Steam has been a dominant force in the PC gaming community for well over a decade and Valve has, in all fairness, delivered great sales like for PC gamers to sink their teeth into. Sure, Steam isn’t perfect, but I know many gamers prefer it over all other stores, especially with the fantastic sales and esports titles such as Dota 2 and CS: GO. Since the Epic Games Store opened last year, a fight has been taking place as Epic tries to challenge Valve with something PC gamers really dislike, exclusives.
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In April, Epic even said that they will drop their exclusives push if Steam changes for the better. For a bit of background on this, Steam takes a 30% profit share from game sales while Epic Games Store takes a 12% profit share. Mr Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games, has made his feelings on this very clear when challenging Valve and, of course, Valve didn’t respond or drop their profit share.
There is no doubt a lot of hate from some gamers and I’ve even seen readers refuse to grab free games from the Epic Games Store as they stand with Steam. That’s probably one of the reasons why Tim Sweeney took to Twitter to explain why exclusives are needed to challenge Steam.
First, Mr Sweeney explained that:
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#33ffff” class=”” size=”22″]We believe the lock-in effect of having a large library of games on a dominant storefront is more powerful than features, and hence a dominant store can only be challenged through exclusives.[/perfectpullquote]
One might wonder what about the other big stores like the Ubisoft Store, Battle.net and more. Well, it seems they didn’t even make a dent in Steam over the years. Mr Sweeney explains that:
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#96ff33″ class=”” size=”22″] For example, after years of great work by independent stores (excluding big publishers like EA–Activision-Ubi), none seem to have reached 5% of Steam’s scale. Nearly all have more features than Epic; and the ability to discount games is limited by various external pressures.
This leads to the strategy of exclusives which, though unpopular with dedicated Steam gamers, do work, as established by the major publisher storefronts and by the key Epic Games store releases compared to their former Steam revenue projections and their actual console sales. [/perfectpullquote]
So what’s the takeaway of this? Well, Epic thinks the only way to challenge Valve is through exclusives and that more features on the Epic Games Store won’t help all that much. Epic wants Valve to effectively drop 18% of revenue share on game sales or they will continue with their strategy of exclusives.
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What do think about this plan from Epic and do you use the store or prefer to use only Steam? Let us know in the comment section below.
