I think it's quite possibly the only way regardless of how your product compares to Steam. Steam has huge platform lock-in as well as other inherent advantages as an incumbent monopoly. Your platform can be better in every way and people will still use Steam because that's where all their games are and where all their friends are. The history of computing is full of better products that failed to beat lock-in. See, for example, the insane lengths we've gone to keep computers compatible with the 8086 instruction set.

People also ignore that Steam built itself up on exclusives too. Heck, Valve bought Turtle Rock Software a few months before Left 4 Dead's release to get an exclusive lock on the Left 4 Dead franchise in perpetuity, then froze the original developers out. But somehow gamers are more scandalized by Epic paying developers to release on Epic's platform a few months before Steam, despite that being less predatory in every possible way.

Is steam really that great? I say this as someone who plays many hours of games.

I think some things they do well are (which are admittedly important things):

* reliability * security * fast downloads * consistent achievements between games

But I think they're lagging others (mainly discord) in chat and social. Their voice quality is comparatively horrible. They don't really have a good space for a group to have a server like discord does, which really helps with cohesion. So while I definitely don't think epic is killing it in any of these areas, I don't think steam has that much going for it outside their core competency.

> Is steam really that great?

Yes. Yes it is. Steam built the online games distribution market from basically nothing to where it is today. They helped usher in the indie game explosion, and gave players unprecedented tools for finding and assessing games. Not to mention the normalization of high-discount sales.

Oh yeah, and also Valve went ahead and made Linux gaming a more realistic proposition than it has ever been in history.

I agree that steam's existence has done wonders for gaming, and I'm also happy with their work on linux gaming (and never mind some cheap sale games)

But that doesn't mean that steam today is the best experience for gaming, and I would probably go so far as to argue that their hold on gaming is harmful to the industry, the largest issue imo being their large take of sales.

I disagree with pretty much everything you've said. Steam is the best experience for PC gaming I know of. It provides discovery tools, cloud saves, forums, reviews, gifting, a shopping cart (Epic still doesn't have one), and is just as happy to promote Nobody Studio's latest interactive visual novel as it is BigCo's annual AAA Call of World of Battlefield. Their "large" take is pretty standard for an online storefront and they provide huge value for it. In fact, if you don't want that value you're free to sell Steam keys to your game on any store you want with Valve receiving no cut at all.

Steam is where it is today because it first earned, and then kept, gamer trust. All the anti-Valve propaganda out there the past few years doesn't change that.

I would argue that most consumers act as follows, based on anecdotal evidence from myself and friends, when they have some game that they want to buy. (so distinct from impulse buys that they see)

If you're buying the game to play with someone, you buy it on whatever platform the other person has it on.

Otherwise, you look at whatever platform you spend the most time on. If it's available there and the price is "reasonable" for you, then you buy it there. End of story. I don't believe that most people actively search out a new platform.

Otherwise, if it's not available or you think you can get it for lower cost elsewhere, then you go to the next store you think is likely to have it or have it cheaper.

Given that framework, it doesn't really matter how good a platform is for a consumer outside of being able to buy a certain game. The main factors for that platform are:

1. How many people are on it. and 2. How wide the selection on the platform is.

So I would argue that not only does the platform compete for users on 1 (which I've argued is mostly based on 2 and pricing), but also for developers on 2. I think steam's behavior with their features is mostly oriented towards making the platform attractive to developers, and Epic is offering exclusives and $$$ to draw developers in.

As to whether Epic's exclusives are good for that gaming community, you can argue that they will allow for an ecosystem of epic subsidized developers, and lead to more competition from steam for holding developers.

IMHO it's not that Steam is that great, but rather than many of the major competitors have been quite bad.

Also, for a consumer there's a big convenience advantage to having a single store - from UX perspective (but probably not from the wider market leverage perspective, tragedy of commons yadda yadda) I'd very, very much prefer using a single service that's good enough to having to use three or more separate places that each individually are somehow better but each doesn't carry all the content that I want. The same applies to most other media - movies/shows, music, books.

IMHO the only way to get competitiveness would be to ensure that exclusivity deals are impossible/illegal, so that you might have multiple services each providing all content but competing on other qualities.