331

Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford says his hopes on Epic Store were 'overly optimistic or misplaced' (www.tweaktown.com)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by simple@lemm.ee to c/games@lemmy.world

112 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm genuinely shocked how much Epic poured into the store and it still lacks so much basic features. Sorting games is still extremely barebones, store is filled with NFT/crypto garbage, the store still looks like a college student's first front-end project, and last time I used the launcher to pick up free games (last year), it was still slow as hell. What were they doing in the past 5 years aside from dropping millions on exclusivity deals?

Epic is going to have to prioritize the store and try some new initiatives while also doubling down on earning pivotal exclusives if it is going to have a chance. I also hope other viable competitors arrive.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz 115 points 4 months ago

I see some larger publishers bemoan the fact that Epic hasn't caught on, but it should be pretty obvious why. Markets that favor the buyer more than they favor sellers will typically attract the largest user base, and the sellers don't have a choice to not sell where the buyers are.

Epic giving away free games is a nice buyer friendly action, but literally everything else they've done, from paid exclusives to poor client experience isn't favorable to buyers. They've created a market that no buyers want to use unless the product is free or literally not available anywhere else.

Giving publishers/devs better cuts is great, but it does nothing for you if all the buyers are on Steam instead.

[-] ryathal@sh.itjust.works 42 points 4 months ago

Advertising better cuts to publishers doesn't mean much when the price is the same across platforms. If epic was consistently 10% cheaper than steam it would get better traction.

[-] IronKrill@lemmy.ca 31 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

They do often have better sales, but you have to launch the store to know and personally I would rather pay the extra $1 to buy on Steam...

[-] Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz 22 points 4 months ago

Steam also has a lot of other stores selling their games though. Unless epic is giving it away for free, I'm probably going to get a better deal through a fanatical bundle or someone else than I would on epic.

[-] yamanii@lemmy.world 10 points 4 months ago

This is true, here in Brazil we have an official key seller called Nuuvem that has prices so good TikTok banned their ads thinking it was a scam, since they often have small discounts even on new games.

Just have to be careful because sometimes the key is for Uplay instead of steam.