The Epic Games Store is almost 10 years old, launching all the way back in 2017. And while it’s kind of come a long way since then – it has a search function now – it’s still exponentially worse than Steam, which it was built to dethrone.
To this day, Epic’s storefront is slow and devoid of the features that transformed Steam from an annoying piece of DRM you had to install with Half-Life 2 into the community-focused storefront that’s nearly synonymous with “PC gaming” itself. It’s little wonder, then, that an Epic employee told Polygon that most users “come for the free games, then leave.” If Epic really does want to dethrone Steam, then I can’t help but wonder if it has its priorities completely backwards.
Publishers Aren’t The Ones Buying Games
When the Epic Games Store first launched, a lot was said about how it would finally be the PC storefront to actually pose a challenge to Steam. We here at IGN even said that Epic’s store actually had a chance to dethrone Valve. But eight years later, that really hasn’t happened, even if it still gets a few exclusives here and there.
A lot of that comes down to Epic’s philosophy around selling games. You see, every platform – whether it’s Valve, Apple, Google, or any other – takes a slice of revenue from games and apps sold on its storefront. Epic’s approach was to offer a much more favorable revenue share – just 12% – compared to the larger margins taken by most other storefronts. (Valve takes a 24% cut of every game sold on Steam, for example.) The problem is, that doesn’t mean much to the average gamer that just wants to play games.
If it did, Epic’s market share would account for a much bigger slice of the pie. But despite Valve’s apparent greed here, Steam was estimated to generate $1.6 billion in December 2025 alone, according to Alinea Analytics – more than the $1.16 billion that Epic made in the whole of 2025.
It’s no secret why Valve sells so many more games than Epic, it has a huge install base of loyal users that have been using Steam for years. For as long as it’s existed, Epic has been desperately trying to carve out its own dedicated userbase, mostly by giving away free games every couple of weeks. And while dangling free game keys in front of people’s faces is a good way to get people to download the app once, it doesn’t do much to keep people coming back, especially when the games store itself is kind of a mess.
Need To Go Faster
IGN interviewed Steve Allison, VP and GM of the Epic Games Store back in February, where he told us that Epic is investing in making the Epic Games Store a better experience for users. Specifically, the company is focused on making the launcher “feel fast and snappy and just be what you expect, frankly.” To its credit, Epic seems to have a finger on the pulse of what makes its platform such a slog to use.
To this day, the Epic Games Store takes forever to load, and once you start scrolling through your library, you often have to wait for a couple seconds for the next batch of games to load. That would be bad enough for a brand new app, but the Epic Games Store has been around for nearly a decade at this point, and even though computers are orders of magnitudes faster than they were in 2018, it still takes way too long to load my library, even when I have it set to a list view.
Epic claims that the new, more efficient store will launch in June, and that’ll be awesome if it’s true, but the store doesn’t exactly have a sterling reputation for improving its storefront on time. Back in 2019, Epic released a roadmap of features that would be added to the app, thankfully preserved by Wccftech, and while a lot of those features did end up getting worked in, there are still features like user reviews that are nowhere to be found.
Playing Catch-Up
While Epic runs in circles, trying to improve its game store, Valve isn’t exactly sitting on its hands. Steam is still incredibly snappy, especially when you’re just scrolling through your library, and it continues to add actually useful features. I mean, just a couple of weeks ago, files were found in Steam’s beta that suggests that the platform will help you figure out exactly how well games will run on your PC.
It’s this focus on making PC gaming more user-friendly that has turned Steam into the juggernaut it is today. And now, it’s at the point where you can argue that Steam is more than just some program that you use to buy video games. You can just use it to buy games, but there’s a reason that there’s a bold “Community” tab that lives at the top of the window.
Steam has everything from message boards, to user reviews, to extremely customizable profiles. Hell, I remember back when Trading Cards came out in 2013 – I was obsessed, for like six months, on collecting them and raising my Steam Level, just so I could add more bullshit to my profile. Features like this are probably why the Valve logo is often shown alongside the Playstation and Xbox symbols whenever a multiplatform game is released. Steam just kind of is PC gaming.
If Epic wants to compete with that, that’s awesome. By all means release an updated Epic Games Store that makes people actually want to use the platform, because the PC gaming scene absolutely needs more competition. But that competition needs to actually compete. Epic Games can continue dangling free games in front of people, but expecting that gamers are just going to flock to its store, even though it has a worse UX and no community features, is just delusional.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
