Why Gamers Prefer Steam Over Epic Games Store: Exclusive Content vs. User-Friendly Features

“The games have clearly shown that customers show up for the games, not the store.

People show up for the games, but some stay away because of the store. I refuse to use the EGS. It may be more developer friendly, but they are very monopolistic and therefore unfriendly to users.

Steam allows 3 types of sales of your games: sale in the Steam store for a 30% commission, sale of Steam Keys without commission but at the same price as the Steam store, and distribution completely outside Steam without limits. They rely, reasonably, on customers who prefer to buy directly through Steam, as they have a lot of user-friendly features.

EGS is pushing hard for exclusives in their store to attract customers, and their feature list is pretty crap. For years there wasn’t even something as simple as a shopping cart (and maybe still is, I honestly have no idea). And they can’t match many other features that Steam simply brings (Proton Linux compatibility, universal gamepad support via Steam overlay, cloud and version saves, the workshop, to to name a few). Therefore they do not compete on quality, but on market distortion by preventing the supply from being available in competing shops. I will never reward the user friendly EGS practices.

The industry gives its monopoly to Steam because publishers are afraid of the risk of supporting stores that have more friendly policies for developers and publishers.

There are plenty of other options, several publishers have their own launchers and stores, GOG. The market gives Steam a near monopoly as their feature list and customer friendliness attract customers and existing game library into 1 store. This means that a publication on Steam is a large possible market. It has very little to do with publishers’ fear of support.

TL; DR Steam competes on features, EGS on monopolizing exclusives. So while I come for the games, I walk away because of EGS.

[Reactie gewijzigd door wild_dog op 23 augustus 2024 15:40]