Epic vs Steam: All This Fuss Over One Extra Click
The Epic Games Store has been the arch-nemesis of the Capital-G gaming community since the day it launched in 2018, locking up the exclusive distribution rights to indie and AAA games alike. It has attracted animosity from gamers unheard of for a storefront; the sort of rancour reserved for the companies which makes games and features they add to them which make them unplayable.
To many gamers, Steam isn’t just the biggest name in PC gaming, it is PC gaming. Valve’s game distribution platform pioneered digital distribution of PC games and dragged it from a fragmented landscape that existed before to a world where people don’t talk about their ‘game libraries,’ they talk about their ‘Steam library’.
Steam has dominated the market for years, and not without good reason. It’s user-friendly, widely trusted, and convenient. Developers and publishers love it too because it puts their games in front of millions of customers, makes it easy for those gamers to buy, and saves them the hassle of running their own distribution pipeline. Valve has also done a lot of good for PC gaming, most significantly they made it an attractive platform at a time when things weren’t looking good for it.
To give an illustration of where PC gaming before Steam really started to take off, here’s an excerpt from an interview between then-Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli and Croatian video game magazine PC Play in 2008:
We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis. We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin, a chart leading that is not desirable. I believe that’s the core problem of PC Gaming, piracy. To the degree PC Gamers that pirate games inherently destroy the platform. Similar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more. It was a big lesson for us and I believe we wont have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future. We are going to support PC, but not exclusive anymore.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080530225043/http://www.pcplay.hr/modules.php?r=23&id=15
And here’s another quote from Yerli in 2010 in IGN:
The other critique outside Crytek was the fact that the PC industry is really, at the moment, I would say the most intensely pirated market ever. It's crazy how the ratio between sales to piracy is probably 1 to 15 to 1 to 20 right now. For one sale there are 15 to 20 pirates and pirate versions, and that's a big shame for the PC industry.
https://www.ign.com/articles/2008/06/26/cevat-yerli-qa
At the time, this kind of pessimism about PC gaming was common: why would I put the effort into porting a game to PC when the market is too fragmented, it’s too difficult to support, and my game will probably just be pirated anyway? Steam changed this. You could sell your games on their unified storefront to a massive userbase, it was a cinch to distribute patches, and Steam’s anti-piracy measures were less intrusive than competing solutions at the time like SecuROM or StarForce.
Valve deserves a lot of credit for elevating PC gaming to near-parity with the major consoles. They accordingly receive a hell of a lot of goodwill from gamers. I’d go as far as saying they enjoy a cult following – but I don’t know how well that moniker works when we’re talking about a company that is very much the king of the castle. And EGS is the dirty rascal.
Anyway, I would be selling you short if I were to merely say that Valve has its defenders. They have evangelists; people who will passionately defend the company’s every move and explain away its every silence. But we owe it to ourselves to at least question whether it’s fair for them to be clipping the ticket to the tune of 30% on every sale; and we should maybe even consider treating them like any other profit-seeking business that can handle a bit of criticism every now and then.
Steam was deeply unpopular when it first launched. In its early years it was seen less as a convenience and more as an obstacle; a piece of intrusive middleware that stood between you and the game you’d just bought. Many people resented the idea that you needed to install a separate client, a digital policeman, onto your computer just to play something you owned; even more so when you bought a physical copy of a game like Skyrim or Civilisation V and were forced to use Steam.
Valve was widely praised in 2015 for introducing a generous refund policy on Steam: customers could get a refund for any reason if they requested it within two weeks of purchase and had clocked less than two hours of play time. What people tend to forget is that this change didn’t come out of nowhere; the change came one year after Valve was sued by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission over their blanket and unlawful no-refunds policy, which the Federal Court of Australia found misled consumer about their rights under Australian Consumer Law, and for which Valve was fined $3 million.
None of this is to say that Valve is a malevolent force; it’s to remind you that Valve is fundamentally a business. Yes, a very successful and often consumer-friendly one, but a company nonetheless whose primary goal is profit. The 30% cut they take is a commercial decision which affects every other link in the value chain – from the developer to the consumer – and we should welcome a competitive market which reduces prices and improves service rather than treating Valve as a benevolent steward of PC gaming
Even if you’re not a fan of EGS, you should want it to succeed, or at the very least to chip away at Steam’s market share; because competition does what it always does: it lowers prices, improves service, and makes dominant players less complacent.
Look at airfares. When domestic aviation in Australia was deregulated in the 1990s, prices on the busiest routes fell by 12% in just the first year, and the number of flights jumped by 21% according to the Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics. The Treasury notes that when Qantas faces competition from Virgin Australia and Rex, it has to lower its fares in response. Now, you might be the biggest Qantas-head in the country. Your house might be full of scale model Dash-8s and 747 coasters, and you might still sleep in those pyjamas you got that one time you flew business class to Singapore. But even then, you’d still like to have a choice, right?
The main criticism of EGS is the exclusivity deals they strike with developers and publishers. Some of these exclusives were timed, like with Borderlands 3, Metro Exodus, and Untitled Goose Game; but others, like Alan Wake 2, remain locked EGS for the long haul. And yes, I’ll grant you that this does poke a couple of holes in my neat little airline analogy, because unlike booking a flight you can’t always shop around. For those games, you’re stuck with EGS for 12 months or even indefinitely.
But here’s the thing: exclusive content is the only viable way for a new storefront to break into the market. Steam has so many users and is so integral to them that no amount of minimalist design or developer-friendly revenue splits is going to make your average gamer switch unless there’s something on offer that they can’t get elsewhere. And free games don’t count, because EGS isn’t a charity. Remember, Valve made Half-Life 2 a Steam exclusive way back in 2004, and while people kicked and screamed about it at the time, it gave people a reason to download Steam and made it a serious platform in the first place.
And on Alan Wake 2, it’s important to understand why it’s exclusive to EGS. This wasn’t some shady backroom deal to force gamers to click a different button on their desktop – Epic Games funded the development of the game, and those development costs weren’t recouped until the end of 2024, over a year after its release. If Remedy hadn’t signed the game to be an EGS exclusive, it would have either ended up being a very different game, or it might not even have come out.
In 2020, Epic paid US$444 million in advance payments to publishers and developers to secure exclusive titles on EGS, and not all of those bets have been winners. In 2019, Epic effectively lost US$206 million in advance payments for games which underperformed. EGS critics pour scorn on publishers and developers for accepting these payments, likening them to “bribes” and suggesting they’re selling out their communities or otherwise being underhanded. But that framing doesn’t square with the reality that game development is expensive and risky. If someone comes along offering to fully fund a game’s development in exchange for timed exclusivity, they’re not selling out, they’re securing the survival of the game itself.
This is exactly why Sony is eating Microsoft’s lunch in the console space. Sony has spent hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring and funding studios that consistently produce high-quality exclusives for the PlayStation 5 – cinematic, polished, often genre-defining titles that you simply can’t get anywhere else. That strategy has paid off in spades, and is why the PS5 is an essential piece of any modern gaming setup, and why the Xbox Series X|S is in such a dire position that industry observers are now seriously questioning whether Microsoft might pull out of the hardware business altogether.
When a game comes out exclusively on a console you don’t yet own, you need to spend hundreds of dollars just to get in the door, and that’s a steep ask. But when a game launches exclusively on EGS, you just need click a different button on your desktop. It’s not exactly a burden.
Yes, it is more convenient to have all your games in one place. It’s also nice to have all your friends on Steam – although I thought everyone had jumped ship to Discord these days. But convenience is itself a product and it comes at a cost; and while that cost is hidden from you when you’re buying a game on Steam, you are still paying it. When you spend $100 on a game, you’re only getting $70 worth of game and $30 worth of Steam. There’s no doubt that EGS has highlighted the convenience of having your games in one spot, and yes, the relative inconvenience of dealing with multiple launchers for your games, but it’s forced people to reckon with how much that convenience is costing them and the industry at large. Every PC gamer knows deep down in their hearts that consoles are more convenient, but they smile at the savings they make on every game they purchase. Paying for convenience isn’t new.
Steam absolutely provides a service to developers and publishers, but it’s not nearly as valuable a service as it used to be. Before Steam Direct and Steam Greenlight, you had to submit your game to Valve and they would decide whether it made the cut. Merely having you game listed on Steam was itself a signal of quality. For better or for worse, Steam was a curated platform, and you knew that while not every game would be good, there was at least a standard they all had to meet.
Long-time viewers of TotalBiscuit, may he rest in peace, and James Stephanie Sterling will recall the absolute slop that flooded Steam during the Greenlight era – although I don’t think we used the term “slop” in 2014. And if you’re unfamiliar, you’ll want to pull up their videos on Guise of the Wolf, and Digital Homicide respectively. Valve has a hand-off approach to curation these days, although thankfully the store isn’t as flooded with shovelware as it was during the dark old days, due to their recommendation algorithm and user-generated ratings and tags. But since Valve isn’t the gatekeeper to their own store anymore, it raises the obvious question as to whether they can still justify that 30% cut. Is being listed on Steam still itself a promotional asset, or is Valve merely extracting economic rent?
It’s easy to forget how much the PC gaming landscape has changed, and how much of that change can be traced back to a handful of bold, controversial decisions. Steam was once the upstart, the awkward bit of middleware nobody asked for, tethered to Half-Life 2 like a barnacle. But it grew, improved, and eventually became the standard-bearer for the entire platform. For years, that seemed like the end of the story: Steam had won. PC gaming was back. The villain had become the hero.
And then Epic came knocking. Not with polish or pedigree, but with ambition and bucketloads of Fortnite cash. It made deals, it annoyed people, and it took risks. And like Steam before it, it asked something uncomfortable from gamers: patience. A second launcher. A break from routine.
But this isn’t about what icon we click or who takes a cut of the sale. It’s about who gets to set the terms of the market: who decides what gets funded, who gets paid, and what kinds of games are viable. If Epic’s arrival proved anything, it wasn’t that gamers were clamouring for a something new; it was that a huge portion of the community will tolerate almost anything from Steam as long as they don’t have to click a different button.
People say they want developers to get a fairer share. They say they support independent studios, better working conditions, and an end to crunch and disposable contracts. But when presented with a platform that gives developers a bigger cut, and that directly funds projects which might not otherwise exist, many of those same people draw the line at even that minor inconvenience.
EGS hasn’t disrupted PC gaming, it has revealed just how stagnant and complacent it is. It’s shown that for all the lofty talk about supporting developers and changing the industry, convenience is still king.
Steam remains the default. Not because it’s the most ethical, the most generous, or even the most innovative company out there – but because it’s there, and it’s easy. That might be the most revealing thing of all.
Sidenote: When I was researching this article, I wanted to get a firm grip of Steam’s market share. A 2013 Bloomberg article put it at 75% citing data from IHS Screen Digest (now Omdia), and that figure was repeated by several other websites without citation. Tim Sweeney (founder and CEO of Epic Games) said their market share was 85% in a 2023 tweet but didn’t give a source either. In the ACCC lawsuit against Valve, Edelman J wrote that Valve’s market share was “said not to be measurable”, but that the company was in some respects “an enormous corporation.” The exact figure will remain a mystery for another day.
