Epic Games Store

Submission 17,946

About

Epic Games Store is a digital distribution platform operated by video game developer Epic Games. The platform was launched in December 2018, with several notable PC exclusives announced and made available in the store in the following months. In March 2019, jokes in which the platform was compared against its competitor Steam were circulated online.

History

On December 4th, 2018, video game developer Epic Games announced the launch of its digital distribution platform Epic Games Store, available through the Epic Games launcher application.^[1] The store offered a 88% revenue cut for game developers, with additional benefits for games based on Unreal Engine developed by Epic Games. The store was officially launched on December 6th, 2018.^[2]^[3]

Hightlights

Starting in December 2018, several notable exclusive titles were announced for the store. On January 9th, 2019, Ubisoft announced that its upcoming video game Tom Clancy's The Division 2 will be available in Epic Games Store, but not through its competitor Steam.^[4] On January 28th, 2019, a similar announcement was made for Deep Silver-developed video game Metro Exodus, which would be distributed exclusively through Epic Games Store for one year following its release on February 15th.^[5] The announcement sparked an online backlash for Metro Exodus publisher 4A Games.^[6]

In the following months, more exclusives were announced for the distribution platform, including Obsidian's upcoming video game The Outer Worlds and Quantic Dream's PlayStation exclusives Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls, and Detroit: Become Human

Malware and Steam Data Use Allegations

On March 13th, 2019, Redditor notte_m_portent posted a thread titled "Epic Game Store, Spyware, Tracking, and You!" in which they investigated questionable activites performed by the Epic Games Launcher.^[7] In the same thread, Epic Games VP of Engineering Daniel Vogel provided in-length explanation for each allegation, asserting that the launcher only imported friends information from Steam with the user's permission and promising to fix the highlighted issues.^[8]

We only import your Steam friends with your explicit permission. The launcher makes an encrypted local copy of your localconfig.vdf Steam file. However information from this file is only sent to Epic if you choose to import your Steam friends, and then only hashed ids of your friends are sent and no other information from the file.

On March 15th, Valve spokesporson stated that localconfig.vdf file which Epic Games Launcher uses to access friends data "is not intended to be used by other programs or uploaded to any 3rd party service", adding that Valve was looking into what information the Epic launcher collects from Steam.^[9]

"Epic Store Bad"

Starting in March 2019, memes related to exclusive announcements and competition between Epic Game Store and Steam gained popularity in PC gaming communities such as /r/gaming,^[10] /r/pcmasterrace^[11] and /r/gamingcirclejerk.^[12] While some posts ridiculed Epic Games Store for attempts to compete with Steam and its exclusive agreements, other, ironic memes, poked fun at this trend.