Epic Games Store is only attractive cause it has a regular slew of free games, yet people only stick to Steam after getting their share of free games from other platforms. As always there is a store that keeps people coming and that’s not the one from Epic, but the one from Valve, and this will remain like this until other stores are better than it. I feel like GOG is much better considering its the only front where you don’t have games with DRM, but Epic Games Store has the potential to be great provided they stop pushing for “AI” slop.
Epic Games Store fails at retention
This signals a big issue with retention, the magic metric that defines the success of a product or service. The fact that most people just use the Epic Games Store client for Fortnite shows that they don’t have interest for anything else. The funniest thing is that they don’t even care about the Epic Games Store if they are on Console because then that’s just a direct install into their systems. Free games keep the store alive, unlike Steam where its actually making sales and taking the cut of hard earned money by the developers.
There is not much of a reason to drop your game on Steam if you are a small developer because the fees might deter you from doing so if you fail, its a gamble. However, considering how the algorithm works there, you can pretty much do anything you want and still find a modicum of success. Regardless, with how authoritarian Steam is with uploads I believe that Itch.io might be the better place to upload your good games and from there move to the big platforms. I’m not sure where this whole Age Verification thing will move us into, but I know it will destroy gaming as we know it.
