As part of an ongoing trial, an executive has revealed that the Epic Games Store still isn't profitable, and after years of roasting the Steam competitor the PC gaming community has some theories about why that might be.
Take the video from Digital Foundry's Alexander Battaglia below for example. Here, Battaglia demonstrates how you can launch Steam and get into a game of Alan Wake 2 in the space of about 10 seconds. The same process on the Epic Games Store takes the better part of a minute. Of course, the extra irony is that Alan Wake 2 isn't even officially available through Steam - Battaglia's using a workaround to get the game running through Valve's platform.
Hmm... I wonder why? (turn on audio) https://t.co/aDAf0ss7Go pic.twitter.com/34Mx4P82vuNovember 7, 2023
That's not the only instance of a renewed complaint against the Epic Games Store, but it is perhaps the most telling. This all comes in response to a comment from EGS boss Steve Allison during the Epic versus Google lawsuit over Fortnite fees. As The Verge reports, Allison said on the witness stand that the store still isn't profitable yet, and that the company's current goal for the platform continues to simply be growth.
Steam is the de facto home of PC gaming, and since the launch of its own store in 2018, Epic has attempted to compete largely by offering regular free games and investing in exclusive distribution deals for the PC versions of a wide array of major games. The company went even further with Alan Wake 2, serving as publisher for the long-anticipated sequel.
The elephant in this particular room is that the Epic Games Store just doesn't seem to work as well as Steam does. Battaglia's example is anecdotal - there are others who've had better results in similar comparisons - but it certainly tracks with my own experience using EGS. Between sales, free game giveaways, and titles I get as a games writer, I have over 1000 games on Epic, and simply navigating the library (much less installing or launching a game) has slowly become more and more of a nightmare over the years.
Once upon a time, I felt that the Epic Games Store was fine - it is, after all, just another window from which to launch your digital PC games. I don't use most of Steam's community features, so I don't really miss them here, either. But as the years have worn on, the platform's poor performance and laggy interface has grown increasingly more difficult to excuse.
Epic does offer generous revenue splits for developers, which at least makes it an attractive option for the folks making some of the best PC games out there.
