The Epic Games Store is the First Real Threat to Steam – IGN

By Tom Marks

This week, Fortnite developer Epic Games announced and then launched a digital storefront housed in the Epic Games Launcher. Apparently that’s the trendy thing to do nowadays since Discord launched its own back in October, but the Epic Games Store feels like the first real threat to Steam’s dominance as the go-to place to buy PC games.

I’m not saying that Steam is certainly doomed, and even if Epic does manage to push it off the top spot it will likely take years. But this new store is in a unique position to do so. Thanks to Fortnite, there are millions of players out there with the store already installed, and Epic doesn’t have to convince or force a player base into using its store in the same way other developer-made launchers like Origin and Uplay did.

More than that, Epic already has massive loyalty from people playing Fortnite on mobile. That audience is much younger, and I would bet most of them don’t even have a gaming PC yet. But a couple years down the line they might, and if Fortnite is still as big as it is now (which seems likely) the Epic Games Launcher will undoubtedly be the first thing that audience installs on their fancy new computers.

The promise of access to that growing player base is undoubtedly an exciting prospect for any major developer, but Epic is also offering devs a significantly larger 88% cut of the revenue than Valve currently does on Steam – a point that’s lead to rising discontent with their platform recently. That means Epic is convincing game makers to get on board with a fervor that Discord or GOG haven’t, and already has the audience waiting to browse.

Epic came out swinging at The Game Awards Thursday night too. It announced that Bastion creator Supergiant Games’ newest game Hades was live now exclusively on the Epic store, alongside Annapurna’s highly anticipated Ashen. Another big surprise was that Journey, previously a Sony exclusive, would be coming to PC on the Epic store, and some games like Satisfactory even removed their Steam listing to switch platforms.

As a bit of a bribe to check it out, Epic even revealed it would be giving away a new game on their store completely free every two weeks, the first two of which are the excellent Subnautica and Super Meat Boy. It’s clear that they are pushing this hard to an audience bigger than your average Fortnite fan, and I’d say it’s safe to expect many more “Exclusive to Epic” announcements by E3 next year.

As for the platform itself, the Epic Games Store seems to offer a good start that needs to be built upon. The UI is attractive, though I’m not sure how well it will scale once it has more than a dozen games on it – but, then again, we don’t yet know how Epic is planning to curate the games it adds, or if it will go for the much-criticized “anything goes” policy of Steam.

The store launcher also seems to be missing some of the things Steam (and other platforms) have standardized by now like cloud saves for your account. More concerningly, it hasn’t retained some of Steam’s hard-learned lessons, specifically around Early Access labeling. Hades was released in Early Access, but it lacks any of the warnings, update plans, or other details that Steam has mandated to protect customers from buying into a bad deal. There’s an “Early Access FAQ” that you have to click into, but it lacks the hard, structured answers Steam enforces and is missing much of the same info as a result.

Since Fortnite is pretty much in a perpetual state of Early Access, it’s not surprising that Epic would be less concerned about this, but that doesn’t mean clear warnings and protections shouldn’t still be there. I don’t doubt for a second that Supergiant will treat Hades and its fans right, and maybe Epic plans to vet Early Access games and their developers itself before allowing them onto the store, but would that mean Epic also takes responsibility if a game is abandoned before completion?

Even if I’m optimistic about the store as a whole, there are still a lot of questions left to answer. A million little things could change or go wrong for Epic, and we probably won’t really know if it’s catching on in a significant way for at least the next year. Countless stores have come and gone (or at least been forgotten) in the past, and Epic’s could easily be next.

But with a huge amount of both players and devs already onboard, alongside a younger audience quickly growing up, it’s not unreasonable to think the Epic Games Store could slowly rise toward being the new normal. Even if that happens, Steam likely won’t “die” as a result of that success, but the Epic Games Store is almost certainly the most genuine threat to its crown so far.

Tom Marks is IGN’s PC Editor and pie maker. You can follow him on Twitter.