[Ethee]

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.

[mort96]

> 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.

[wongarsu]

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."

[rubslopes]

I agree. No company is perfect, but if someone asked me to name the most consumer-friendly large tech company, I'd say Valve. And honestly, I can't think of a second one.

[tharkun__]

The big "test" there for Steam will be when "Gabe goes away". It's gonna happen sooner or later.

[bigstrat2003]

I'm normally firmly against piracy, because I believe it to be morally equivalent to theft and I want to fund the artists making stuff I enjoy. But if Valve shreds my purchases when Gabe dies or retires, I will hoist the black flag on those games and not feel an ounce of guilt. As the saying says: if buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.

But we'll see. I hope it doesn't come to that. That said, I'm trying to change my purchase habits over to GOG because even if Gabe's successor doesn't screw over the Steam customers, eventually someone will. With GOG there's no possibility of the games I pay for being taken away from me.

[georgeecollins]

They have shown its a wildly successful model. They would be very crazy if they changed it, and it would make them vulnerable to Epic and the Windows store. It's more likely that your OS/ hardware will change in a way that isn't supported by an old game.

[endominus]

Unfortunately, "this is a wildly successful model that prints money for us with almost no upkeep required" has historically not been a bulletproof argument when new management comes in and wants to prove themselves. Human beings are not necessarily rational and the kinds of people that tend to rise to the top of large corporations don't necessarily have the best interests of customers or the business itself in mind.

That being said, I believe that Gabe is taking his "succession planning" seriously, so I'd be fairly optimistic for the next decade at least.

[xdertz]

One thing to keep in mind is that Valve is fully private so Gabe can not just be replaced by some random person by a board of directors like in other companies.

He probably already has a will set up that details how ownership should be transferred.

[taude]

Isn't Epic private?

[mort96]

It is, but I'm not sure why that's relevant? xdertz's point wasn't, "Valve is private and therefore it engages in ethical consumer practices"; the point was "Valve engages in relatively ethical practices and because it's private, the board can't replace Gabe with a CEO who would engage in more unethical practices".

[stock_toaster]

Not sure if this is relevant, but I have read reports[1] that Tencent currently holds a 28% stake in Epic Games. So private, but with unknown levels of ownership.

[1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/trump-adm...

[jamesfinlayson]

I thought he was already effectively retired. Not sure who's running the show now but the COO Scott has been there 20+ years I think.

[Ferret7446]

I hate to break it to you, you're never buying any games, only licenses. If you don't like that, get copyright law abolished.

Even if you "buy" a physical "game", you are just buying a license.

[croon]

I've rebought games on Steam I had on Epic for free, just because the platform is so terrible. As far as a metric goes, that's pretty clear.

It's definitely not about lock-in for me. It's everything from local streaming, to linux support, to cloud saving working properly, to 100s of other things that become apparent if you try to do anything other than launch a game in a bog standard way on a windows machine.

[Sander_Marechal]

Same. Sometimes I will play a givewayway game on EGS and like it enough to e.g. buy the DLC. In that case I'll buy the game on Steam, just to buy the DLC there too.

[happymellon]

Doing Big Picture Mode well is another.

Epic have had decades to get any one of these right, and yet they refuse to meet us even half way on a single point.

[Jare]

I have the EGS with games on it me and my kids actively play. I don't resent EGS for exclusivity deals nor hold any other kind of grudge towards them. If a game I want comes out first on EGS, I'll buy it on EGS. I don't actively play with friends, so who is or is not on EGS to play with is barely a factor on my radar.

I still prefer to buy on Steam if I can, because using the EGS sucks in every way possible compared to using Steam. If I want to sit to rest I can do it on a cold and irregular rock, but if there's a bench right next to it, then I'll use the bench.

That said, you can do a lot worse than EGS. MS Store I'm looking at you. In the above metaphor, you'd like sitting on the wet and muddy ground.

[Aeolun]

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.

[cybwraith]

The big one for me is linux support, followed by steam input remapping. Input remapping, turbo, combo / chord buttons is incredibly important for accessibility.

[zem]

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.

[dpatterbee]

It makes sense that those with huge libraries may never want to move. But there are many existing and future PC gamers who do not have particularly large libraries on Steam, who would likely be much easier to lure if Epic actually made their launcher worth it.

[codebje]

You don't need to move stores, though, do you? Want to play a Steam exclusive? Fine, launch Steam. Want to play an Epic exclusive? Fine, launch Epic.

What you do need is to avoid tying your game socialisation to a _store_. Some day, Steam will be enshittified too.

[ryandrake]

But I don't want all these app stores!!

The ideal number of app stores I want installed on my computer is ZERO. I don't want to have to load a damn "store" just to obtain and run your game. I am willing to angrily live with ONE store on my computer, Steam, but no way in hell am I going to tolerate having to have an Epic Store and a Microsoft Store and an Activision Store and a goddamn Rockstar Store and an Ubi Store and a fucking Adobe store for Photoshop. I don't want to have to install store after store for each damn app developer on my computer, yet that's the way the industry seems to be headed.

[imtringued]

I don't know why "zero" is ideal. That means going back to the old days where every single company would need their own launcher.

Having a separate company focus on distribution sounds more ideal.

Epic Games had an opportunity here to erode the app store margins through standardization, instead, they've become a copycat of what they resented with a slightly smaller cut.

[phil21]

Why would games need their own launcher?

Just install the damn game, ask if you want icons on the desktop as well as in the start menu.

OS handles it all for you.

Perhaps some multiplayer functionality and such makes sense to share cross-game, but I miss the bad old days of every game having a bunch of privately maintained servers and its own server browser list etc. You could eventually find a few servers that fit your playstyle and make online gamer friends that way.

The only benefit steam brings to the table as far as I can tell is making it easy to reinstall your library on a fresh PC.

[ryandrake]

Yea, that's another way games are terrible today. I don't want a launcher for my game. My OS is my launcher. I don't want a launcher, I don't want a store, I don't want a "helper," I don't want a tray icon, I don't want an updater. Why can't game companies just ship their game and that's it?

[LtdJorge]

A very bad copycat

[mort96]

I mostly play games on a computer in my living room. It boots into Steam Big Picture, which I use to launch a game (or sometimes buy new games) using an xbox controller.

[happymellon]

And yet Epic is shitty today.

[TulliusCicero]

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.

[yoyohello13]

> Just make it a nice experience.

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

[lacy_tinpot]

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]

>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]

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]

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.

[jrozner]

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.

[ryandrake]

I still don't like Steam. I resent that I have to have this "Store" middle man on my computer just to have access to games. I want to pay a company for their product on their web site, download the installer, and install it on my operating system directly. I don't want this other layer that I'm dependent on, who could switch off my access to the things I "bought" whenever they want.

[Jensson]

Steam has multiplayer integration so you don't have to connect by IP to play indie games, that is massive. So many people either don't have access to their router or don't have the skills to configure it to play multiplayer without steam without having a server middleman which most indie games wont have.

Then steam reviews are the most accurate reviews there are for how likely you are to be happy with the purchase. I am much more hesitant to spend money on a game where I can't see the steam reviews for, so there is basically no way I'll buy a game on epic store that doesn't exist on steam since I am basically buying it blind.

[com2kid]

With gaming on Linux, steam fixes so many middle issues. I can download a game and it just works through some combination of WINE and voodoo magic.

And all game controller even works!

Steam is a serious value add on Linux.

[Ekaros]

Looking at what many of your games do I think it is better option. I have zero doubt that there wouldn't be countless downloaders and accounts and poorly written startup menus for each game and each publisher both big and small.

Simply getting installer would not be option for most games.

[graynk]

GOG/Humble Store/Itch is for you then.

With the added downside of less choice and/or delayed releases

[wredcoll]

I mean, steam does install the game and you can run the executable, but yes, there is a level of trust that it won't delete the game or some such.

[jamesfinlayson]

I vaguely recall Half-Life 2's launch being pretty problematic.

I started using Steam in 2007 and it was fine. In 2006 there was still some residual animosity towards it but I think the tide had well and truly turned since the early days (and I think there were a handful of third party games on it by then too which I guess was something of a vote of confidence - a few were Source engine titles so they may have got a discount or kick-back from Valve, but not all were).

[ChoGGi]

> People hated steam when it launched but you needed it to play CS 1.6.

I thought CSS was the first release on steam beta? I remember playing the crap out of it, then the actual steam release happened, and it somehow turned into a laggy buggy hunk of crap for months.

[rounce]

No, it was 1.6 that was on the Steam beta. That was years before HL2 and CS:S were even leaked let alone released.

[jamesfinlayson]

Not sure of the exact history but pretty sure Steam was launched as a beta in 2002, or maybe 2003. In September 2003 or so the database was wiped and Steam was launched, again with probably only Counter-Strike available.

Counter-Strike Source was launched some time in 2004 and then Half-Life 2 came along in November 2004.

[Sleaker]

Steam dropped basically alongside team fortress.

[wredcoll]

I mean, people really didn't hate it. There was some grumbling about digital and not having a cd, but by and large people liked it as soon as they had broadband.

[pas]

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.

[pjmlp]

Indeed people behave as if Gabe would live forever, or Valve's management will always take the perfect decisions.

Eventually like it comes to all of us, there will be time to a new generation of game stores, or gaming devices.

[happymellon]

But it won't be Epic unless they change their attitude.

[troosevelt]

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]

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.

[laughing_man]

That's what's happening to Windows as we speak.

[johnnyanmac]

Steam was first to market and it took forever for competitors to form.

It being a good service is secondary.

[usrusr]

If Valve started to routinely do Bad Things on Steam they'd be gone pretty quickly. Many would go to GoG, some just stop buying games. Bad Things do occasionally happen (bad things like those "oops, we don't actually have licenses for the music used in the game you bought" revokes), but Valve keeps succeeding in keeping it to a rather low background noise level. Competitors have two decades of being that good or better to catch up. You can't buy trust, you can just put money into not losing any of the trust that grew over time. When competitors have done that for two decades, Valve, unless they fail in the meantime, will have even more.

[johnnyanmac]

I heard the same thing for Discord last month, and reddit and Twitter a few years back. It kind of worked for Twitter due to be outstandiningly bad, but it still didn't "kill" Twitter in the colloquial sense.

I don't see it going down any differently with Steam. It may take a dent and open up a competitor, but it won't do a move so catastrophic that it losses its leader status from that alone.

[usrusr]

Which of them are privately owned? In a publicly traded company, there's an inherent logic that people who believe that the company can get by with squeezing customers a little harder will end up with higher projections than those who think it's better to get by with a moderate approach. Price goes up with the bids from the squeezers and occasionally a moderate will sell until eventually the squeezers own an identity-defining fraction. Valve only is what it is because of the ownership structure, its closeness to being bootstrapped (I assume that in reality ownership is a little more complicated, but close enough)

We could also call those squeezers "optimists", and publicly traded implies ownership by the most optimistic (well, the most optimistic who have money to invest). Leading to behavior patterns that could be described as suicidally chasing the most unrealistic money making projections. (and founder majority stakes are surprisingly susceptible to falling in line with those optimists, because those owners still don't want to see their valuation going down, doubly so of they ever started borrowing against their stakes)

[Jensson]

"pretty quickly" is a few years, not one month. Chrome dominated the browser market pretty quickly even though the richer bigger company microsoft already had most of the browser marketshare, and that was 3 years. Before those 3 years it seemed like nobody would be able to make a dent in microsofts monopoly, and then it was gone in just 3 years.

If steams fumbles as hard as microsoft did with internet explorer they too could be mostly gone in 3 years, replaced by a giant competitors product.

[gverrilla]

> 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.

In what role-playing game?

[DANmode]

Not with that attitude!

Demanding it is how Steam came about!

[red-iron-pine]

only if you're publicly traded

[brendoelfrendo]

> 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.

[vablings]

15 years is not some insane gap that you can't get around. The biggest issue is that the EGS is just an inferior experience compared to steam, that's simply it.

If Epic games really wanted to start eating away at steams market share, they would do one thing. Make EGS not shitty for the user

[johnnyanmac]

15 years is a humongous gap. Almost an entire generation. Do you expect to make a Facebook killer in 2022? A WOW killer in 2017? Make a DOTA killer right now?

There's so many people who aren't even your market, they are an "one game player". You can't target that realistically unless that one game shits the bed.

[bentcorner]

Tik Tok is arguably a Facebook killer.

Roblox is in some ways there, I think Epic thought fortnite could have competed. IMO they made a strategic mistake in shackling their game-as-a-platform to Fortnite. I thought the music fortnite thing looked interesting, but I have negative interest in installing Fortnite.

Call it something else and make it literally the first thing you see on epicgames.com, have it work on mobile, and maybe things would be different today.

(Aside: Roblox wins because I can go from typing in roblox.com into my browser and be playing a game with a friend in under 20s)

[vablings]

Instagram was a Facebook killer until Facebook bought it.

Snapchat was a Facebook killer until Facebook bought a VPN service and tracked every user without consent then stole half its features

I guess you could say LoL is a DOTA killer since its significantly more popular now, although some of that is likely to do with the Russian/Ukraine war

Giving actual compelling reasons to get users on your platform is the only way and the best way and that isn't really a function of time. TeamSpeak, Ventrilo and Mumble got eaten up by Discord and also most game forums

One of the biggest issues with all these stores that are other than steam is that they suck in terms of UI/UX and they are HUGE resource hogs, I am more inclined to kill off the epic games launcher from running in the background because it taking up gigabytes of my system memory and that annoys me

[johnnyanmac]

Steams's UI is also meh and is also a resource hog. There's a good reason I don't keep any launcher running at startup.

>Giving actual compelling reasons to get users on your platform is the only way

And sometimes there is no compelling reason. People may only want 1 or 2 things and they bias towards what they are familiar with.i suspect that's why Twitter is still technically a market leader (despite falling apart behind the scenes).

I also think it's really funny that talk about offering a good platform then mention an example where the market leader just gobbles them up.

[tzs]

> 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?

I haven't play a PC game in a long time, so don't have any experience with the modern game stores and playing downloadable games.

I understand that these stores are more than just places to buy games--they also include extensive social media aspects.

But surely you don't have to give up one store if you make another account on another store? If you are on Steam and have a large friends list there and want to try a game that is only on some other PC game store couldn't you send a message to your Steam friends saying you are going to try that other game and asking if anyone else wants to come play with you?

If you meet people in that new game and want to be online friends, just point them to your Steam account and say that's your main gaming social media site, or point them to some non-gaming social media if you actively use any and they aren't also on Steam.

[toast0]

Freebies and discounts helps get people in the door. Having an experience that people don't hate might keep them there.

I don't buy a lot of games, but when I do, I don't usually look at Epic. I'd rather buy on GOG or Steam. Steam is probably from inertia, but if Epic provided a better than Steam experience on the games I've gotten for free, than I might consider it. I don't really know what would qualify as better than steam though... maybe faster startup, less dumb prompts?

I don't even consider buying games on the Microsoft store though, so Epic has a leg up --- if it's sale season, I will look to see if Epic has a bigger sale than Steam.

[IshKebab]

> Your experience can't just be nicer,

No but it has to be at least nicer and they didn't manage that.

[tayo42]

Why did they need to make a store? Seems like there was no need for it...

[brendoelfrendo]

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]

Interestingly both Walmart and Target opened in 1962. There were other stores by then, so I guess there was no need.

[saalweachter]

Maybe they saw the 30% cut Apple and Google were taking on their app stores and wanted in on the action?

[johnnyanmac]

The litigation angle to legitmatize a mobile storefront was smart. Having a company able to offer premium mobile games with a proven track record could have had it stand out from Steam, or at least open on an untapped market.

But it seems that gamble slowed as the economy did. Worse yet, China and Korea have gotten much more attractive to get people into their casinos. Competition is stiffer than ever.

[glenstein]

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.

[fcsp]

This being microsoft, my expectation UX wise is that similar to those Xbox ROG devices you'll have to drop to the windows desktop to install updates, and they'll probably also throw in some copilot to help you through the process. I don't think they have it in them to innovate here and make it pleasant in any meaningful way

[bigstrat2003]

Yeah, I agree. There are certainly engineers at Microsoft who are skilled/talented enough to do something cool. But it doesn't matter if the business people will just saddle them with bad requirements that drag the experience down.

[bigfishrunning]

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]

I can run Epic and GoG games in Steamdeck. All Steam had to do is not block them.

[glenstein]

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]

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...

Not exactly first class, but one step away.

[georgeecollins]

I think if it were a good plan Phil Spencer would still have a job.

[glenstein]

You're not wrong, at this hour success is as much about picking up the pieces from one of the singularly worst disasters of brand confusion we've ever seen. Even this attempted recovery is a bid to get into the lane now owned by Steam.

The SteamOS is capable of getting out of the way, which is something Microsoft is pathologically incapable of designing Windows to do. And these days I think Linux and the Linux desktop are just objectively better than Windows, and the days where Windows embodied what it meant to have when anything goes PC are long gone.

So you're left with limited options. I think a first class console experience for a wide range of storefronts is the best bet to out-steam Steam but it assumes a degree of execution capability that I don't trust Microsoft to have.

[tcmart14]

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]

It does use Chromium.

Any web browser can seem slow vs a native app, though.

[Morromist]

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.

[keyringlight]

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.

[hparadiz]

Epic games goes out of their way to be hostile to Linux users. I'm at the point where I just ignore windows only games. And I'm the exact type of person they'd want to convert cause I tell all my friends about my gaming experiences. They could even take proton and use it in their store.

[imtringued]

This is basically my opinion as well. There are enough games that run on Linux that I don't have time to play them all, so if the game is windows only I skip it.

The steam chat app is kind of terrible and there was a Linux UI bug that caused UI lag a few years ago. Epic Games just can't replicate the goodwill.

[surgical_fire]

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]

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]

GOG was bought out by the founder precisely because it became a decent money-shredder after CD Projekts were merged.

[jamesfinlayson]

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.

[zer00eyz]

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.

[butterlesstoast]

Anyone else find it interesting the massive set of fines financially lines up with their "Savings findings"?

> together with over $500 million of identified cost savings in contracting, marketing, and closing some open roles puts us in a more stable place.

[slumberlust]

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]

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]

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.

[pjerem]

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.

[Hamuko]

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]

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%.

[GreenVulpine]

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

[johnnyanmac]

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]

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]

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?

[ikiris]

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

[TitaRusell]

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.

[ericd]

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

[TitaRusell]

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]

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.

[llyama]

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]

That isn't true though. The only restriction is if the thing you're selling on that other store is Steam Keys themselves.

[imtringued]

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]

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 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.

If there was no evidence it would be thrown out. But until it concludes who knows what the truth is.