Epic Games Store is introducing changes in order to gain appeal against its main rival: Steam. In addition to self-publishing the games, Tim Sweeney has come out to criticize the Valve platform, more specifically the Steamworks API.
In a statement collected by PC Gamer, Tim Sweeney has said that “Steam has created a real problem for the industry” with the Steamworks API, which doesn’t work outside of the Valve platform. Being more specific, the founder, CEO and maximum shareholder of Epic Games has accused its rival of having created a kind of vendor lock that prevents multiplayer video games from working between different services or platforms:
“They have a classic lockdown strategy where they build these services that only work with their store, and this bit us early on with a number of multiplayer games coming to the Epic Games Store. Steamworks didn’t work on our store, so they either had a reduced set of multiplayer features or none at all, or they were just limited to a much smaller audience back in the Epic Games Store launch days, so the games felt like they were broken. And remember, Call of Duty went through a debacle launching on the Windows Store a while back, where you could only match up with other players from the Windows Store, and that’s not how PC should work.”.
In response to Steamworks, the Epic Games Store has made it a requirement that multiplayer games that are also published on Steam must be compatible with each other. For this, it has released a solution called Epic Online Services, although Tim Sweeney’s company does not prevent developers from using their own solutions in this regard. Another aspect to take into account around the same thing is that Steam requires the use of its own wallet for in-game money transactions, while the Epic Games Store offers complete freedom in that regard.
In addition to the requirement for multiplayer titles, The Epic Games Store explicitly prohibits pornographic video games. This clashes with Steam, which has allowed pornographic content since 2018, although as long as they are not real scenes. At this point, we enter into a debate about moral limits and freedom of expression.
To all of the above is added a change in the exclusive strategy of the Epic Games Store, which from now on will focus on big-budget titles because these are the ones that generate the most interest among users. Among the exclusive titles are the future Alan Wake 2 and those from developers such as genDESIGN, PlayDead and Mediatonic, which have been acquired by Epic Games.
Another interesting fact is the fact that the total number of users of the Epic Games Store is now 230 million, which is an increase of 36 million compared to last year. The monthly number of active users has gone from 62 million to 68 million, while with the free video game program, which will continue to be active in 2023, a total of 99 titles were offered for a value of $2,240, adding the PVP.
In short, Epic Games is going to try to apply the same strategy against Steam that it has used against Apple, thus continuing with its particular vision of open platforms. We’ll see if, apart from some developers who are beginning to return to Steam, it also manages to convince users.
