this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2023
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That's one interesting thing about this: They trained the players so hard to associate their store with the free weekly giveaways and only the free weekly giveaways, that's all everyone uses the client for now, and never mentally considers it to be usable for anything else.
The effect is pervasive, too. Games factually have not released if they're epic-exclusive. They're not discoverable on PC, as nobody would ever imagine checking the Epic catalogue for a game they're looking for. That's not what you open Epic for, it's those 1-2 free weekly games and nothing else.
In their bid to vie for developers not consumers they went so far too far that they have managed to alienate the concept of "selling games to players" in the consumers' minds, therefor making their store automatically unable to compete at its main intent.
Mind you, there are far more problems with it. Among which is that despite having so little in there, discoverability and navigation are downright terrible! It's an interesting lesson for frontend/UI design I imagine.
This. I visit the site every week to claim the free games. If a game is epic exclusive, I consider it not released yet.
Protip: isthereanydeal.com has an RSS feed which will also alert you to other givaways.
This is a good point. Everyone harps on Epic’s exclusivity, but there are a huge amount of games that only exist on Steam. Most of these never go on other platforms, and many that do, do so only years later.
When put like this, it sounds a lot like Steam and Epic are similar. Of course the difference is that, as far as we know, Valve doesn’t pay for this exclusivity - except indirectly by visibility.