this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2025
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Alright I know people rag on Epic all the time... but it's truly incredible how hard they keep dropping the ball. It's been SEVEN YEARS since it was created and it still feels so basic and terrible to use.
The store is drab and uses huge chunks of space just to advertise fortnite and f2p rewards. Discovery is terrible and the store is full of crypto scams and AI spam shovelware, which is ironic because Epic started off being very selective about what's allowed to be published there. The store also feels like adware because it keeps spamming random notifications and ads unless you turn it off.
The best part is that Epic constantly blames users for not wanting to leave Steam instead of admitting their store sucks. They keep spending tens of millions buying exclusives and giving away games for free rather than spending any time improving the store. Seriously, what are they doing over there?
It's called shortsighted management.
Valve has had success with Steam because they ask themselves "What do gamers want, and how can we turn a profit by giving it to them?" For example, many of us want to mod our games. Enter the Steam Workshop. It's free, convenient and exclusive so it fidelizes (is that a word in English?) customers and indirectly makes them money while improving their image in the market.
Epic's management instead asks themselves "How can we make money off of gamers?" without trying to understand the market. They see that there are many free games on Steam, and many console exclusives, and their tiny MBA brains decide that the only way forward is with free games to lock us to their platform (that's what Valve did, right?) and exclusives so we have no choice. And they have no idea why Valve waste their time with Workshop, Community forums for each game, Proton (Linux and Mac are such a tiny share of the market!) or any of that not-obviously-profitable filler that is in fact what sets Steam apart as a service rather than just a storefront.
Builds customer loyalty = se fideliza
Thank you! Yes, that's what I meant.
Con gusto, parce.
The modding is great, I got so much extra content for Mudrunner by the mods available in the community.
Same with Mech Warrior5, even just adding the war mod turned on more fire and smoke from salvos and thick clouds from burning mechs; it brought the game from a cartoony weapon feel to an actually battle scene.
I think Epic was very arrogant in their approach assuming consumers have no self control over buying things, so assumed they'd get them no matter what if they made things exclusive to their store. That pissed off vocal people would still not be able to resist not buying games.
Which actually is not a bad bet to make, but turned out to surprisingly not work as well as they hoped it would. And led to lingering animosity towards them that is still around years later.
And they still seem lost when it comes to trying to figure out how to win consumers over. It's like they got advice from Randy Pitchford from 2K telling them the way to win consumers over is to berate them and attack the competition.
And even when people do buy the exclusives on their store, what reason do they have to buy anything else there?
Just like the free games, it would work as advertising, to initially attract people that then decide their product is worth using. But it will never work for making people use their store for anything else as long as it's as terrible as it is.
It's also not 2009: Netflix streaming isn't new. The consumer cost, time, administration and inevitable enshittification of a platform walled garden is not lost on gamers. No one wants 4 streaming services or have to open up a separate launcher depending on what game company created it.
Yeah I've been boycotting them from the start and still am, because fuck 'em
To be fair to Epic, I don't want to leave Steam. It's great having most of my games in one place. Steam has had very pro-customer policies. Even when I got some free games on Epic, if I ended up playing them a lot, I would just buy the game on Steam when it next went on sale just to keep my collection in one place
As long as Steam keeps favoring the users, I'll keep using it