this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2025
84 points (76.6% liked)
PC Gaming
9499 readers
759 users here now
For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki
Rules:
- Be Respectful.
- No Spam or Porn.
- No Advertising.
- No Memes.
- No Tech Support.
- No questions about buying/building computers.
- No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
- No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
- No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
- Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates. (Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources. If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Okay, but any significant plans to make the launcher or store itself worth using?
I think the vast majority of users only use launchers to launch games. For that purpose, it does that perfectly fine. I suspect that even if Epic invested billions into bringing their store up to feature parity with Steam, users still wouldn’t switch. They’d need to be leaps and bounds better, and that’s hard to comprehend in terms of features and cost. I think they’re making the smart move sticking to their wheelhouse.
Hard disagree on every point. Majority of their "user base" just get the free games but spend the money on steam or gog. That will never change unless the store itself becomes worth spending money on.
Let’s remember they are already the second largest games store. Okay, let’s assume they try to compete with Steam on features. What do you think it would take to get users to switch?
A few that come to mind
And you think Epic implementing some or all of these would encourage Steam users to switch? Why would they? Steam already offers all of that.
I'm saying that if they want to compete with another company they need a compelling offer, one that at least has feature parity on the big ticket items. Yes, you would then need to work to attract people, but a bare bones store front like they have is a huge roadblock. People feeling like making the switch means they lose things is not a way to encourage adoption.
I don't think feature parity would entice anyone across. It would need to be much better than Steam to entice migration, and it's hard to conceive how much work and money that would require.
I agree, is why I said at least. That matches the current offering people are already embedded in. Now you need to entice. I think the biggest issue they face is how much history people have with that platform, there already so bought in. Literally. With tons of games, friends, and achievements already there, it would take a ton for most people to just walk away from that.
When the majority of "user base" is there for free games then being second largest store doesn't mean anything. They already said they are operating on a loss so that further invalidates it.
That said, the last time I used their launcher was a couple years ago when I was still using windows so these points are based solely on my experience back then. They didn't even have chat option or removed at some point so there was no way to directly message or call a friend from the launcher which means I couldn't even ask if anyone wanna play. Library GUI was shit, missing so many filter and highlight features of steam. No user review and no I don't consider the so called game journalist reviews as actual reviews. The store suggestions was also very lacking compared to what steam offers. No workshop support like steam, no community pages, guides etc. Regional pricing was same as steam but they offer more cut to the devs which is nice but I as an user get insanely low value buying on epic than steam. The entire launcher experience was nothing but annoying at every point when Steam is at least usable and had a lot of features that makes it worth using despite all their issues. All this time, they focused on getting exclusives and developers but didn't give 2 fucks about user experience so let's see them fix that. Although I vehemently hate epic for a lot of things so I don't see myself ever buying from them but I don't see how an average user would care about any of that.