Borderlands CEO says his hopes on Epic Store were 'overly optimistic or misplaced'
www.tweaktown.com
Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford discusses his thoughts about the Epic Games Store and the years-old exclusivity deal for Borderlands 3 to skip Steam on PC.

I’m genuinely shocked how much Epic poured into the store and it still lacks so much basic features. Sorting games is still extremely barebones, store is filled with NFT/crypto garbage, the store still looks like a college student’s first front-end project, and last time I used the launcher to pick up free games (last year), it was still slow as hell. What were they doing in the past 5 years aside from dropping millions on exclusivity deals?

Epic is going to have to prioritize the store and try some new initiatives while also doubling down on earning pivotal exclusives if it is going to have a chance. I also hope other viable competitors arrive.

  • Tellore@lemmy.worldEnglish
    494·
    4 months ago

    I like how many games they give away for free, but tbh I’ve never played any of them there. Some of those games I decided to buy later on Steam anyway just to do achievements (epic launcher doesn’t have achievements, cards, any meaningful statistics, etc).

      • rdri@lemmy.worldEnglish
        64·
        4 months ago

        Are you serious? Obviously people don’t care about achievements on a platform that has almost no community-related functionality.

        • smeg@feddit.ukEnglish
          23·
          4 months ago

          What has community got to do with achievements? My Steam profile is entirely private, the achievements are for me.

          • rdri@lemmy.worldEnglish
            4·
            4 months ago

            My profile is also not public but it’s visible to friends. Also I can make it public when I want.

            There are also achievement statistics.

            • smeg@feddit.ukEnglish
              23·
              4 months ago

              Fair, but my point is that plenty of people care about achievements without any community integration

              • rdri@lemmy.worldEnglish
                3·
                4 months ago

                Well did it help Epic when they added achievements? Guess not much. Either they never marketed this feature enough or most spending users never cared about achievements on Epic.

        • Kecessa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          35·
          4 months ago

          The person I was replying to said there’s no achievements on EGS, I showed them the proof that achievements are supported and they’re now mandatory.

          I don’t care at all about community shit on Steam and consider all of it to be bloat, I still love the challenge from achievements.

          • rdri@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            4 months ago

            I see. Still, I can see that for many people achievements with no value are no better than their absence. Platform provides value, and for now only steam provides a lot of it with almost each purchase.

            • Kecessa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              15·
              4 months ago

              I’m willing to bet all I own that most Steam users don’t care about their profile or people seeing the achievements they got but they still care about achievements as a form of optional challenges they wouldn’t have thought about otherwise.

              • rdri@lemmy.worldEnglish
                31·
                4 months ago

                If you mean just the percentage of users I might agree. But those people don’t really correlate with the users who provide most of the profit of the platform.

                • Kecessa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                  14·
                  4 months ago

                  Pretty sure you underestimate what the average gamers spend, you’re in a bubble if you use the social features and it makes it seem like most people do, Steam has 132m monthly active users.