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Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford says his hopes on Epic Store were 'overly optimistic or misplaced' (www.tweaktown.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm genuinely shocked how much Epic poured into the store and it still lacks so much basic features. Sorting games is still extremely barebones, store is filled with NFT/crypto garbage, the store still looks like a college student's first front-end project, and last time I used the launcher to pick up free games (last year), it was still slow as hell. What were they doing in the past 5 years aside from dropping millions on exclusivity deals?

Epic is going to have to prioritize the store and try some new initiatives while also doubling down on earning pivotal exclusives if it is going to have a chance. I also hope other viable competitors arrive.

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[–] [email protected] 115 points 2 weeks ago (40 children)

I see some larger publishers bemoan the fact that Epic hasn't caught on, but it should be pretty obvious why. Markets that favor the buyer more than they favor sellers will typically attract the largest user base, and the sellers don't have a choice to not sell where the buyers are.

Epic giving away free games is a nice buyer friendly action, but literally everything else they've done, from paid exclusives to poor client experience isn't favorable to buyers. They've created a market that no buyers want to use unless the product is free or literally not available anywhere else.

Giving publishers/devs better cuts is great, but it does nothing for you if all the buyers are on Steam instead.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 2 weeks ago (11 children)

Advertising better cuts to publishers doesn't mean much when the price is the same across platforms. If epic was consistently 10% cheaper than steam it would get better traction.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

They can't sell the games cheaper than steam as the steam's conditions doesn't let devs sell games on steam if the game is available for cheaper somewhere else.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

This is only true for steam keys. https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

That doesn't apply to exclusive games which also don't have lower prices.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

How could it apply to exclusive games if they don't exist in steam in the first place

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

Industry standard prices exist. If an exclusive matches them you aren't getting a discount.

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