPS genre.

another player to try an compete with Steam

Here is the mistake. It does not trying to compete. It only tries to catch as many fish in its bucket as possible, while leveraging (burning) Fortnite money.

It’s a wasted effort, and it will never come close to Steam like this. It may even die along with Fortnite, or degrade further.

Imma try to add something that hasn’t been mentioned in the top comments.

Epic’s refund policy is shit, comparable to nintendo. I buy a game, it doesn’t work, I don’t want to waste my time trying to figure out why, so I ask for refund, Epic said no. I’ve never had this problem at a physical retailer, and I’ve never had this problem with Steam.

Here are my reasons:

• no Linux support - Heroic works, why doesn’t Epic do what GOG do and revenue share w/ Heroic?
• exclusivity deals, which reduces options outside of EGS
• Epic’s anticheat works on Linux, but their own games that use it don’t, that’s a pretty big slap in the face

I certainly want more competition to Steam, but that competition needs to do something other than exist for me to use it. GOG is that, and if they properly supported Linux, they’d get most of my gaming money. But they don’t, so they only get some of it.

Yeah, this probably reads like a Linux fanboy post or something, but I’ve been using Linux longer than Steam supported it with its client, and I’ll still be here if Steam leaves. It’s my platform of choice, and a vendor needs to meet me here if they want my business. Valve did, so they get my money. I honestly don’t need much, I just need games to work properly on my system.

Competition is good, yes and no.

Exclusivity is not competition, it’s lock in for me. So epic should get it’s head out of its ass and offer games on both platforms equally. THAT is competition.

I am not a fan of steam. Not a fan of having a library that could change at anytime at anyone’s whim but mine. So I prefer gog (yes I know some titles are drm free on steam and it’s not perfect on gog either / this is just for context).

Anyhow steam is well established and forcing me to use your store and launcher will just lead to me ignoring you (doing that for origin, uplay, epic) because it’s a luxury problem.

Same with all that streaming shit. Also there are other ways if you piss off people a lot, yarr!

The companies forget who made them big. And for epic I count myself in on that massively, still owning game boxes of e.g. Xargon (look it up, and my EU? box is not to be found on ebay) and equally for EA.

And I will not stand for anti consumer behaviors. Got enough money to spend at my age but theyre not getting it like this.

Epic doesn’t support my operating system.

It’s very simple, valve is a gamer company. Epic is a money company. Every single thing each respective company does shows that. I’m not a bitch, I’m never going to let those Epic cunts have a penny of my money. Fucking with the games industry, fucking with gamers, locking exclusives, it’s all bullshit & they can suck my cock

It’s a bad experience overall

The UI was super buggy for me

I want all my games on Steam and to not have to install multiple apps

First, the EGS software is really bad. It’s slow, clunky, a pain to navigate, and is missing loads of basic features that Steam has had for decades.

Second, rather than improving their offering to make it more competitive and appealing to consumers, they’ve utilized coercive tactics like exclusivity to force adoption rather than earning it on merits.