Epic Games Store still falls short comapred to Valve’s Steam

Epic Games, which is best known for Unreal Engine and the popular battle royale game Fortnite, is still unable to top the PC store market even after countless attempts to overthrow Valve’s Steam. 

The Epic Games store launched five years ago for PC and wasted no time in adding exclusive titles with Remedy’s Alan Wake 2 being the latest. The launcher and store didn’t resonate well with many gamers for countless reasons that we are going to list below.

According to The Verge, Epic itself admitted that the Epic Games Store is still miles away from turning a profit even after offering free game giveaways and paying a hefty amount of money for exclusives in hopes of introducing more users to the platform and offering game developers a much cheaper revenue-split compared to Steam.

Adding salt to injury, Epic recently suffered a huge amount of employee lay-offs across the company itself and its subsidiaries such as Mediatonic which is known best for Fall Guys.

Why is the Epic Games Store falling short?

First of all, PC gamers were left with a sour taste in their mouths after Epic started gatekeeping titles by making them exclusive to their store since it meant that the only way they could get the game was through the Epic Games Store.

Secondly, Epic’s controversial partnership with China’s Tencent (A Chinese investment company that owns more than you know!) made users worry about downloading the store for countless reasons, some of them being:

• Polygon – “Epic Games is funded by a Chinese corporation (Tencent) and can’t be trusted.”
• Epic Games Store is allegedly a spyware – Gaming_Crusader, a user on Reddit said that Epic automatically looks through your system files and your browser for information. Epic Games’s privacy policy for more information.
• Last but not least as mentioned above, users believe that Epic gatekeeping games are bad for consumers.

Steam remains the king of the PC gaming market

Epic Games / Fortnite

At the end of the day, Valve is a giant corporation that has had control over the PC market for decades with their games including Counter-Strike and Dota 2. Additionally, they own one of the most popular game stores in the world, Steam which will be a difficult king to uncrown.