The Epic Game Store is probably the first major threat to Valve’s total dominance over the PC gaming sphere in a decade or so. While the Epic Game Store client lacks a whole lot of basic functionality (or consumer standard features), Epic has been aggressively working to solicit developers, and through them, customers.
Epic’s strategy has involved an aggressive revenue sharing arrangement with developers, which makes the Epic Games Store more alluring versus Steam (or any other storefront, really), as well as the poaching of multiple high profile third party games as exclusive to their storefront. Going forward, Epic’s Tim Sweeney sees these revenue sharing arrangements and exclusivity arrangements as the way for the Epic Game Store to gain ground against Steam—because Steam is already so “perfect” in terms of user facing features that adding some smaller irrelevant ones on top won’t make people switch.
“We’re giving game developers and publishers the store business model that we’ve always wanted as developers ourselves,” said Sweeney to MCV UK.
“[Steam is] nearly perfect for consumers already… There is no hope of displacing a dominant storefront solely by adding marginally more store features or a marginally better install experience. These battles will be won on the basis of game supply, consumer prices, and developer revenue sharing,” Sweeney added.
As long as Epic doesn’t slack on offering consumer facing features, I don’t think anyone cares how they choose to attract developers. Nonetheless, one can hope that Epic will feel it is on solid enough grounding soon enough that it won’t see the need to resort to console-style exclusivity shenanigans.