Epic Games Store: Why it’s not a bad thing

I think it’s fair to say that, whether or not you like Epic Games Store, it has been a controversial move by Epic to break the Steam monopoly on digital PC game sales. Here, I’m going to state why I think that the Epic Games Store is good for the PC community while also explaining why I don’t use it and have no plans to in the near future.

I remember hearing the announcement that Epic was going to release a store around December 2018. Hearing that they were going to release free games every 2 weeks to users and that they would only take a 12% cut of a game’s sales compared to Steams 30%, I remember thinking to myself that this might be what the industry needed.

Having used Steam for around 10 years at that point, I could testify that Valve, the company that runs Steam, had become lethargic and stagnant. Having not released a new game for years (excluding The Lab, a tech demo for VR and Artifact, a digital trading card game), they were content instead to develop and expand their multiplayer games such as Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2.

They also became a company of reaction rather than innovation, dealing with problems as they arose rather than nipping them in the bud. This has led to an increasingly cluttered marketplace with lower sales per game, various security breaches and controversial games being granted pages before examination. All of this led me to the realization that Valve needed a competitor to truly innovate again.

However, when the Epic Games Store was released, it was woefully underdeveloped lacking such features as cloud-saving, achievements and even a shopping cart! Their tactic has instead been to lure consumers with exclusives such as Metro Exodus and Control by paying publishers.

While I do appreciate that games publishers and developers are making money through these deals, I also lament the fact that the Epic Games Store is an inferior gaming experience with the only advantages that I can see for consumers are the free games. That is why I have no intention of using the store in the near future.

However, despite only one comment by Valve directed at the Epic Games Store, the store does seem to have woken Valve up who are now tackling issues on Steam such as a library redesign, a new feature called Steam Labs where Valve tests various new possible features out with the public and continuous reworking of Steam’s automated discovery system.

For these reasons, I think that the Epic Games Store, while not necessarily good in and of itself, is beneficial to the PC gaming industry and community and we will hopefully see both Epic and Valve continue to develop their stores in competition with one another.

Thanks for reading and if you wish to seek any of the titles I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use amazon.co.uk or amazon.com for all of your needs! Also feel free to follow my curator page on Steam “JRPG Reviews” for thoughts and opinions on any JRPGs that I play and my YouTube channel “Victory Achieved Gaming” where I guide my friend through challenging games.