Explain to me like I'm 5: What is so bad aboutthe Epic Game Store?

I get that it isn't fully featured - neither was Steam or GOG when they first launched.

I understand that exclusives can be a pain in the ass for friends lists - but people are fine with any weirdness resulting from Humble or Twitich Prime codes.

Do people really hate the idea of multiple launchers on there PC that much? - I'm not a PC player I have Steam and GOG on my laptop but I next to never play anything on it.

From the outside looking in it seems to be a lot of conspiracy theories, anger about user reviews (which have always been a turn off for me with steam) and annoyance at an almost over curation of games (too high a barrier to entry)?

Do people hate the lack of features that much? Is it bad for consumers to have more competition somehow? Does having multiple launchers ruin the experience of PC gaming that much (I play on a Playstation or Switch manly with a laptop next to me for discord, podcasts.etc, I can't imagine it being that different)? Or is there something I'm missing here, I get its a bit inconvenient but is this just a mass over reaction on the part of the master race or is there legitimate concerns I should be aware of to consider myself informed on the topic?

PS

I've been having as much fun as the next person watching PC douches fly off the hook whenever this mentioned, which I think is the thing that's been making it hard for me to judge how seriously I should be taking this debate, so I'd really appricate a simple well reasoned explanation as to why this is so bad.

1. The epic store isn't competing with steam when it launched, it's competing with steam right now, it should be striving to have the same features steam users have grown to expect.
2. While many of these features are somewhat niche, they can be very important to some people. Universal controller support, big picture mode, cloud saves, and so on. The epic store offers basically nothing in return. I haven't checked recently, but last I remembered they didn't even have a search function.
3. Steam forums are a cesspool that are actually really useful. It means accessing tech support for a game, looking up a guide, patch notes and so on are a few clicks away at all times. You don't even need to close the game thanks to the overlay. I heard that after release, the best place to go to talk about Ashen was still the steam forum even though the game got pulled from the store. Seriously, if you're having a problem with a game on pc, 90% of the time the steam forum has the solution.
4. They've had numerous issues with account security and privacy concerns.
5. Exclusive games are straight up unavailable in some countries. The epic store doesn't operate in China, nobody in China can buy games on the epic store. But they can buy games on steam. When a game goes from being available on steam to being epic exclusive, it is actually locking people out.
6. Games are more expensive in some countries. While they've expanded their regional pricing, it used to be super limited and certain games could be drastically more expensive depending on where you lived. The current problem is that Epic doesn't support alternate payment methods. Not everywhere in the world uses paypal or credit cards like North America does, some use things like paypal that steam supports, but epic doesn't. Epic also doesn't sell payment cards like steam does. This means that customers in many countries are having to use credit cards and they have to foot the sometimes heavy payment processing fees that they don't get when using steam. Even disregarding the regional pricing thing, some games got more expensive. Metro Exodus was available for significantly cheaper on the Razer game store, an official steam key retailer, before the Epic thing happened.
7. Their kind of exclusivity isn't one that's helping store visibility and it's not one that's actually going to force change in steam. If this was just about Epic taking a smaller cut and giving more to devs, that would be one thing. But epic is actually paying massive sums upfront for games to go exclusive, nothing steam can do could compete with that other than also paying up front, which turns games into a bidding war. And epic isn't paying for smaller folks like the Baba is You devs to be exclusive, they're paying for Borderlands, The Division 2. Big games that don't even need that kind of spotlight to do well. Even on the indie side, SuperGiant Games isn't exactly struggling for recognition, they're one of the most successful and well known indie devs out there.
8. Steam allows free key generation for games, meaning devs are free to sell keys on their own site or to other storefronts and they will get higher, sometimes 100% of the proceeds if they do so. Ultimately Steam's cut is lower that it seems because of this. Yes, this also means that if you spent a little time looking, you could usually find games cheaper elsewhere, so games got more expensive for everyone.
9. When epic buys exclusivity, they aren't just hurting steam, they're hurting every other storefront as well. GOG has had to change it's super generous regional pricing rebates because of this. At worst steam will earn less money but keep going like it did before, it's too big to fail. It's the smaller stores that are going to be hurt most and again, these stores are going to pass the cost on to the consumer.

Basically, it boils down to this, it might just be a different launcher for you, but there are lots of people in the world for whom this is is an important thing. Epic buying away games from steam is giving customers products with fewer features for a higher price. It's as anti-consumer as it gets.

So I'm not too up in arms about the exclusives situation, I'm pretty happy for Steam to have some competition in the mix and exclusives are certainly an effective way of getting a foothold in the market share. I would hesitate to call what they're doing consumer friendly but it is at the very least providing competition. That being said, as things stand I will almost certainly buy something on Steam over the Epic store, even knowing developers would get a bigger cut from Epic, due to the lack of features in Epic's platform.

When the news about Metro first came out, the Epic store didn't have regional pricing implemented, which would have meant real money lost compared to buying it on Steam for a majority of the global population, myself included. This has since been implemented for most regions, which is good, but I thought I'd provide this context to illustrate that when news of the first exclusive hit, there were obvious material reasons to be unhappy about being forced to buy a game from Epic. Also worth noting that for many people this is still an ongoing concern as they haven't implemented support for many local currencies which, again, has actual material impact on people.

The currently missing features that personally impact me the most are the lack of cloud saves, the lack of in-home streaming and the lack of family sharing. Cloud saves are apparently slated to be coming within the next 2 months, so that's great! But the other 2 features that I want aren't even on their Trello as of now, which suggests that they'll take anywhere from 6 months to Never to come to the platform. Outside of cloud saves, these other 2 features certainly aren't vital to my playing of a game, but I've come to rely on them pretty heavily so their absence would heavily disrupt how I tend to play games nowadays beyond just forcing me to open another launcher. This doesn't mean I'll never buy anything from Epic, if there's a game I really want to play that they have exclusive distribution rights for I'll suck it up and buy it from them, but it does mean that I'm almost never going to make it my first choice of platform.

And that's just for my personal situation, I'm sure there are people out there who heavily depend on some missing feature or another. If you look at that Trello, there's a whole bunch of features currently missing compared to Steam and even more that aren't even on there. Platform-level remapping of controllers is another big one that isn't even on Epic's road map. I myself use the feature sparsely but I know of at least 2 friends with disabilities that frequently use it to make playing games easier for them. It's the internet so sweeping generalizations like 'master race' are in vogue but remember that we're talking about millions of people with different situations and needs and tens of missing features that might impact those situations.

You're certainly right that Steam wasn't fully featured when they first launched but that's also a pretty silly comparison when most of the features people want from Steam (that Epic is lacking) didn't exist in a practical consumer form back when Steam launched (back in 2003!). With these exclusive deals, Epic is essentially forcing people to engage with their store if they want to play some games so I think it's completely fair to criticize the lack of features of the platform and be upset at being forced to use their platform. It's obviously not as impactful as console exclusives but it is still impactful. While I'm sure there exist some people out there who just really hate the idea of multiple launchers, it's pretty ridiculous to generalize that people are angry over something that's just 'a bit inconvenient' when the problems go far beyond opening a different launcher.

Long term, i can see problems for indies getting fair exposure on a level playing field compared to other indies by making it mandatory for games to not only share a cut with Epic, but also with streamers & youtube folk.

I'm talking about the support-a-creator system . Basically, this system lets creators / streamers share referral links with their viewers which gives them a piece of the pie on those games. The mandatory floor is at 5% but the devs can up this cut for their games at will.

Right now, there are only a few games on the epic store and discoverability is at a high. But as more & more games will appear on the store, Epic will let streamers do the promotion for these games and lead their viewers to the good stuff. Which games will streamers play? The big games that draws the biggest audience. Fortnite, Apex, League, Overwatch, Fifa, COD, Dota, CSGO you name it. Now i'm not too alarmed by this group. Whenever these streamers play a smaller indie title, they will lose a bunch of their core audience. That doesn't only lose them donations & subscribers, but having 1% of your 20k audience buy a game using your referral is often more valuable than getting 5% of your 3k audience to buy a smaller game. The past has learned us that when there's a direct monetary relationship between the streamer & the game they play, most streamers will choose for the option that makes them the most money. I point you to the rise & fall of Conan Exile & Reign of Kings that were the biggest games on Twitch for 1 or 2 days before falling back into obscurity.

Enter the variety streamer. Because the biggest games are oversaturated with streamers, there's a gap in the market to play smaller diverse games and set your channel apart. These streamers will be able to retain their audience across smaller games , which means that they can pick & choose between indie titles without huge fluctuations in views, donations & subs. This makes them able to hop from indie to indie game and truly choose for games they think are worthwhile of the spotlight. The issue arises when Indie A offers a 25% cut of the salesprice while indie B offers a 10% cut of the salesprice. Suddenly, there's a direct incentive for those streamers to get their viewers interested in indie A. I could see an issue arising where these indie titles are forced to up their streamer cuts to get a fair shot of exposure among those variety streamers. The initial price to get on the EGS might be lower, but this streamer revshare program might drive the cost up anyways.

As a streamer, why would you play 7$ Reprisal Universe if you could play 30$ Rust? Reprisal Universe would have to give a rediculous high cut to make financial sense for the streamer to spend time on. On top of that, the multiplayer aspect of Rust gives viewers an extra incentive to actually buy the game themselves. Like which viewer goes out there to watch a playthrough of Thimbleweed Park & then afterwards decides to buy that game to play through it themselves? Certainly not enough people to make it a sensible choice for a streamer to play over a multiplayer game. From my point of view, sharing revenue with streamers won't lead to better discoveribility at all and it might end up more expensive for the devs as well. Don't get me wrong, right now it's a fantastic deal to release your game on the EGS. Long term, i can see it being quite damaging.

TLDR: To get any exposure at all, indies on the EGS will eventually have to compete with eachother for the variety streamers through pricing. Not playing along means that your game won't get exposed by a variety streamer, which is one of the more affordable & attainable ways to get your small game in front of people's eyes. On top of that, the goal of getting people to actually buy the games you play, means that you would have to be a fool to spend your time on narrative & linear games over multiplayer games. I believe this is worse than the current model, where variety streamers don't necessarily have a direct monetary reason to showcase one indie title over another & where the devs can set a pricepoint that they themselves are comfortable with instead of having to make a good value proposition for the streamers out there that act as your marketing vector. Right now , the EGS is a great deal for devs though. Unless it turns out that they aren't able to get the fortnite players away from that game and would have had more sales on the competing matured platforms.

My only problem with the Epic store is that it wants to be a competitor to those two and it's missing some of even the most basic of features. GoG used to just be a web page store and it was perfectly serviceable for what they where doing. It wasn't until later that they decided to have a launcher.

I find searching for games on the Epic store to be pretty bad right now. Last time I used it, they just had a singular long list of games available, which I think is less than ideal and it will not scale well.

Games on there don't have good information or standardized ways to tell what the game is about. There's nothing to say if a game is single player or mutliplayer, co-op or not, controller support, online, offline, etc, etc other than reading the description, which might not have all that in there.

I don't care about having another launcher, or them buying 6 months or 12 months of exclusivity to games. But I don't think their launcher or store is particularly well featured and I think if you actually want to be a competitor to whats essentially the status quo, you need to do better out of the gate beyond just strong arming people into using your store because you paid 2K a lot of money to get Borderlands 3 on there.

I think the real question is what's good about it? (at least from a consumer standpoint).

What benefit do I as a consumer get that i don't get from steam?

I'm glad Steam has some competition that will hopefully make Valve fix some of the issues with that client and storefront. That being said, I don't currently have any reason as a consumer to purchase games from the Epic store. I don't about timed exclusives, as I'll just wait until it comes to other platforms. I've got plenty of games to play in the meantime. I don't think the revenue cut argument is a good one either, as Steam and most other storefronts currently offer more features and, in my mind, deserve a bigger cut because of that. Epic can afford to give developers a bigger cut now, but a few years from now when they'll hopefully have better software and infrastructure? I'm doubtful of that.

I'm not anti-Epic store and don't understand why anyone would be. They're not doing anything particularly bad that any other company doesn't do in some form or another. Maybe I'm not the best person to be answering your question, but currently all of my needs are being met by Steam and GOG, so the Epic store just doesn't have any advantages to make me consider it.

The only problem I have with it that I don't have with Steam is it lacks Linux support. That said, I don't use Steam either as it's a proprietary client that acts, in some forms, as DRM.

Epic doesn't have a great track record of supporting consumers; I could see why people, that don't have my concerns, might also have issues with them. Then again, I seem to remember Valve having terrible support for quite a while as well.

@basicallyolly:

From a customer view. Epic Game Store is fine, if feature incomplete, and nobody really should care if a game is exclusive to it or not.

For deeper issues:

a) The role of Steamspy (aka Sergey Galyonkin, Epic Games Head of Publishing for Eastern Europe) in exacerbating problems with Steam that Epic Games Store claims to solve

b) The ones getting the worst deal on Steam currently are smaller devs and Epic doesn't even want to deal with them. And discourse around this topic seems to exist in a world where something like itch.io doesn't exist.

A lot of people really are that mad about having to use more than one launcher and there are some very legitimate concerns about the features on the platform, although the complaints really aren't that economic. If you were thinking about the potential economic advantages of the Epic Store, you'd be more likely to be supportive of it, but I don't think that's the way most of the games community is taught to think. It's true that Steam launched in a very bare state, but Valve's platform went online in 2003, not 2019; expectations have justifiably changed for what a digital games store needs to look like. Epic isn't competing against the Steam from the early 00s; it's competing against Steam now. Other users here have done a good job of talking about the absent features from the store, so I'll talk about the UI a little instead. The Epic Store is currently not laid out with an appropriate design for a digital marketplace; it's using a design you'd associate with a visual art website. It looks like Flickr or ArtStation.

Notice how a lot of Steam is long lists of games, where on each tile you can see the name, box art, price, price reduction, platforms, and genres in a relatively small space, allowing it to use not much of your screen to convey a healthy amount about each of the products. Now look at the Epic Store and notice how it uses much more space to just throw the box art, name, publisher, developer, and price at you, and when the service launched it was even more taciturn about data. It's an inefficient use of space and forces users to click through to the dedicated store page on each game to get basic info on them. Even then, many of those pages don't contain the fundamental facts about each title that the store pages on just about every other online games platform does. It's more work for less information. You'll also notice that the Steam front page sorts games in a lot of different ways to accommodate different users looking for different things. There are the games on sale, there are curator-recommended games, there are new releases, there are personalised recommendations, and so on. If the player then wants to look at games based on tags and genre, they can do that too. The Epic Store has none of that organisation. There's the few containers at the top which give you your free games for the month and then everything else is chucked in a big, unordered pile. This may have been appropriate when they were only selling about five games on the store, but it's already woefully insufficient for the volume of products they're touting.

Like you're 5?
I don't like it, it smells funny.

Assuming you want more here are my reasons.
PC was and probably still is the smallest market in terms of game platforms, it has seen huge growth thanks to Valve creating a market for which AAA's, indie's, passions projects and other 3rd parties can thrive, i shouldn't need to remind you that a couple generations ago the platform was filled with crap console ports due to lack of budget or care put into PC games. Epic wants to compete not by offering a better service, but by creating 3rd party exclusivity within a platform, and that's insane to me, PC grew to the point that companies were willingly putting their games on the platform, now they're accepting large cheques and in return put out statements bestowing the virtues of a totally featureless store. Epic are setting a disturbing precedent by gifting developers and publishers large downpayments, should its competitors do the same and start outbidding each other for their own exclusives? Epic claim to be "improving the PC market", but while nobody is going to say the better revenue split is a bad thing, at the moment it's primarily the downpayments that developers want and that can only last as long as Fortnite brings in the money.
Some other less ordered reasons.
China and Tencent.
Epic's fortune being delivered to them on the backs of a game idea that they stole from one of their engine licensee's.
Said game's popularity creating security issues with accounts and the store.
Statements issued by developers of exclusive games claiming they are excited at the possibilities offered by working with Epic, despite the only apparent advantage being monetary gain.
Epic have abandoned all of their games except Fortnite, Valve supports their back catalogue, every Valve game runs on modern systems.
Every other feature i enjoy on Steam being totally absent from the Epic Store.

This is something i have thought about and take interest in, as a customer playing games on a platform with historic compatibility and wide ranging support, Epic's business practices have no place in it for me, we're so lucky the exclusives aren't permanent.

I think the real issue for most isn't the store itself but Epic's strategy with exclusivity. They're removing consumer choice by forcing people to use the store to play certain games upon release. This is made even worse when certain exclusives were advertised or promised on Steam beforehand, creating a real sense of false advertising or betrayal for some.

The reason for all this is obvious: Epic wants to move Steam users to their platform. However, I think there are much more consumer friendly ways to do this. Epic already has billions of dollars and millions of users (that don't even have Steam) thanks to the success of Fortnite. So they have the resources to do pretty much anything. But instead of using those resources to create a platform that is superior to Steam and therefore migrates consumers over organically, they've chosen to use brute strength and money to force people to use their store if they want to play certain games.

I've used Steam, Origin, GOG, Gamefly, Epic, etc. stores for years now and never really understood why people hated multiple launchers so much. Competition is always good for consumers but Epic's tactics here leave a real bad taste in my month. It all feels really greedy and anti-consumer to me. What new technique will they use next to compel people to use the Epic store? They already bypassed the Google Play Store for Fortnite. This wasn't done to help consumers. It was done purely for monetary reasons and because they can.

The problem with everything on the internet is that tiny amounts of negativity are always greatly magnified and exaggerated to the extreme. This is because it feeds into our natural prejudices, bias and perceived stereotypes like "PC douches" which I didn't even know was a thing. In any case it's best to take everything with a grain of salt.

I don't really understand the dislike for user reviews though. I think they're a very valuable tool for evaluating a game. Sure, not all reviews are useful or helpful but it's easy to identify those and sift through them. If a publisher can choose to disable or selectively delete/edit user reviews because they're negative (regardless of the reason) who does that really benefit? Would this not make reviews even less trustworthy?

@imhungry@onemanarmyy@jesus_phish@magnetphonics@gamer_152 All of these are super complying and well reasoned, I think after reading through all this I fall somewhere similar to @zombiepenguin9.

I don't play much on PC so this obviously doesn't impact me massively, however I feel now knowing all this I'll be disappointed to see games go there on a personal game by game basis, but I hope it sticks around purely to pressure Steam to be better. I just hope it doesn't make smaller store fronts stop being viable alternatives. I worry that all these store fronts and publisher launchers could start drowning each and with Epic obviously having enough piles of money to survive the EGS being unprofitable for years it would be a shame if it were to kill better/other/smallerstore fronts.

Given me loads to think about cheers y'all.

Competition is good, but it is still a bummer to have to use so many different services. That goes for pretty much all media. We ended up getting rid of expensive cable packages, but I feel like pretty soon we will have essentially the same thing, but for the internet. I wouldn't be surprised if when 5G rolls around you buy some very expensive premium package from your provider and get Netflix, HBO, Hulu, Stadia, Spotify, Game Pass, etc.. It is not hard to imagine Epic or Valve creating some kind of subscription based games service thing too.

Do any EU users have this issue where the Epic game store is convinced that you are russian & pay in rubles?

I honestly have no idea where this can come from. I'm not using a russian VPN or proxy or anything like that.

@brackstone: I haven't used it yet and since I am outside of America lots of this will likely effect me, so both thanks for the heads up and sorry if I seemed dismissive, a lot of this had just passed me by and I did just want to get the temperature of the room on why its so reviled right now, all this makes sense and I agree with most of it.

Still think attacking game devs for making the best business decisions they can is kinda a shitty thing to do but hey, there is always going to be sit parts of any community in gaming.

Thanks for the concise education!

I'm fine with buying and running games from another launcher. I typically go wherever the price is better. I even have the Epic launcher installed to claim the free games they've been handing out every couple weeks. I'm not keen on the paid exclusivity deals Epic has been making with publishers. If Epic competed by having lower prices, or better client features I wouldn't have an issue buying games through their storefront.

I think that is actually an argument in favor of this kind of stuff

Let's hop in the ol' time machine and go back about a decade or so. Comcast sucks. But fuck Netflix. I can't watch sports or the news. So if I am going to need to subscribe to cable anyway, why not just get HBO and get new movies as soon as they are available (let's not compare prices). Wait, they got Speed? I will pay five bucks a month to watch Speed whenever I want.

Next stop, five or so years ago: Netflix is awesome, but they don't have TV. I guess I can get Hulu? But I don't want to pay for both. And neither of them have sports or the news. Huh... this sucks

And now: If you want to get all the services you want you'll probably pay about the same as you would for cable, if not more. But folk who want TV can get youtube or hulu or whatever. Folk who want movies have Netflix and Hulu. Folk who want anime have Funimation and Crunchy Roll. And hell, even the cable providers have a LOT of VODs and are increasingly making it easy to just DVR your shows and potentially auto-skip past commercials. In a lot of ways, cable might be better than the streaming services for "most" people

And that is the thing. We largely went in a big circle. Some stuff got worse as far as monetization goes. But the overall quality of just about every product involves has jumped massively. Right now we are in the state where that expensive video rental service has mother fucking Keanu to make us take a look* but is overall not that great. Hopefully we'll see things get a lot better on all sides.

*: I don't actually know if Speed or Keanu were a factor in the rise of Netflix. But I just watched the Bill and Ted 3 announcement again and it makes me giggle

I'm loving it, I'm getting a nice game for free every two weeks. I don't mind having multiple launchers installed, no harm there.

@brackstone: I want to commend you on ACTUALLY answering the question in a way that makes sense AND doesn't lionize Steam or ignore its myriad issues.

With how toxic the discourse is getting around this (seriously, the podcast comment section is a pit) is getting, a post like this is a cool splash of ACTUAL reality.

Steam saved PC gaming and gave people a reason not to pirate games.

Epic copied PUBGs' ideas, made a ton of money and are using it to annoy people with an extra launcher and buy up exclusivity deals that do not benefit the consumer.

Any time you take choice away from consumers like Epic is with the exclusivity deals, you're going to cause friction with consumers. Even if Epic was a better platform in every way there would still be a lot of hate for them simply because of that. People don't like origin or the uplay launcher, but tolerate them because it's just ubisoft or EA games, not games from other publishers. I also think situations like the Metro incident were handled poorly, the game WAS available on steam but then got suddenly pulled without warning. If they had given even a 48 or 72 hour notice there would have been almost no backlash in that situation.

I don't think Epic would be getting nearly as much hate if they had enticed publishers to sell on their platform for a lower cost than anywhere else because of the more favorable revenue split, instead of sniping exclusivity deals. They're trying to force themselves into relevancy instead of offering a better product or storefront.

I think what it boils down to is we are seeing the video game marketplace getting to the point where video streaming has gone, with a myriad of different platforms getting "hot exclusives", to the detriment of the ecosystem as a whole. If this were more like the music streaming marketplace, where competing services still have for the most part, all the same content, I don't think anyone would care about the Epic store. As it stands, these companies are turning video games into cable TV, and piracy will go up as a direct result.

As a Costumer you get a worse experience for the same price, if the epic game store would give a discount on 60 dollar games that would make the service slightly better, but all there doing now is bragging on about look at how much money this publisher is getting look at how much money this company is getting as a consumer i don't really care about that, of course i want people to get a fair wage for there work, but as a costumer i only care about two thing the game and the service if one of these is bad, people will get upset.