The meme about Valve/Steam “does nothing, keeps winning” is mostly true (I don’t think the average gamer knows about Valve’s contributions to FOSS).
Because of Fortnite EGS has a very big installed base. People added their friends on Epic because of Fortnite. And yet gamers buy other games on Steam instead. That may have something to do with the fact that the main page of EGS mainly promotes Epic’s own games, whereas Steam promotes third party games first.
I’ve commented elsewhere about this, but it’s probably more about the customer experience than anything else. I can only speak to me and my friends use cases, but steam has the best infrastructure for social gamers in my opinion. Remote play together and family sharing encourages me to buy through steam over any other platform. Steams friend list features are not even what I’d call robust, but I can’t even set my status to invisible on epic. If I want to play a game with online connectivity I have to appear online to my friends list on epic. That is a bare bones feature that any platform that takes social experience seriously would add. Any game I expect to want to play solo/without interruption will be purchased through any platform other than epic for that issue alone. I don’t need a lot of the features steam has (discussion boards/game guides), but the fact that epic doesn’t see reviews as an important feature of their platform is also a huge oversight. If I see a game I like I’m checking steam reviews and since I’m already there, I might as well buy it there and potentially leave my own review. Steam also has robust infrastructure that can recommend similar games and lets me see a games tags to help me decide if I’ll enjoy it or help me manually search for similar games. EGS offers me nothing of the sort.
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The meme about Valve/Steam “does nothing, keeps winning” is mostly true (I don’t think the average gamer knows about Valve’s contributions to FOSS).
Because of Fortnite EGS has a very big installed base. People added their friends on Epic because of Fortnite. And yet gamers buy other games on Steam instead. That may have something to do with the fact that the main page of EGS mainly promotes Epic’s own games, whereas Steam promotes third party games first.
I’ve commented elsewhere about this, but it’s probably more about the customer experience than anything else. I can only speak to me and my friends use cases, but steam has the best infrastructure for social gamers in my opinion. Remote play together and family sharing encourages me to buy through steam over any other platform. Steams friend list features are not even what I’d call robust, but I can’t even set my status to invisible on epic. If I want to play a game with online connectivity I have to appear online to my friends list on epic. That is a bare bones feature that any platform that takes social experience seriously would add. Any game I expect to want to play solo/without interruption will be purchased through any platform other than epic for that issue alone. I don’t need a lot of the features steam has (discussion boards/game guides), but the fact that epic doesn’t see reviews as an important feature of their platform is also a huge oversight. If I see a game I like I’m checking steam reviews and since I’m already there, I might as well buy it there and potentially leave my own review. Steam also has robust infrastructure that can recommend similar games and lets me see a games tags to help me decide if I’ll enjoy it or help me manually search for similar games. EGS offers me nothing of the sort.