Dusk Developer David Szymanski: I'd rather pay Valve 30% and put up with their de facto monopoly than help Epic work towards their own (very obviously desired) monopoly
If I'm honest, I don't disagree.
I would love for Steam to have **actual competition. Which is difficult, sure, but you could run a slightly less feature-rich store, take less of a cut, and pass the reduction fully on to consumers and you'd be an easy choice for many gamers.
But that's not what Epic is after. They tried to go hard after the sellers, figuring that if they can corner enough fo the market with exclusives the buyers will have to come. But they underestimated that even their nigh-infinite coffers struggle to keep up with the raw amount of games releasing, and also the unpredictability of the indie market where you can't really know what to buy as an exclusive.
Nevermind that buying one is a good way to make it forgotten.
So yeah, fully agreed. Compared to Epic, I vastly prefer Steam's 30% cut. As the consumer I pay the same anyways, and Steam offers lots of stuff for it like forums, a client that boots before the heat death of the universe, in-house streaming, library sharing, cloud sync that sometimes works.
They did both things.
Yes, they went after sellers, because they needed something to sell. Nobody's going to go to the new upstart store without some incentive. For sellers, that incentive was piles of money (with the understandable trade off of an exclusivity period - a completely normal thing for businesses to do).
But they also went after buyers by handing out hundreds of free games to build up everyone's libraries (something they're obviously still doing), and by running the best sales seen on a PC store since Valve stopped doing flash deals during their sales.
But nothing they do is going to achieve your statement of "you could run a slightly less feature-rich store, take less of a cut, and pass the reduction fully on to consumers and you'd be an easy choice for many gamers." They actually tried that at the start, with Metro [Whatever - I don't play the Metro series so I can never keep the titles straight] launching at a reduced price point because of the lowered cut, but everyone just focused on "ZOMG, I HAVE TO CLICK A DIFFERENT ICON TO LAUNCH IT?!?!11". Aside from that example, though, the pricing of the games isn't up to them. Blame the publishers for prices staying the same while they pocket the extra from the lowered store cut - they could easily pass it along to consumers, but they choose not to. Epic themselves did what they could with the coupons during sales (leading to devs/pubs like CDPR maliciously increasing the prices of their games to disqualify them from it just to spite Epic and their potential buyers) and now the not-nearly-as-good-a-deal cash back program they're doing.
The bulk of gamers simply don't want to buy from anything other than Steam, and nothing anyone says or does will budge them from that. Every argument against EGS existing is just a rationalization of that stance. I've literally seen people say "I want every game on every store and then I'll buy it from Steam."
While I can understand the difficulty of trying to come up with competition to a pre-existing and dominant storefront, they went about it almost entirely the wrong way. They underestimated consumers' aversion to change and overestimated the value their own launcher provided.
Everybody and their mother used Steam at the time, and it provided a whole lot more than just a storefront and icons to click. When Epic launched EGS, it offered absolutely none of that. Without any social aspects or significant consumer buy-in to their ecosystem, it had no staying power. People—myself included—would go to it to play a shiny new free game until it stopped being fun, then fuck right off back to Steam to play our other games with friends. If they had spent more time cooking up the EGS ecosystem into something more similar to XBL or PSN before trying to attract consumers en masse, they likely would've been pretty successful. They could've even just decided to partner up with (or buy) NexusMods and integrated a mod manager, and a lot of us would've had a good reason to prefer EGS over Steam for some games.
Instead of doing something to make their ecosystem more appealing, though, they used paid-for exclusives to make other ecosystems less appealing. It was an obvious attempt to herd consumers into their ecosystem, and it backfired spectacularly. Before that, most people were either indifferent or liked them as a company due to their legacy and/or Unreal Engine. These days, I see a lot of bitching about "timed exclusives".
It wasn't really even exclusives technically. It was explicitly Excluding-Steam exclusives. It released everywhere else but not on Steam. And it was further aggravated by games that were already on Steam being taken off in favor of launching elsewhere.
That's not remotely how it would have happened.
Have a read over this article that was posted by Lars Doucet (well-respected indie developer of Defender's Quest) roughly a year before EGS even launched. It lays out exactly what a Steam competitor is going to run into trying to break into that market and provides a blueprint to not fail that is almost exactly what Epic did. And yet, the discussion to this day is still filled with nothing but "REEEEE, EXCLUSIVES!!!1", nevermind the fact that those games all still run perfectly fine on the exact same machine you launch your Steam games from (excepting, now - multiple years on from the whole kerfuffle having begun - the Deck... buying straight from Steam does make that a much nicer/smoother experience). You can even add them to Steam to get the extra features like the controller customization and such.
Basically, even if they built a launcher that was better in every conceivable way than Steam, nobody was going to switch. They had to do something else to bring both devs and players on board. As the article states:
Thanks for the read. A couple points:
I summarily addressed the inertia issue already, when I mentioned that they underestimated consumer's unwillingness to change.
The article is primarily aimed at startups, who don't have the same amount of money to pour into software development, testing, and infrastructure.
Epic almost did exactly what the article suggested, but it notably did not improve anything over Steam. It didn't even try for parity with Steam. In my opinion, as someone who plays PC games, that removed any chance of me even considering using it in any serious capacity.
I genuinely think they would've had a shot at being successful if they had tried to improve the state of PC gaming. Steam is massive, but it's not without its pain points. The core of the client is ancient, and the fact that it heavily utilizes CEF makes it a bit of a resource hog. There's a lot of bugs hidden in the nooks and crannies, and legacy cruft makes fixing some of these issues take a very long time.
Epic had the right approach to getting their foot in the door by giving away games for free and paying/bribing developers to release non-exclusive games on their platform. They just fucked up everything else.
Some things they could have done to help themselves:
Released a client that worked more consistently than Steam:
Built-in Nvidia GameStream protocol support.
GameStream has lower latency than Steam Link.
Integrated mods.
They wouldn't get developer buy-in for a new ecosystem, but that doesn't mean they couldn't just buy out an existing mod platform and integrate it.
Forums, chat, and social features.
Lacking these, they're basically asking players to go to Steam whenever they need to find comminuty guides or discussions.
Achievements and matchmaking as a drop-in Steam API replacement.
An equivalent to Steam Input for remapping controller inputs on a per-game basis.
A CEO that knows when to stop talking.
The impression I get from him talking is that he thinks he's the messiah of PC gaming. The impression I get from his actions is that he's just like the rest of the publishers trying to grope our wallets at every opportunity. I doubt I'm the only one.
The reason that it's so hard to compete with Steam is that Steam just does what it does so well.
I don't have much desire to change my primary digital storefront because there isn't really much of anything more I want from a digital storefront that Steam doesn't already provide. If the quality of Steam's experience declines at some point, I would welcome competition, but otherwise, why would I bother switching to another service when I don't really have any complaints about Steam?
Besides, the TV/movie streaming service market has already demonstrated what happens when not enough competition suddenly turns into too much competition. If Epic were able to demonstrate that it was possible to overtake Steam, everyone would try to copycat their strategy, and then you likely end up with a balkanized market where no one has the market share or resources to provide the level of quality that Steam does.
Exactly, Steam got where it is because it managed to be more convenient than piracy (as Gaben himself said, piracy is a service problem), as did Netflix before the fragmentation (and rampant enshittification) of the streaming market made piracy once more the most convenient (and better quality) option.
Epic store exclusives don't promote Epic, they promote piracy, as that is the second most convenient option after Steam (it's worth mentioning that Steam also acts as unobtrusive DRM; infect your game with malware like Denuvo and suddenly piracy again becomes the more convenient — even the only reasonable — option, as cracked games perform better and are more stable than malware DRM infected ones; Steam provides a good enough and, more importantly, harmless option for both consumers and developers, something no alternative, including piracy, has managed to achieve).
And, of course, the instant Gaben retires and Valve goes public and begins to enshittify itself we won't be going to Epic or GOG (unless they manage to replicate what Steam has achieved), we'll be back to sailing the high seas.