This is the most asinine approach IMO.

"Let's release a worse product. Hey, no one likes it. Okay, let's spend money on games so THEY can essentially force people to use our software. Hey, still, no one really likes it. Okay, let's try to give away stuff for free. Hey, people use our thing for the free stuff but still no one likes it for any other reason."

They just keep spending money to up their numbers and their product is still missing features and inferior to competition. They spend big money on exclusivity, but that is only temporary - if that's how you're getting your customers, you're going to have to keep doing it forever to retain them. If people only use you for free stuff, you're just going to have to keep giving stuff away at a loss to retain them.

This model is not sustainable. You're not doing anything that aligns value with your customers besides just throwing free stuff at them. That's not a business.

What's especially sad to me is they could literally have just spent that same money to improve their launcher and have an actual product. Instead they've invested in temporary stats. They're essentially bankrolling other devs on games with temporary popularity instead of in their lifelong product.

Using other games exclusivity as sway into your ecosystem only works when you have a good product the person would be interested in but they haven't seen it yet. EGS is currently something people are essentially coerced into using but no one really gets any real value out of it other than "well I couldn't buy this game anywhere else"

We made the shittiest thing and nobody likes it. We’re all out of ideas.

That's one interesting thing about this: They trained the players so hard to associate their store with the free weekly giveaways and only the free weekly giveaways, that's all everyone uses the client for now, and never mentally considers it to be usable for anything else.

The effect is pervasive, too. Games factually have not released if they're epic-exclusive. They're not discoverable on PC, as nobody would ever imagine checking the Epic catalogue for a game they're looking for. That's not what you open Epic for, it's those 1-2 free weekly games and nothing else.

In their bid to vie for developers not consumers they went so far too far that they have managed to alienate the concept of "selling games to players" in the consumers' minds, therefor making their store automatically unable to compete at its main intent.

Mind you, there are far more problems with it. Among which is that despite having so little in there, discoverability and navigation are downright terrible! It's an interesting lesson for frontend/UI design I imagine.

Won't even take their free 'gifts', worse than Origin when it comes to spyware and data collecting. I can't understand anyone who willingly puts EGS on their device but complains about advertisers on other platforms collecting info about them.

Steam got to where it is by good will, good prices and good features.

Well, eventually.

When Steam was first released, the running joke was "steaming pile of shit". It was slow, unreliable and only a couple of shades of green away from the worst color in the world. People complained about the birth of "always online" games and about paying full price but not even getting a box with it.

It's not exactly unassailable now either. It's my platform of choice as a user but for indie developers, the 30% cut is brutal and last I used it, the Steamworks SDK was pretty rough. The app itself also has a lot of legacy bloat like a built in MP3 player.

It's ahead of the rest but I think "good will, good prices and good features" might be an overly romantic take on "it's where all my games already are".

To make it worse, I have all these games, but I still rarely play them. Not that it’s a bad selection, but between steamdeck, gamepass and just a crazy backlog on Steam makes me rarely think of Epic store.

Gamers lose when the store shuts down and you lose access to all of the games you got for free, or worse actually paid for.

ESG losing money is great for me just on principle, Tim Sweeney can go fuck himself.

But you have to give Valve credit for supporting Linux gaming witch if gets popular enough will create perfect competition for Windows. imagine system that requires 1GB or RAM instead of 4-5GB when idle , that doesn't spy on you and is more secure. Perfect for gaming IMHO if taken seriously.