Gearbox founder says Epic Games Store hopes were “misplaced or overly optimistic”

It's an open question whether Epic's limited success is a result of the company's failure to "press its advantage," as Pitchford opines, or just a sign that Steam's massive entrenched network effects have proven more resilient than he expected.

It's not. EGS doesn't solve any problems that Steam leaves on the table to be solved. Customers have no reason to shop at EGS when Epic takes its thumb off the scale.

Imagine if Steam and EGS were hotdog vendors.

Steam offers all the condiments; mustard, ketchup, mayo, relish, onions, pickles, tomatoes, bacon, cheese, chili, etc.

EGS is just a plain hotdog. No condiments. You're lucky to even get a bun.

Both are equal price.

Which hotdog are you getting?

Now imagine that the plain hotdog guy keeps whining that nobody wants his hotdogs.

It's false equivalence to claim steam has a monopoly when you're literally giving epic a monopoly on your games for financial kickbacks between yourselves that in the best case doesn't impact the user and worst case actively compells them to a much worse platform. What epic and gearbox did is monopolistic, what steam did is just make a good enough product that no one gives a sh*t about EGS. If you want an actual competitive store front, make something your users want, not your business partners. Gog is struggling but it's still my first goto for games because even if it's missing all of steams functionality, it gives me ownership of games that can't just be revoked or broken by publishers. That's a value add I'm willing to pay for. Paying more so publishers can make more money and sell a worse experience through EGS ain't moving me.

Sometimes I wonder if these people understand that no player ever wanted exclusivities on a game store. Instead of providing a decent service, they're litteraly trying to kidnap customers with a choice between waiting for months for this big release or taking it on a subpar platform.

"Famously, Steam does very little to earn the massive cut they take"

Must be why it's so successful.

EGS is worse than Steam was 10 years ago. Its only useful for piling free games from the store that I'll never play.

I gave Epic's store a chance but even after all this time it's still shit and very far from feature parity with Steam. There's not even proper reviews. No big-picture equivalent. No good out-of-the-box Linux support. No Steam-Deck. The list is very very long. Until Epic starts delivering, the 30% cut Valve takes is more than justified.

I don’t get why anyone pays attention to these wannabe Hollywood producers like him or Todd Howard. The most interesting and innovative things in gaming are NOT happening in the AAA space.

I don't even bother claiming free Amazon games on the epic store.

do nothing

Win

The gaben method works again

This is a CEO covering his ass. Nothing to see here folks

What he really meant to say was that he shilled out for the bags of money

I would love to see reasonable competition to steam which would give consumers and developers better options, but Epic ain't it

With his Linux takes I'm starting to think ol Tim doesn't have a good grasp on computer games

I like the fact they tried to compete with Steam from the begining. I have a large library of games and some real gems that I wouldn't normally look at.

EGS is ok, GOG is ok and also Steam is just ok too for what I want from a store/launcher.

No digital game store is worth your loyalty.

Imagine if both epic and the devs made an agreement to make all games 10% cheaper and share the costs.

Gearbox founder? Is this about greasy Randy?