While the Epic Games Store offers a lot of freebies, many PC players still primarily use Valve’s Steam as the way to keep their catalogue of games. Epic Games is the new kid on the block, still, and yet even after launching in 2018, some still find the publisher’s launcher to be clunky.
Speaking in a massive interview with Lex Fridman (via Wccftech), Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney admitted that the launcher has its problems. “I think one of the reasons that people characterize the Epic Games launcher as clunky is because the Epic Games launcher is clunky and we need to improve this,” he said. “There’s a lot of work going on there and, you know, I wish we’d gotten better at addressing quality of life features and prioritize them above all of the other features.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=477qF6QNSvc/
“A lot of the time, it’s been supporting commercial features like merchandising, offering multiple versions of a game for sale, and offering upgrades from the regular edition to the deluxe edition and other things that partners work,” he continued. “Other priorities have been quality of life and launcher load times and other things. And we’ve not put enough emphasis on the quality of life features. We’ve recognized this very clearly multiple times, and we’ve gone through multiple refactorings. But that’s definitely been a disappointment to us and to a lot of users. One thing it took us a while to realize was it’s not in uniform.”
Sweeney claims there’s a larger team working on Steam at Valve, who have had more time to develop the Steam Store. But, this defence doesn’t hold up for everyone, as it has been years since the Epic Games Store launched, and yet some features are still missing. Perhaps in time, though, we’ll see the Epic Games Store reach its true potential, and Steam could have a rival without exclusivity being bought for new games.