Epic has announced that they will be launching their own online game store as an alternative to Steam. The new Epic store has been developed by none other than the creator of the site “Steam Spy”. He is now talking about Epic’s goals and his experiences with developers.
What happened? A few days ago, Epic Games, the developer of Fortnite, dropped a bombshell. They are working on an online store, which is set to compete with the gaming giant Steam. In the process, Epic took pointed and confident jabs at Valve, who takes a 20% – 25% cut from the sales of games.
A man named Sergey Galyonkin, known to many through his statistics page “Steam Spy,” has worked on the development of Epic’s store. Since 2015, Galyonkin has been collecting, analyzing, and compiling statistics from publicly available data from Steam and has been very successful until recently.
According to his own statements, he has been working on the Epic shop project for years. However, when Galyonkin launched his Steam Spy page, he was not yet involved with Epic. The joke behind the name is therefore unintentional.
Learning from Steam’s mistakes
Hardly anyone outside of Valve is as familiar with Steam as Galyonkin. In developing the concept for the Epic store, he primarily consulted developers: “I spoke with hundreds of developers to find out what they like and dislike about existing digital stores.”
This is how Epic plans to combat review bombing: Conversations with various devs have led to the conclusion that the new store will not include social features like forums. On Steam, these features create an extremely toxic environment. Therefore, the Epic store will initially launch with a ticket system.
Players will be able to send their complaints and comments directly to the developers, allowing the developers to have direct contact with their communities. Actions like the infamous review bombing are expected to be prevented as a result.
This is how Epic plans to tackle clutter: According to Galyonkin, another issue with Steam is its terrible organization. “It feels less like an online store from 2018 and more like a closet stuffed with games. And when you try to pull out a game, it feels like pulling the wrong block from a Jenga tower,” says the head of Steam Spy.
Galyonkin believes that the fundamental problem is that too many items compete for the attention of users, and thus most have no chance of reaching the user. Therefore, the new Epic store will feature a “Twitter-like news feed” through which developers can inform players about the latest changes to their games.
Players will also be able to follow these feeds and receive emails about updates.
This is how Epic plans to support developers: In addition to the low revenue share of 12%, Epic wants to support developers primarily through more information. Steam Spy helped companies in the past, for example, to assess how much interest there is in certain game genres and whether an investment in a project would be worthwhile or not.
Galyonkin wants to take a similar approach: “We want to provide as much information to developers as legally possible. While we cannot share sales figures from other companies, we can provide other useful statistics. We ourselves use much of this data and want developers to have the same tools we do.”
Epic courts developers
What could be the goal of these measures? At first glance, it is clear that Epic aims to attract developers with these features and measures. Especially smaller devs who rely on sales on Steam will certainly be keenly interested in Epic’s offers.
To break Steam’s absolute monopoly, developers must be offered an alternative that is more advantageous for them to publish their games there. And where the games are, the gamers are known to follow.
