Epic Games Is Spending Its ‘Fortnite’ Cash Trying To Eliminate Steam’s Biggest Advantage

Horace

credit: 505 games

Today, I added another game to my collection on Epic Games. It’s called Horace, and apparently it’s a story-driven, very British platformer that people like. Will I play it? Hopefully! For right now it goes onto my backlog, somewhere in the middle of the now 43 games I own on the Epic Games store, another free title from Epic to round out my already ungainly collection. It’s all part of Epic’s attempt to spend it’s money going after one of the biggest cash cow in the gaming industry: PC games distribution, i.e., Steam.

Last year, Epic Games made $1.8 billion off of Fortnite alone, not to mention what it made off of the Unreal Engine licensees, other games and the Epic Games Store, which raked in $680 million (PC purchases for Fortnite go through EGS, so there’s significant overlap there). And it’s spending some of that cash to continue this ludicrously generous free games program through 2020. I haven’t even clicked “buy” on all the excellent free games that Epic has offered me in 2019, but it’s clear that someone could easily wrack up a triple digit game collection without spending a dime.

For the most part, people use Steam for one simple reason: because that’s where their games are. Yes, Steam still has superior features and yes, on the whole it’s a better experience for consumers than the Epic Games Store. But most people don’t think about that sort of thing: most people just use Steam because it’s where their games are. It’s the sort of advantage that’s near-impossible to go up against, because there’s just no way to match the years and years of purchases on Valve’s platform that most PC gamers have stored up. But while there’s no way to match it, there is a way to simulate it.

That’s what Epic is doing with this particular portion of its Fortnite cash. If people use Steam because they have games on Steam, Epic will make sure that you have games on the Epic Games Store as well. We don’t know a lot about any of these individual free games deals and what they cost for the company, but they definitely can’t be cheap. Giving away dozens upon dozens of free games is the sort of thing you can do when you’re pulling in 10 digits a year off of Fortnite.

Will it work? It’s hard to say, but I can say that when I got a new computer, I installed the Epic Games Store second, right after Steam. No, that’s not first, but it’s close. Epic can’t fake the years that I’ve spent on Steam, the achievements, or the simple fact that I bought all those games with my hard-earned money rather than just dropping them in my library. But it’s a start, to be sure.

We’re early yet in this multi-store experiment. Tons of large-scale games are exclusive to Epic, and there’s no denying that Epic’s smaller cut of sales is appealing to developers of all sizes. But we’re still seeing what happens when we get out of this spending period and see if Epic can truly break Steam’s stranglehold on the market. I hope it can, because competition is good and because all of a sudden I have a ton of games on the Epic Games Store.