Fortnite is one of the most profitable crashes in video game history. There is no memory of such a flagrant case in which a title that was supposed to hit stores is canceled and readapted to the battle royale format almost by accident to become (by magic?) A global phenomenon capable of raising very little time billions of euros. And it was thanks to that that today we have the Epic Games Store among us.
Four years against Steam
On December 6, the Epic Games Store celebrated its fourth anniversary . 48 months in which he has tried to undermine Steam‘s supremacy in the PC market by attracting players with what the company believes they can compete with: weekly gifts of titles that are sometimes good and others don’t give us exactly the same; and a policy of exclusives based on truly advantageous conditions for publishers .
We must not forget that Epic has become the jackhammer that wants to eliminate those abusive percentages of digital stores that charge a toll for using their infrastructures. Apple, Google or Valve itself take an average of 30% of each transaction and the idea from the beginning of Tim Sweeney was to tempt developers by reducing these amounts to 12% and even 5% if the titles used its already famous Unreal Engine. This policy served to cajole middle-tier publishers , with little impact or relevance in the face of a global market that in 2018 controlled Steam and, four years later, remains practically the same.
Those commission percentages are very good to reduce, but they are something that only affects companies, not players. For them, Epic believed that a system of gifts and temporary exclusives, of six months or a year, would be enough to unbalance the balance in their favor in record time, but clearly this has not been the case, although its millions of players They have touched 35 while those of Steam were around 70.
Metro Exodus or Assassin’s Creed Valhalla were two titles that we couldn’t find on Steam: one because Epic forced it to have it only and the second because Ubisoft preferred to seek its fortune in its own store, Stadia or any other. Now, since he returns with his tail between his legs , we also have it available in the Valve store , so the Epic Games Store effect obviously does not exist.
It may surpass Steam, but not now
Epic Games Store is burning the stages that are supposed to be a project of these characteristics where money is not only used to convince us all to make the leap from a store that will soon be 20 years old to another that has the duty to consolidate. Users accept gifts and add them to their libraries because it doesn’t cost them anything, but it’s another thing to decide that your entire library goes from one that we know lasts to another that we don’t know if it’s a temporary whim of the rich man who has lined up with a game like Fortnite . It will be when the glory of the battle royale declines, as well as its income, when we will see if the commitment to the Epic Games Store remains intact and with the same premises that, on occasions, it does not look at the business and launches news practically at a loss.
As happened to Valve in its early days, when many thought that as long as Half-Life 2 sales held up, Steam would remain open. It passed the test and today we can say that if we continue to have gaming on PC it is thanks to the creation of Gabe Newell, who saved it from piracy and made many projects viable that otherwise would have lost loads of money due to illegal copies.
Epic Games Store is still in its internship phase. Learning from the market, from the companies and from the users and, most importantly, demonstrating that everything we spend on it is not in danger of being lost down the drain when things go wrong.
We don’t know if it will be able to surpass Steam in one, ten or 20 years, but it’s not on the wrong track. It is one more actor, like GoG or Microsoft itself, so let’s hope that next year it turns five and so on, ad eternum . That would be, without a doubt, his greatest success… for now.