Steam vs EGS

The war of the vidjergaem selling platforms. One is the old fogie who’s been winning battle after battle against the toughest opponents. One is the newcomer on the block trying out brave new strategies like halving its own cut to raise profits to the developers that choose to stay with them. In the end, only one will survive. Right now, that one that’s going to survive is Steam and in spite of its efforts EGS still barely has any marketshare. Why is this? Let’s find out.

I’m going to preface this by saying that I’m not a Valve shill in any way and also that I fucking despise them at this point. Software wise, the last good game they made was in 2011 and everything since have been among the worst games ever made, treasures such as Dota 2, CS:GO (which was deliberately killed like Overwatch so people would play CS2), Artifact, Overlords, Alyx (a shitty VR game basically proving the entire thing is little more than a gimmick), and whatever other diarreha they made that was so forgettable I didn’t even feel like including it.

Hardware wise, most of what they released was utter trash. The only thing I’m holding out some interest in is the Steam Deck but I doubt Valve has the capability to properly market this thing.

I’ve essentially stopped doing business with Valve entirely. If it weren’t for the fact that I occasionally still get Steam PMs I would have very little reason to even be using the platform to begin with. I mention all of this because criticizing EGS’s shortcomings is seen as Valve shilling for some odd reason.

Alright, so these places both sell videogames. Most people do not know how to juggle multiple accounts, and as a result don’t really like to have more accounts than they really need, so as a result it typically ends up that these people are only going to use one of any given service, so whichever service they use is going to be the one they like.

Most people already have an account for Steam when it comes to buying videogames on PC, so Steam has that sort of advantage and that’s a really good advantage to have. Then again, it’s not the only thing that matters. Lots of old services have been dropped overnight because better alternatives existed, but it usually requires people to want an alternative.

Let’s take a quick look at EGS’s strategy. One of their key selling points at the moment at least is that they take half the regular cut that most places do. For example, if you sold your game on Steam (or anywhere else, really) you would see 70% of the profits and Steam would take the remaining 30% to keep themselves afloat. EGS would take 15% and you would see the remaining 85%.

That’s pretty sexy. If I was a developer, I’d be okay with that. Most devs can still easily profit off of the 70%, but nobody’s going to say no to extra money. So, their next idea is to start making exclusitivity deals. If people can’t get their games on Steam, they’ll have to come to EGS to buy them instead. So, a lot of games started getting EGS exclusitivity. Some of these were pretty notable, I’m pretty sure Hades was a timed exclsuvie on Epic and that was a pretty massive indie game.

You’re starting to notice the strategy here, right? Be as nice as possible to developers, and the developers will come over and make the games for your platform and not Steam. Make them never wanna go back. The problem is that they’re missing an incredibly key component IN this strategy, which is the actual consumers who buy and play videogames.

This is the part where Valve realized they could very easily sit back and LOL because EGS was literally never going to figure this out.

In its years of development, Steam has created a lot of useful things for its users. It’s added its own messaging system, which at the time was very useful for organizing people into games, it has a forum where customers can directly talk to developers. It has a review system to help sort the trash. It has a good recommendation system to help avoid seeing the trash to begin with. It has a workshop for easy access to mods, which many people actively use. It has an inventory system first developed in Valve’s games then made free use for any developer that wishes to utilize it, it has a market system for trading those inventory items for real money…

There’s more but you get the idea. Valve implemented a lot of things that help consumers, as well as developers. You could argue how much (YOU) would like to use such things, but it should be pretty clear to you that there is at least some existing market of people who actively use and enjoy such things. Some of Steam’s ideas have been challenged by competitors like Discord (even they’re using official public Discord servers lol) but the core of what people like is still there.

EGS has uh… uhm… they occasionally put games for free. But wait Steam does that too. Oh… Um…

Actually if you look at this a different way, EGS’s actions could be easily considered incredibly backhanded and aggressive towards actual consumers. Exclusitivity deals do nothing but fuck over the paying customer, and the 15% cut is something the consumer never actually sees. A 60$ game isn’t suddenly going to cost less because of the decreased cut, at least in most cases, the dev is just going to pocket the extra money.

On top of that they’re very aggressive to Linux users, actively barring them from playing their games, but Linux users aren’t that big of an audience anyways so shrug.

To the early adopters who were trying it anyways, they had the wonderful experience of a store that was so broken it didn’t even have a shopping cart. I seriously doubt that EGS is that broken today, but I haven’t checked.

All of this essentially means that short of Epic directly giving developers money (which actually happens a lot), devs aren’t actually going to see any profit on EGS. At all. The 15% cut doesn’t matter when nobody is buying the game to begin with, because nobody wants to use EGS because EGS is a bad platform.

Games that sell millions of copies on Steam might only sell hundreds tops on EGS. Smaller games that sell hundreds might only see 10 sales at best.

There’s also a factor where people simply hear about new game releases the moment they see them on Steam, but this could easily be the case for EGS as well if they were convinced EGS was a platform worth using, which it is not.

I don’t count out EGS just yet. I have very bad experiences with Valve and could easily see this scenario 180ing very quickly if Epic pulled their heads out of their asses and really figured out what people wanted in their online DRM vidyajaem stores. So far they don’t seem to be doing that at all and are still desperate to make their exclusitivity strategy work, which only turns more and more consumers against them.

Epic, with a similar hubris Napoleon must’ve had taking the Grand Armee into Russia, figured that this’d be an easy victory and that EGS would basically be turning a profit within a few years of its release. So far it has yet to report a single profitable year and is bleeding money like nobody’s business. How long they’ll keep it going is beyond me, they do have ties to China so maybe they’re getting infinite handouts as long as one day they can pull off a success, but if that was the case why not use those infinite handouts to improve the platform?

I just don’t get it. Epic’s strategy does not make a lick of sense to me, it very much feels like a strategy born in a boardroom instead of born from experience.