Ex-Epic Dev Blames Steam Loyalty For Killing PC Store Competition

Valve has spent over two decades building its Steam games storefront into the PC gaming juggernaut it is today, with it currently serving as the de facto place to buy games for most PC gamers. Epic Games has sought to knock Valve off the top of the mountain, but after fully eight years, it hasn’t managed to make much of a dent in Valve's marketshare. A former Epic employee says that the users themselves are largely responsible for the status quo.


Kiaran Ritchie, who used to work at Epic Games as a principal animation engineer, posted a lengthy diatribe on Xwitter about Steam’s dominance in the PC gaming space on social media platform X. In his rant, the services and infrastructure that Steam offers developers are waved off as "not that hard" as he claims that the task of hosting something like Steam is "trivial" and easily handled by cloud providers. He frames Steam as simply a black hole where precious revenue is sucked away from hard working game developers and publishers, yet also claims that it's unavoidable because of the platform’s massive user base.

What Ritchie casually leaves out is all the excellent features Valve has been implementing over the course of decades. The Steam Workshop makes modding games effortless, Family Sharing is there to make gaming more affordable for parents, players can read and write their own reviews of games (and developers can reply), and they can use the Steam client to record, capture or livestream gameplay. Valve also provides built-in community discussion forums where developers and players alike can share ideas and feedback.


All of these features are notably absent from the Epic Games Store. Ritchie doesn't call out the Epic Games Store specifically, but his argument that developers are "forced" onto Steam is predicated on the idea that there has ever been a reasonable competitor. The truth is that there hasn't. There have been competitors that offer enticing unique features of their own, like GOG's DRM-free downloads or Microsoft's Xbox ecosystem integration, but never mind all that—Kiaran believes that it’s the players who are wrong.

In fact, according to him, not only are they wrong, they actively work against other options. "The mere existence of other stores risks splintering their precious collection. They are ‘all in’ on Steam. Invested." Adding that, "competition in this space is not only uninteresting to most Steam users, it's actively denigrated!" No, Kiaran, it's only the Epic Games Store that gets this treatment. You won't see gamers complaining about GOG or Itch.io. EGS gets "actively denigrated" because Epic spends a lot of money to bring exclusives to its platform in an effort to force users to come over from Steam to play them rather than, as they say, "building a better mousetrap."


No, Kiaran, the failure of the Epic Games Store to provide meaningful competition falls squarely on Epic. The company hoped that handing out a steady cadence of free games was going to move the needle with players, but its launcher remains a terrible application to have to use. As a service it's incredibly barebones. The best it has offered players of late is an attempt at improving the performance of the local client, resulting in a vibe-coded mess of a launcher that players rejected vehemently. That lines up with the store's previous efforts, though, which have ever been more about making a point rather than delivering something good for players.