Why Steam is better than EG Store.

Jason T.

Steam and Epic Games Store (EGS) is a video game digital distribution service and it makes game
publishing and updating easier and securer for game publishers and consumers. Steam has been
around since 2003 and is very successful while EGS had only sprouted in 2018. While the majority
decided that they are already comfortable using Steam, the others slowly decided that they wanted
to play the exclusive games that EGS was offering that Steam didn’t have. Steam has the upper hand
in this competition as it has been in the market longer and knows what users need. Here’s why.
Ever since the Epic Games Fortnite got a high rise in popularity in 2018, Epic Games has a lot of
money to invest in. They invested in a game store that will compete against Valve’s Steam. Epic
Games Store is very new compared to Steam; people are just starting to adapt to a new platform to
buy games on. Epic Games has a strategy of paying game developers and publishers to release their
games exclusively on the Epic Games Store. The games that are exclusive on EGS are great. But the
store is very buggy and servers often lag, making it hard to buy and download games. People
couldn't just move their games from EGS to Steam too, they have to play the game in their platform
of choice. Because there are so many problems in EGS, people often ignore the games that EGS is
offering. The application is a buggy mess and using the application long term means that you’ll have
to deal with the bugs all the time.
Valve, being in the business ever since 2004, knew how to deal with their competitors. They had a
different strategy. Instead of paying developers and publishers to release their games exclusively on
Steam, they made the store more user friendly for both consumers and producers. They also made a
forum for each game in their store so that communication between developers and their community
is made easier. With more features and improvements, developers will want to publish their games
on Steam instead of EGS. Users also feel more comfortable using Steam, not having to deal with
bugs like the ones on EGS. Valve’s Steam eventually has more users, and publishers that were from
EGS will want to publish their new games on Steam because of how crowded the traffic is on Steam
and how comfortable it is for both users and publishers to interact with each other on Steam. But
just how much is missing on EGS compared to Steam? The table below shows just how much you’ll
be missing out if you use EGS.
A user on Reddit.com made a table comparing features of Steam and Epic Games Store. Steam has
way more features than Epic Games Store does and it’s not worth the time to wait for the features
to be updated on Epic Games Store because users are already annoyed with the lack of features and
the abundance of bugs on the store. Valve would already be adding more features to Steam like
remote play while Epic Games are still fixing bugs and adding basic features.

According to data taken from an article in SegmentNext, Epic Games Store has amassed 108 million
new accounts in January 2020 (left; orange). Meanwhile within the same month, Steam has amassed
667.7 million new accounts (left; blue). That is around 6 times more users compared to what EGS got
at the same amount of time. Steam also has reached a peak of over 22 million active players in a
single day in March 2020 (right; green), meanwhile, Epic Games Store had only reached a peak of 13
million active players in a single day in June 2020 (right; blue).
In conclusion, Steam is a better game store than Epic Games Store, the facts speak for itself. This is
because Steam is better for users in the long run. After all, it has a more reliable and comfortable
application to use compared to Epic Games Store; a store that is only good when users want to play
an exclusive game that’s not in Steam. It proves that making the store feel great to make purchases
is as important as making a good game. If Epic Games wanted EGS to thrive, they’ll have to start
improving their store a lot. Because at this state, users would rather wait until exclusive games were
finally on Steam or pirate those exclusive games. That is why Steam is better than EGS.