![]() ![]() But I do know the system is ripe for abuse. I don’t even know what Valve’s current policy is in terms of which games make it onto Steam and which don’t. ![]() Worse, instead of actually hiring people to curate its increasingly crowded platform, Valve has instead tried to shirk the problem onto the community through Greenlight and user reviews, before praying to the altar of algorithms to make the problem go away. In recent years, however, Steam has gone from PC gaming’s boutique store to PC gaming’s thrift shop, a gigantic virtual dumping ground where you need a headlamp and a shovel to find the games that are actually worth buying. And nobody cared, because for the longest time Valve was PC gaming’s benevolent dictator, appeasing the masses with its regular sales and Steam’s extensive social features, further boosted by its image as this perfect company where anyone could do what they wanted, and the fact that it created some of the best goddamn PC game series ever made: Half Life, Left4Dead, Portal. In fact, when I first heard that Epic was creating its own storefront, I was thrilled, because it meant, finally, some actual competition for Valve, which has enjoyed a de-facto monopoly on PC gaming for the best part of 10 years. Picking on the Epic Store is like having a go at your bath for overflowing in the middle of a tsunami. Sadly, they’re all pretty rubbish in their own special ways. Thing is, there are valid criticisms to be made about the Epic Store (I'll make them shortly!), just as there are valid criticisms to be made about every PC gaming storefront there is. ![]() That was a somewhat confrontational opening paragraph. It makes me want to set my desktop on fire and leave my house to become a Tibetan monk, isolated from anything that looks remotely like a PC. Not interested,' I boggle at the sheer, clanging, weapons-grade silliness of it. Every time I see a comment on a game review that says something like ' Epic Store exclusive. It's all worth it because in the end, if PC gamers want to play one of the exclusives, they'll have to use the Epic Games Store.The outrage over the Epic Games Store (hereafter Epic Store) has to be some of the most ridiculous I’ve seen in a while. ![]() That seems to acknowledge that, not only is Epic aware this practice is a bad look, but that the company is willing to simply cover the short-term costs associated with it. In the case of the latter, Epic Games has even offered to pay developers for any pre-orders they lose because of making the switch to its storefront. RELATED: Fortnite: Everything You Need to Know About Season X The types of games that take this deal vary wildly between triple-A publishers and independent developers, and from big releases like Borderlands 3 and ports like Detroit: Become Human to small games like Super Meat Boy Forever and crowd-funded releases like Shenmue III. This exclusivity sometimes lasts for six months, but oftentimes lasts for a year. With the Epic Games Store lacking so many features, why are publishers, big and small, putting their games on an inferior product? You know, besides money. ![]()
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