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

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 115 points 2 months ago (40 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I want to point out that Valve won't allow games to be sold on Steam and be cheaper anywhere else. With the lower cut Epic takes games could be cheaper there, but Valve uses their dominant market position to force developers to set the same price on other marketplaces if they want to also be on Steam, which is essentially required.

I get some of the hate, but the "fuck Epic" crowd always annoy me. It's such an ignorant position. That said, I don't use the Epic store because it sucks to use. Fuck monopolies though. Steam has too much control. We need competition or we're going to suffer in the future.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

As has been pointed out by many other people in this thread, this is untrue.

If you are providing a Steam key, it has to be the same price as Steam. Otherwise, you can set whatever price you want (e.g. if you were selling on both Steam and Epic - like Borderlands 3, which frequently had sales on Epic where the price dropped below the Steam price)

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

It's even fine to sell your Steam keys at a lower price in another place - as long as you're planning to have a similar sale on Steam at some similar time.

It's OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.

TL;DR: Games sold on Epic could be any price they want. They're no different to Steam, in general, because that's what publishers choose.

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