Epic Games Launcher would always end up a pile of shit anyway. Tim Sweeney is a fuckhead and he has lots of investors to please.

its not about making better product for epic. its about removing competition so they dont have to.

Sweeney is legit delulu tbh.

He literally said Epic's launcher/store is ready as is, doesn't need more development. It also runs in Unreal Engine, so you get Chromium (CEF) + Unreal Engine running just for one launcher/store.

At least on Linux you can run Unreal Editor without EGS (because it doesn't exist on Linux) and if you've claimed any free games on Epic, you can use Heroic launcher to manage them easily.

it's often more risky and expensive to hire, train and develop systems and communities like that, especially when doing it against the tide, than to just try to trip up the competition. It's not just that it's dificult and it costs money, but it's not preferred because investors abhor risks.

Isn't this seen in global politics all the time. When US says China is too dominant in X and we need to fight it. They are not saying that US will invest in shit that will help them compete. All or 90% of the actions is to try to trip up, sabotage and sanction the competition.

And a Mac client.

epic is irrelevant because nobody wants it, not because steam is trying to crush competition.

Why is Epic insignificant?

They launched with a 12% service fee, dropped that service fee to 10%, and then dropped the service fee entirely for the first $1Mn in sales per year.

In June 2025, they released a new feature enabling developers to launch their own webshops hosted by the Epic Games Store. These webshops could offer players out-of-app purchases, as a more "cost-effective" alternative to in-app purchases.

They provide developers with free to generate license keys, and keyless integration with other e-shop stores including GOG, Humble Bundle, and Prime gaming.

They offer a user review system.

They also added cloud saves in July of 2025.

The thing is, they offer none of the other features Steam offers:

• In-Home Streaming
• Remote Play with Friends
• Family Accounts
• Achievements
• Price Adjusted Bundles
• Gifting Games
• Shopping Cart
• TV/Big Screen Mode

Epic launched their service in 2018. It's been 7 years. The only reason not to offer feature parity (for a company that makes $4.6Bn - 5.7Bn in revenue, and a shop that makes $1.09Bn, you'd think they would be enticing users with the services they want.

What they have done instead is exclusivity deals that plenty of consumers complain about but devs don't seem to care about so long as they're getting paid.

So, the excuse that Steam got there first (as if it's just about that and the reason their market share is what it is is because they have refined, adapted, and improved their service offering over time) doesn't make a whole lot of sense when steam has a significant percent of the market share (79.5% to epic's 42.3%) but is only making twice the revenue of their rival store.

It makes sense for GOG or Itch.io who's market cap is smaller by quite a lot to not offer the same feature parity. Each of those platforms has figured out they can offer other things to devs and consumers to make themselves competitive over time.

Sweeny's attack is basically just a pity party he's throwing for himself because he doesn't want to compete.

Edit This is a sanity check because I wasn't correct with my numbers by mistake.

So, the excuse that Steam got there first (as if it's just about that and the reason their market share is what it is is because they have refined, adapted, and improved their service offering over time) doesn't make a whole lot of sense when steam has a significant percent of the market share (79.5% to epic's 42.3%) but is only making twice the revenue of their rival store.

These numbers are not correct and I was mistaken. In actuality Valve's revenue is approximately 16 times that of Epic e-shop. It looks like an estimate of Steam's game sales is that about $4Bn of their revenue last year was from Steam's game sales. I am trying to corroborate that from other sources.

I'm still looking into and trying to parse out what percentage of steams sales last year were hardware (epic to my knowledge doesn't have a hardware arm of their business), and it's not immediately clear how much they made on the e-shop portion of their business alone so I can get more comparable numbers.

What I have been able to find so far I've posted below, and I'll try to remember to come back and do some math on that after I focus on the first thing.

https://gamalytic.com/blog/steam-revenue-infographic

https://80.lv/articles/valve-earned-over-usd4-billion-on-steam-alone-in-2025-analysts-say

Stupid people do.

That's what Apple charges devs in their "ecosystem" correct?

Isn't valve being sued for

1. Not allowing devs to sell steam download codes on other stores, But the ban only applies if they are selling the download code for cheaper than Steam

2. Not allowing devs to sell steam DLC download codes on other stores

I don't think 1 or 2 puts other stores at any disadvantage. If a store wants to sell steam download codes then Valve has to get their normal cut. If they don't want to pay the valve tax, then they don't need to offer a Steam download code.

Valve isn't forcing anyone to use their platform.

If Steam's terms aren't satisfactory for developers, then they don't have to use Steam.

It does remove easy Linux compatibility. Also you can run any storefront on steam deck, so not sure what your point is about hardware

But Steam didn't kill the idea of ownership of games? It never existed for digital distribution (or even physical with DRM), which existed before Steam.

Steam didn't do that. Even Super Nintendo cartridges tried to claim in the Terms and Conditions that you legally didn't own the copy you paid for. It was never contested, and thus we have the current software ownership debacle.

Apparently a lot of games don’t have DRMs on Steam. The only thing missing is a badge indicating this.

So at least you own these..

Yeah, it's no longer for sale. If you bought it before it was delisted, you can still download/play it through steam. What is fucking atrocious is that I had to go and make an account with epic to play. Well, they can spam and sell my 'nannerbanner'sfakeemailforepiccunts@proton.me' all they want. Fucking cunts. .