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The Epic Games Store celebrated its second anniversary recently. You can be forgiven for not setting a calendar reminder. The store’s impact on the PC gaming landscape has been fascinating but controversial: a suspiciously philanthropic entity that has provided gamers with dozens of wonderful gifts, rookie developers with financial security and a foot in a difficult industry, and Steam with a welcome competition.
It has also pissed off a lot of people. From fairly trivial issues about having to use a separate launcher other than the de facto beloved Steam for PC, to slightly less trivial issues around the aggressive platform’s exclusivity and its poor infrastructure compared to Steam.
All of this can generate a confusing tangle of sentiment about the Epic Games Store, and even two years later, the slightest mention seems to instantly inspire discussions and, most of the time, discussions. So, as a kind of birthday celebration of sorts (albeit one where I whisper all the recipient’s character flaws in their ear while giving them a hug), I’ve decided to see how far it’s come since its inception and have a chat with the developers of games that have been released on both Epic and Steam to get an idea of how creators feel about the two platforms.
The state of the store
Clicking through the smooth, smooth pages of the Epic Game Store today, the most surprising problem is that it is as worn out as it was two years ago. Its user interface and interface features just don’t feel worthy of a platform that continues to capture swaths of big IP and indie games alike in exclusivity offers. And there are no community features, no hubs full of goofy memes and inside jokes, no place to chat with strangers (or particularly gregarious developers), no workshops where players’ passion for a game is fed back through. of mods.
At that last point, the Epic Games Store introduced mod support for its first game, MechWarrior 5, in July. It’s a start, but the lack of comments or forums removes the sense of community that is so endemic to modding. It’s like comparing Bethesda’s sterile, controlled mod pages to the beautiful mess of Nexus Mods – I’ll take the noise and misery and the occasional NSFW content onto a clean controlled grid of thumbnail images any day. Modding is meant be a little messy.
The lack of these little rabbit burrows leads to a lack of discovery. When looking for new and unfamiliar games to play on Steam, the trailers and screenshots only appeal to me so far; more often it’s the weird stories from the players, the streams, and the creativity of the community that really show me what a game is about. There is now a ‘Discover’ tab that serves as the main page of the store, ostensibly to “help users find cool new games”, but the games it throws out aren’t exactly the ones someone needs help to discover.
At the time of writing, five of the games on the first page of ‘Discover’ are great titles from Ubisoft, sandwiched between Fortnite, Cyberpunk, Star Wars Squadrons, and GTA 5. Only one of the ten games on display is independent. The next thing you will see when you scroll down is a selection of service games with Christmas events, most of them already well known and popular, then you have the daily Christmas gifts. Only after that do the indies really start to leak in, showing up in the ‘New Releases’ section a few scrolls down.
By contrast, Steam greets me with no less than eight standalone titles from the start, using my personal tastes to find games on sale that might interest me. A little further down, I get a list of indie games enjoyed by ‘gamers like me’ and daily community recommendations, again highlighting lesser known games. Sure, the algorithms are inevitably flawed, but at least they’re setting my eyes on a wider selection of indie games, whereas at Epic the main way to stand out as indie is through the golden ticket of exclusivity or being the free-to-play of week.
Epic is to be commended for creating a publicly visible roadmap for the Epic Games Store, but it also highlights the company’s priorities. The newly added payouts, currency localization, wish lists, and growing currency support are helpful, but very showcase-oriented. The achievements, enabled in July, are slowly being added, while a loosely worded “social review” and user reviews (which will be optional for developers) are still a long way off. There’s no mention of remote play, streaming, or family sharing – the kind of features that separate a storefront designed to sell games from a developed platform designed to make games convenient and accessible.
How developers feel about the Epic Store
Of course, frustrations with the interface have to be weighed against how developers feel about the platform, and for the most part it seems that those who have worked with Epic and Steam are very happy with what is on offer.
Close to the Sun is an atmospheric indie game (think Bioshock without the combat) released in May 2019 as an Epic Store exclusive, before hitting Steam a year later. Developer Roberto Semperbene says that while sales probably weren’t as high as they would have been with a Steam launch, the benefits of exclusivity far outweighed potential lost sales.
As a small business that wants to survive and grow, Epic’s exclusive agreement ensured that we would recoup costs and continue to develop.
Roberto Semperbene
Beyond Epic’s coverage of the development and other projected costs, the season of Close to the Sun in the store as free game of the week gave it an incredible boost, according to Semperbene. Suddenly, almost a year after its initial launch, dozens of media outlets, subreddits, and deal sites were talking about Close to the Sun again, simply because it was the latest headliner on Epic’s famous free-to-play carousel. .
“Would we have reached such an audience, being a small, independent studio, even with the support of the big boys from [publisher] Wired Productions? “, Semperbene asks.” As a small business that wants to survive and grow, Epic’s exclusive agreement ensures that we would recoup costs and continue to develop. It also helped us spread our brand to a lot of players who probably didn’t know us. “
Semperbene did not want to share exact figures on purchases versus free downloads, but admitted that the free week played a large role in the game reaching around four million downloads in total. There are many people who own a game that on Steam has only received 211 reviews.
In 2019, the DARQ developer was approached to make it an Epic exclusive, and was told that exclusivity was the only way it would appear in the store. However, this does not seem to be a consistent rule, or has been relaxed by Epic. Every developer I spoke to whose games were shipping simultaneously across both stores said that Epic did not express any reservations about it. One such game is Calico, an irresistibly cute game about managing a cat cafe. The game’s publisher, Whitethorn Digital, a specialist in cute, low-budget indie games, compared the launch process on Epic favorably to Steam.
“Great support, direct contact with a human being, simple staging, great backend tools, personalized support,” says Matthew White, CEO of Whitethorn. “But on Steam, every time we launch a game, we spend five to six hours trying to get the streaming to the page to work, updating the store is a nightmare, the build load must be done by a member of our engineering team, and it is almost impossible to get assistance in responding to your requests. Fortunately, after four years in business and thanks to the introduction of a mutual friend, we now have a reliable contact at Valve, although this process was extremely difficult. “
Gavin Price, studio director behind Playtonic’s Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair, was equally pleased with his studio’s dealings with Epic. “We have had no problems creating versions of Epic and the store has provided great opportunities for our game to reach a very large audience (we released it as part of the 12 Christmas games of 2019).”
When I asked if these studies would consider Epic exclusivity for future games, their answer was a unanimous ‘yes’. Price put it in the best way: “Each game is its own puzzle tailored to bring it to market in the best possible way, and nowadays, visibility will always be a big problem, so I think an exclusivity agreement regardless of the platform can have huge benefits. We would be very open about such offerings and we can certainly empathize with developers who see this as the right thing to do for their game (which they could ultimately rely on for a living or as a stepping stone). for future success). “
Whats Next?
So after two years, the Epic Games Store is still eerily similar to how it started out in both design and principle: a virtual developer golden ticket and an awkward yet engaging platform for gamers, dazzling us with its glittering hoard of video game riches. free. Its lack of community and discovery features is easy to ignore when Epic keeps both sides of the equation satisfied with its seismic display of monetary magnanimity.
But will goodwill carry over to genuine consumer loyalty when Epic’s free-to-play sideshow ends? Will indie games get the opportunities and exposure they need in the Epic Games store without the hype of exclusivity or without being considered the free game of the week?
Based on my own experience as a ritual recipient of Epic giveaways and £ 10 game coupons, I feel that the loyalty to the Epic Games store is as superficial as the store pages themselves. It’s not a convenient place to search for cool new indie titles or host game parties with friends; it’s a showcase with some flashy titles and claims to be a Steam competitor, but walks in and it’s an eerily empty place, making me question the sincerity of the impressive window as I back toward the exit.
There is a lot of work to be done here if Epic is to keep my attention beyond this lengthy and expensive honeymoon period.
