2nd Place: Epic Games Store
Company: Epic | Security: 2FA via email | Download link
Strengths: The largest and presumably highest-grossing competitor of Steam. The Epic Games Store offers a library for your games and achievements in addition to the shop. Cloud saves are also offered by Epic.
Epic primarily relies on regular free games and exclusive promotions with certain publishers like Ubisoft to attract customers. Big games like Fortnite are also exclusively distributed through Epic.
A special feature: Those who purchase in the Epic Store receive a portion of their payment back as credit. Epic primarily advertises that it charges significantly lower commissions than Steam, which benefits developers.
Weaknesses: In particular, exclusive deals with publishers have caused heated tempers among players. The purchase of Rocket League and the migration to the Epic Games Store upset many players.
Epic also lacks important community features like the integration of reviews or guides.
1st Place: Steam
Company: Valve | Security: 2FA via email or Steam app | Download link
Strengths: Steam is the most well-known platform on the market. In addition to the official shop, it offers many features like achievements, trading cards, and cloud saves. Over the past few years, Steam has steadily evolved. Almost all major developers are represented on the platform, therefore Steam offers an enormous selection with more than 100,000 games and software.
With the Steam Deck, it has launched a successful hardware platform for its own games after failing with the Steam Machine.
With the “Steam Community”, Steam also offers a broad platform for reviews, guides, and discussions. Additionally, there is support for modifications for numerous games.
Weaknesses: Developers complain about high commissions on Steam. During sales or highly demanded releases, Steam servers sometimes crash when many players try to access them. Moreover, some games and content are blocked for German and Chinese players.
Steam can quickly overwhelm with its abundance of features and functions and sometimes feels more like a large social platform than a gaming platform.
Bonus: Lutris and Playnite
Lutris and Playnite are officially not a “real” platform, as they do not offer their own shop and you cannot really buy games there.
Instead, Lutris and Playnite provide another valuable function: They bundle all your games from various platforms into a single client. This is extremely convenient if you use many different shops and offers, have lost track at some point, and would like to have all games in one place.
Playnite and Lutris offer no integrated chat or achievements but provide playtimes and additional information about the installed games.
