Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford discusses his thoughts about the Epic Games Store and the years-old exclusivity deal for Borderlands 3 to skip Steam on PC.
I've been interested in a couple Epic exclusive games but never wanted to buy them from Epic. Even once they finally come to Steam the game is tainted in my mind and I've got other stuff to play by then.
Borderlands 3 and Wonderlands demonstrated clearly that the customers show up for the games, not the store front.
This doesn’t seem to match my own experience but I would be curious to see the steam vs epic sales numbers for gearbox. I use steam because it has good features. If epic supported user reviews, a flexible refund policy, a workshop for user mods, voice chat, cloud saves between devices, achievements, profile customization, the ability to stream games to a different device, etc. I might be more inclined to try it. I waited for borderlands 3 and wonderlands to come to steam and be on sale before I purchased there was zero incentive for me to create an epic games store account unless I really wanted the game right away. Epic exclusives were a good business idea (it worked for Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo for years) but they needed to develop a good store front along with them because it just isn’t sustainable.
One thing that I am somewhat curious about is if Epic has the downtime steam does for maintenance. As an east coaster valve has definitely screwed me over several times on Tuesdays. Granted, it's been months since I've been caught in any maintenance window related downtime so maybe they're making progress there.