The Epic Games launcher has been a cancer of the game store variety. Now I’m not defending steam. Steam has their own problems, but that is because it doesn’t have any real competition. The Epic Games launcher was supposed to change that. But instead they took a backwards leap and instead of providing a reason for people to download their launcher, they have provided a reason for people to resort to piracy (Now I’m saying should, but rather that people have already done this).

Since Epic themselves want to be compared to steam, I’ll do a feature comparison.

Features Steam Epic Offline Games Yes No Cloud Saves Yes Some Games Achievements Yes Planned User Profiles Yes No Reviews Yes Planned Forums Yes No Groups Yes Maybe planned? Mods Yes Planned Trading Yes No Account Sharing Yes No Screenshots Yes No Guides Yes No Wish lists Yes Planned Linux Support Yes No Universal Controller Yes No Free Games No Yes Android Store No Planned Gifting Yes Planned

I’m really trying to give epic the benefit of the doubt out here and added the planned releases, because they themselves said that steam grew over time and so would EGS, which is true. But even with all those features there is still a lot of necessary things that aren’t planned within the year.

Along with all these missing features the epic games store as a slew of fundamental problems. Even before the launch of their store, people were getting hundreds of requests to access their account from weird locations. If it wasn’t for 2FA these people would have been hacked, and many people have. Their 2FA isn’t the best either. The two choices a user has is either an app authenticator which is the best option out of the two, or your email. The email that secure of a 2FA method because the hacker usually has access to your email already as they need it to log in, and if you’re using a poor email service, they may be able to get into there as well.

Then there was the EGS Mega sale, that was clearly meant to overshadow the Steam Summer Sale, the biggest sale on any game platform. Epic promised that any game over 15 dollars would be 10 dollars off, but many of the upcoming triple A titles suddenly weren’t available on the store until the sale ended. And if you wanted to buy a bunch of games during the sale, you would be blocked by Epic’s security because buying a lot of games in bulk is suspicious.

More recently Metro Exodus released a DLC for the game. On steam people who preordered the season pass before Exodus pulled out got to preload the DLC a day early and were able to play the DLC as soon as it was released. Meanwhile on the Epic Games store there was no preloading, and on the launch day people couldn’t get into their DLC. They finally deployed a fix the day after, but some people were still struggling to play it even then. (https://twitter.com/EpicGames/status/1163890235639508992)

And finally, the topic everyone wanted to hear about: Epic Games exclusive. Their exclusives system is extremely predatory and only makes people hate the launcher more. Epic is actively trying to take all of the games from steam so to force people onto their platform. But it’s less about just buying out the games and more about the games they choose. All the Epic exclusives are already highly successful games and franchises. Ooblets, for example, even though it is a smaller indie game than the other exclusives, it already had a massive following and by getting an exclusivity deal Epic knows that the game is going to earn them more money than they paid the company. And epic doesn’t take lightly to people who don’t accept their exclusivity deal. The recent release game DARQ denied the deal because they had already promised people a release date on steam, instead of being the bigger platform and letting DARQ be a non-exclusive on epic, they threw a hissy fit and denied DARQ a spot on their platform.

In the end, I’m not saying the Epic store is a bad store, but in its current state it has nowhere near the features of steam. And with the state of exclusives it is only harming itself by creating a deep hate for EGS within the gaming community.