this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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Yeah, poor multi billion dollar company has only had 7 years until now to make a decent games store. That's definitely not enough time and money.
Not really how that works, though.
To be clear, I'd agree that the prioritization by a bunch of competitors has been wonky, but Steam ONLY does client. They are a very lean company that actively builds stuff to be hands-off and has stepped away from focusing heavily on game development for a while.
Could Epic invest more heavily in their client as opposed to spending all that money on giving away free games and acquiring content? I bet. I also bet if they looked at GoG building a whole interoperable client and getting nothing in return or some of the work EA wasted on their version (twice!) for also nothing in return, then prioritizing redundant features that Microsoft provides at the OS level seems like a worse investment. Particularly when the store loses money and they could be spending that on Fortnite content or Unreal features or whatever else.
Steam is a weird outlier in that their ultimate goal has been to ditch Windows/MS for a while, so their whole consolized controller-based UI, the controller layer, the background recording, the overengineered chat all make sense in the context of SteamOS having been in development for a decade. For everybody else it's a leap of faith.
Do I think it would have been a better choice for Epic? If it was up to me I'd have given it a shot, I think. But let me be clear: I'd have done that in the understanding that the minute you match a Steam feature the cult of Gaben shall move on to a different shortcoming as the justification for their adhesion. When Steam was behind on their refund policy nobody raged against them and nobody stopped raging against EA Origin depite offering no-questions-asked refunds. Now you hear about it as a differentiator. When Epic didn't have a perisistent shopping cart that was the dealbreaker for a while, when they implemented it's their store design or the library paging or whatever. Nobody complains about games only being available on Steam when they aren't elsewhere, but Epic exclusives are a travesty. This is not about the feature set or policy.
But starting to match the feature set at least would take a talking point off the table and offer a selling point.
Did I give your trolly post way too much credit and took it too seriously? Yes. Is that an apt metaphor for this entire conversation? Absolutely.
You're unironically defending EGS and calling me a troll. If you think that's how a store with 7 years and a billion dollars invested (Sweeney's words, not mine) should look like, that's fine, that's your opinion and you're free to use it. Personally I'm not a fan.
I'm not "defending" anybody. I'm not taking sides at all. The only reason I even jump into these is that the absolutely cult-like zeal grown-ass men deploy in defending large corporations over each other is both some Sega-vs-Nintendo console war crap I wish we could get over and not particularly good if you want a PC market not dominated by a single player.
I don't know what percentage of the Epic Store's funding goes to feature work versus other areas. I can guess Epic is investing very heavily on content, and I can guess that's because it'd be really hard to meet Steam on content when every developer of any size is effectively forced to be on Steam first and everything else if and when. I don't know how much funding that leaves for client development.
Like I said, I'd probably have refocused on client features a bit further, but I'll also acknowledge they probably wouldn't see that much tangible return from that investment, given that Steam fanboys already don't give them enough credit for the very noticeable improvements they've actually made and they have no effective means to run PR against Steam.
Hell, if you look at it objectively they'd probably be better off focusing on their legal fights with Apple and Google and on having a decent mobile client, which Steam very much doesn't. Maybe there's a path forward there. I don't have enough of an inside view to know.
How come gog doesn't get the same hate if it's all steam fanboys and it's all so unwarranted? How come it's all focused at EGS? Are you sure it's not because you're mistaken? Maybe you've got a rage boner for Steam and you can't see past it.
Well, for one thing the "GoG doesn't support Linux" narrative runs strong (I believe it made at least one appearance in this thread), so there is that.
For another, GoG doesn't get the same hate for the same reason in Sega vs Nintendo the Turbografx or the Neo Geo didn't get the same hate. They are simply not in the same race.
Ubisoft's platform does get the hate, though. And EA's. And Acti/Blizzard's. And Microsoft's. Gamers love a good narrative, though, so EGS took over when Origin stopped being the bad guy du jour. Ubi had a brief period in the spotlight, though.
So after some soul searching I'm going to say I absolutely don't have a rage boner for Steam (considering my Steam library is in the thousands and I own both iterations of the Steam Deck and a Vive that'd be a very confused boner anyway).