Because Tim doesn't believe the customer matters, and it shows.
Epic Store was intended to be focused on the developer experience. That's why they offered a better cut of the profits and removed features developers hated like user reviews or forums that make it harder for developers to control the narrative. Tim believes that if he can win over the other publishers to only sell on Epic, they'll all abandon Steam and then the gamers will fall in line.
The problem is, the few who actually did publish Epic exclusives saw their sales completely bomb because nobody actually uses the damn thing except as a launcher for Fortnite.
Sweeney is a greedy piece of shit. I have no doubt his "pro developer" stance would quickly disappear if he overtook Steam. The increase in profits might not decline all at once, but given a few years he would have seen no reason to give them a better deal than Steam if he dominated the market.
He tried to take over the niche with brute force and failed because he didn't understand the opponent. It's a win for consumers, even if some of them don't realize it.
Yeah it's the same model as Kick/Rumble. They try to win over the content creators(developers in Epic's case) with better splits, but we all know if they actually overtook their competitor, they would immediately start inching closer and closer to the splits the creators ran from in the first place. Not to mention how dogshit Epic is for the end user in comparison to Steam. It's why Tim Sweeney is bankrolling damn near every lawsuit against Valve at the moment. He'd rather try to overtake Steam underhandedly instead of just making a better fucking product. He's a fucking rat and I hope he never gets what he wants.
Which I will never fucking get. Like if you wanna win people over, make a better fucking product. I hate that in our day and age instead of doing that its "Fuck over the guy making the better product and force the user into something shittier!"
That was blatantly obvious when they released Fortnite as a pve and took our money, pivoted to the battle royal money and fucked over every cunt who funded the project from the get go, we got to wait because seasons?. I think they eventually finished it a few years later, but i dont know because fuck that shit it was too late and fuck epic.
I think for products trying to compete with Steam it's an accurate assesment that the devs are the customer.
In my opinion the whole steam ecosystem and market place and social hubs etc. was lightning in a bottle and trying to reach parity on those things is a waste of time because of the sunk cost consumers have in the steam ecosystem.
Even if Epic provided an objectively better service it wouldn't guarantee customers adopt their storefront because they are already married to steam
But it's hard to prove one way or another because no other storefront really provides the breadth of services that Steam does. GoG has competed with DRM free versions of classic games, Itch.io sells indie games that often aren't listed on Steam... and then there are a bunch of storefronts that basically exist to act as a launcher for one studio's games like Epic, Uplay, Origin (is that one still around?), and Battle.net.
Yeah i mean fair, i kind of think of it like World of Warcraft.
It's not that i think it's impossible to compete with WoW and draw long-time fans to a competing product; I just think the amount of resources and time it would take to do so is prohibitively expensive.
So yeah, agreed it's hard to prove one way or the other but i think we'd agree that whoever attempts it is up against an insanely tough competitor, even if it's not strictly speaking impossible.
Really it comes down to that Steam is basically a monopoly. No one likes having their games split between stores, so no one else can compete because Steam is already established.
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u/grendus 8h ago
Because Tim doesn't believe the customer matters, and it shows.
Epic Store was intended to be focused on the developer experience. That's why they offered a better cut of the profits and removed features developers hated like user reviews or forums that make it harder for developers to control the narrative. Tim believes that if he can win over the other publishers to only sell on Epic, they'll all abandon Steam and then the gamers will fall in line.
The problem is, the few who actually did publish Epic exclusives saw their sales completely bomb because nobody actually uses the damn thing except as a launcher for Fortnite.