Steam has been at the top for long, Valve may have forgotten how to compete. That’s very bad news when you have Epic Games Store exclusive titles. This move is going to shake things up in ways that could reach even the PlayStation and Xbox marketplaces.
Steam is in a position of power due to Valve’s exclusives, and Epic Games is now trying to fight for PC gaming market share the same way. The Epic Games Store is officially here, and it’s bringing a console war-like mentality to your PC.
That move is going to shake things up in ways that could reach even the PlayStation and Xbox marketplaces. Your gaming PC used to be a relatively peaceful place, with Valve sitting comfortably on top. Epic Games seems willing to go to war.
PC gamers didn’t initially install Steam to buy games, they installed Steam to play Half-Life 2. You couldn’t authenticate your retail copy without a Steam account, which was a relatively new idea for 2004.
People were annoyed at the time, but the mandatory Steam installation was a wise move. Soon Valve had a program on the computer of a large percentage of serious players, and was positioned perfectly to grab the majority of digital purchases. It’s been on top ever since. It was a well-timed land grab during an era when few other companies thought it would be necessary to sell their own games online, much less anyone else’s. It took time for Valve to grow Steam into what it has become, but the service was in the right place at the right time. Valve was smart and hungry.
And that head start is the real power of Steam in 2018: The large amount of time it’s had to build up users and offer a huge back catalog of games. It’s an advantage that has seemed impossible to overcome for at least a decade. Everyone has to fight what Steam is today, not what Steam was when it launched.
Until Epic Games moved in, at least.
Fortnite’s own massive success means that a critical mass of players already has the Epic Games launcher on their PC or Mac. It’s launching a store that’s likely to already be on your PC. And first-party exclusives aren’t good things for these digital storefronts to have, they’re absolutely essential at the front end if a developer or publisher wants to compete with Steam.
Think of installing a new service the same way you think about buying a new console: You go through the trouble because there is a game you want to play that you can’t get anywhere else.
The joke these days is that Valve doesn’t make games anymore — which isn’t very accurate — but Steam hasn’t been about Valve exclusives for some time. Its power lies in its number of users, the games they have bought through the service and the number of games being offered.
Epic’s challenge, now that it has those initial numbers and a functional store, is to grow at a steady pace while chipping away at Steam’s dominance. But Epic Games is one of the few companies in gaming that’s already in a position to begin that process.
No one stays on top forever, and it was once silly to imagine that Sony could compete with gaming giants like Nintendo and Sega. Yet here we are.
Valve doesn’t do much to advertise Steam or tout its exclusives because it’s never had to; Steam has always been the de facto leader in digital marketplaces since the early days of buying games online.
Epic Games has done something remarkable in the past few days; it has recontextualized PC gaming to get players to understand that Steam is just one place you can buy games, and Steam doesn’t even have all the games anymore.
