r/gaming • u/doublah • 10h ago

Epic Games' new store is fully vibe-coded, and they're so proud of it they're taking shots at Steam

https://www.destructoid.com/epic-games-store-ai-vibe-coded/
11.6k Upvotes

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1.3k

u/juniorjaw 9h ago

I do like Steam's strategy of "Do nothing, Win" is still on a streak.

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u/Darder 8h ago

To be fair though, Steam is far from "Do nothing". They constantly improve the software.

Just in the last few years, we saw the arrival of Notes in the in-game overlay, which personally has been a game changer. We also have had some revision of store UI, improvements to the VR side of Steam, reviews are now by language and region first to compare to your region / language and probably a bunch of other stuff I have missed.

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u/ProcessingUnit002 7h ago

I didn’t even know notes were a thing in the overlay that’s sick

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u/Trixles 6h ago

Yeah it's dope as fuck. Epic is LIGHT-YEARS away from even holding a candle to Steam.

I don't know why Randy insists on holding on to this crazed fever dream of his, where he isn't a total dork and somehow his platform doesnt suck. It's a delusion that he can't seem to let go of.

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u/Mephzice 4h ago

very useful for puzzle games, you can even take screenshots and put them into the notes

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u/tempinator 2h ago

wtf lol that's super useful

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u/throwaway47351 4h ago

Honestly, that's probably a good portion of why they're successful. They do make changes, but by default the user is usually unaware of the changes.

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u/Darder 3h ago

Yeah it's amazing! And it even supports pasting in images inline, which helps a ton!

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u/Hellknightx 3h ago

If anything, Steam has a terminal problem with underselling their own improvements. Half the time they don't announce new features and you'll only find them by accident. Like I only recently found the "Interactive Recommender" feature on the store that analyzes your playtime in all of your owned games and then builds a custom list of games it thinks you'll like, with various filters and algorithm tweaks you can apply to narrow it down.

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u/locohobo 5h ago

the adding user specs to reviews helps a whole lot. its not on for every review but being able to see someone with performance issues has a potato pc means a whole lot vs just saying performance issues

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u/Darder 3h ago

Oh yeah! Absolutely, I love that feature.

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u/Justhe3guy 4h ago

Also the game release calendar

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u/fudge5962 2h ago

Valve has created so many libraries, tools, and APIs that basically all of modern gaming is powered by their work.

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u/Kopiok 1h ago

The calendar has also made discoverability crazy good.

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u/Nirrudn 33m ago

Just in the last few years, we saw the arrival of Notes in the in-game overlay, which personally has been a game changer.

Notes is probably my favorite addition, but Steam Recording has been a close second. I never remembered to turn on other software (Nvidia/Microsoft) for this, nor their hotkeys. I wish more games would add support for automatic markers in Steam recordings though.

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u/JimboTCB 9h ago

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

And Tim Sweeney is stepping on rakes like he's Sideshow Bob.

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u/AnOnlineHandle 9h ago

For some reason Steam copied vertical thumbnails from the other worse stores. I think they're a huge downgrade. First my Steam Account since 2003 has tons of games which never got vertical thumbnails so it looks like a broken mess. Second, the title text is at a different height level in every thumbnail so you can't just scan across a line and read the titles. Third, you can see way fewer things on screen at once for no benefit, everything is just worse.

Annoyingly all games have horizontal thumbnails still, they're used in things like your steam profile page. They just won't give the option to make the library use them, which as a programmer of 30 years I can say is probably about the easiest possible thing to implement.

The "What's New" bar in the library also fucking sucks too. I've never used it and it just eats up space trying to advertise DLCs etc when I want to look at the things I've already bought in a clean library. Leave ads for the store page.

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u/SDRPGLVR 8h ago

UX/UI is on such a downward spiral. Even games that are ten years old like Overwatch have taken on a modern enshittified interface to... I dunno, stay relevant?

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u/Strowy 6h ago

The "What's New" bar in the library also fucking sucks too.

You can disable pretty much everything from showing up in What's New, and if it has nothing to show it hides itself.

The games without vert thumbails are a mess (I have a few myself), but if you have one you use/see regularly, you can set custom images yourself, which is a neat feature (right click - properties - customization).

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u/AnOnlineHandle 4h ago

You can disable pretty much everything from showing up in What's New, and if it has nothing to show it hides itself.

Thanks I'll try that. edit: Wait do you have to delete notifications one by one or is there another way to make it go away for good?

In the past it was possible to disable it by adding a HTML override somewhere or something, but they disabld that.

The games without vert thumbails are a mess (I have a few myself), but if you have one you use/see regularly, you can set custom images yourself, which is a neat feature (right click - properties - customization).

Yeah I've considered it but it's dozens of games and it's more just the principle of the thing that the best game store in the world just went and broke its UI like that for any long term users without the ability to set it to the assets it used before which exist and would work.

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u/Strowy 16m ago

For What's New you can change general settings around to drastically reduce entry numbers and also flag specific games to not show any.

With the reduction toggle and a half-dozen games flagged, for the 60+ games I have installed What's New pops up maybe once a week with a changelog I might actually read, hide, and not see that bar again for a while.

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u/Bodomi 1h ago edited 1h ago

You can delete the Play Next shelf if you do not like it.

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u/ThatGuyYouMightNo 7h ago

Sweeney's paying someone top dollar to design the most efficient way to step on as many rakes as possible

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u/Admirable_Risk8156 5h ago

But why does steam, the largest store, not simply eat the smaller store? /s

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u/Hellknightx 3h ago

Steam is actually doing a lot. They just don't put a ton of marketing out there and quietly toil away at new features, only to unveil them when they're finally ready. Or they do stuff silently and most users remain blissfully unaware that Steam is making the platform better all the time.

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u/Specialist-Award4293 30m ago

For me it's like

Store: Steam is an unfair monopoly, they need competition!

Me: Okay, then compete.

Store: It's hard :(