The Epic Games Store Is Not Killing PC Gaming

Rocket riding on the success of Fortnite, Epic Games launched the ‘Epic Games Store’ on PC earlier this year. To attract people to their fledgling platform, Epic sought the rights to host many high-profile games instead of Steam, including The Divison 2, Metro: Exodus, and Borderlands 3. PC users were outraged, and I do not know why.

The most critical PC consumers call the platform anti-consumer due to these exclusivity deals. Players are ‘forced’ to buy the game from Epic. Whilst this is to an extent true, it ignores the effective monoploy Valve had with Steam. There have been other storefronts for some games, developers like Blizzard and Bethesda have used their own, and sites like GOG.com exist but none have really competed with Steam’s huge base.

Exclusivity is also not a brand-new concept in gaming. Many of the most popular games of this generation, including Spiderman, God of War, and the upcoming Death Stranding, are PlayStation exclusives. This exclusivity is perhaps much worse than Epic’s, as it keeps games off of PC (and Xbox) and requires expensive hardware rather than a free launcher, yet the internet does not criticise these decisions nearly as much.

Another criticism often used in Reddit posts entitled ‘Why I’m Boycotting Epic’ is that Tencent partly own Epic Games. Tencent is a Chinese company, and therefore allegedly, works for the Chinese Government to collect your data using the Epic Store. Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic, has refuted these allegations, by stating that he is “the controlling shareholder in Epic Games, and has been since 1991. None [of our investors] can dictate decisions to Epic.”

Further, if PC users are truly concerned about Tencent, then there are plenty of other companies they should abandon too. Tencent has invested in Ubisoft, Activision-Blizzard, and owns Riot Games, the creators of the hugely popular League of Legends. Criticising the Epic Games Store for being a ‘communist data harvester’ is an absurd stance likely fuelled by leading politician’s anti-China rhetoric. Epic Games are the least of your concerns if you are worried about your personal data, Facebook collects far more and has already been openly caught up in scandals.

Though, where I can agree with Epic’s critics are with its UI problems. Epic has no chat system, no player reviews and no community features. Whilst these issues have valid replacements in the form of Discord and Metacritic, if Epic wants to compete and sustain itself, these are essential in forming a community who will rally around the platform.

This all ignores the actual good the Epic Games Store is doing for developers. Their standard revenue split with developers is 88% to 12%, compared to Steam’s 70% to 30%, putting much more money in the hands of game’s creators and publisher. What is more, exclusivity deals often come alongside an upfront payment. Glumberland, developer of the upcoming game Ooblets, said in a blog post that Epic were guaranteeing “what we’d be wanting to earn if we were just selling Ooblets across all the stores. That takes a huge burden of uncertainty off of us because now we know that no matter what, the game won’t fail”.

Since their post, the two person team have received threats and hateful messages. This behaviour is completely unacceptable. Epic have since pledged their support to their partner developers. The company acknowledge people have a right to be critical and they do have some reason to be. But abuse and lies are not the way to go. The Epic Games Store is not evil,  stop treating it as if it is.