Epic’s rivalry with Valve is nothing new, but while it’s usually CEO Tim Sweeney who takes shots at Valve, a former engineer has published a long list of problems Steam has caused in the industry.
Just last week, after posting about Valve’s 30% cut that claimed it was driving game sales, former Epic engineer Kiaran Ritchie wrote a lengthy post on Twitter detailing his critiques of the largest PC gaming market. And, really, it seems like he’s throwing up his hands and accepting Valve’s dominance of the ecosystem while blaming Steam users.
Ritchie says that “even if an alternative were objectively better, by any metric you’re interested in, it still wouldn’t interest Steam users. They would actually find it a problem and a threat to their investment.” Specifically, he claims that Steam users are hostile to other stores, even existing ones, stating: “Competition in this space is not only uninteresting to most Steam users, it is actively denigrated!” The CONSEQUENCE of this situation is that 30% of all gross revenue is being siphoned from the PC gaming industry into a black hole.
Epic Games tried to topple Steam again recently, after Tim Sweeney bragged on Twitter about flavor-coding a new version of the Epic Games Store that launches faster than Steam. But while a quick launch and letting users access their library without waiting a few minutes is an improvement, even Ritchie doesn’t think it will make much of a difference.
Elsewhere in the article, Ritchie states: “The Steam client and infrastructure fall somewhere between ‘not that difficult’ and ‘trivial.’ It is a download service combined with a payment processor with a handful of services alongside it. Nowadays, cloud providers manage the entire infrastructure. But even if someone becomes a “better” customer, he says, “Steam users love Steam and having their entire library in one place.” It works. It’s reliable. There are sales, cards and achievements, oh my God!
This all comes on top of Epic’s years-long battle to reduce the amount of digital sales on money markets. Epic didn’t just fight Valve on this; the company also took on Apple and Google in its quest to get Fortnite on mobile devices – and later had to pay Apple $6 million, but won against Google.
But with Valve, Epic’s problem seems to be that most gamers outright prefer Steam. After all, there are dozens of PC gaming stores where people can buy games, but as Ritchie points out, Steam users are happy to stick to Valve’s store. And no matter what Epic does, it probably won’t change.
Gn tech
