Steam And Epic Are In A Game Store Battle, And Players Win

For the last decade and change, Valve’s Steam has been the de facto standard for digital games on the PC. Want a game? Install Steam and download it. New launchers have risen to challenge Steam lately, but none have been so well-positioned to put up a fight as Epic.

There are a few different factors that can enable Epic to transition from a notable developer to a digital sales powerhouse. One, it already has an in with a massive amount of PC players via Fortnite. Two, players are getting tired of Valve’s lackadaisical attitude to its platform, and they’re finally ready (if not happy) to embrace a more fractured collection. And three, Epic is coming out swinging with a deal that partnering developers can’t refuse.

Fortnite Is Epic’s Trojan Horse

Steam began as an online platform for Valve’s multiplayer games like Counter-Strike. Initially, users didn’t appreciate the software running in the background and its baked-in DRM. Those are two things that are still annoying users to this day, at least on everything except Steam, since it’s proven to be reasonably easy and unobtrusive. Valve sold digital copies of its own games on Steam’s integrated store but didn’t begin accepting games from third parties until 2005, a couple of years after the platform began. Profits for digital games were much, much higher than retail sales, thanks to lower overhead and no need to share the money with retailers—third-party developer and publisher partners paid Valve instead.

the orange box, steam, valve, team fortress 2, half life, portal, — The Orange Box introduced millions of PC gamers to Steam.

Things took off in 2007 with the release of The Orange Box. The omnibus game bundle included the much-anticipated Half-Life 2: Episode 2, the instant classic singleplayer puzzle game Portal, and the surprise smash hit Team Fortress 2. Players could download The Orange Box digitally directly from Steam, but at the time conventional retail sales were still king, and Valve took advantage of that. Steam was installed along with retail copies of The Orange Box enabling its DRM and online multiplayer management, introducing millions of new players to the convenience of having your games tied to an online account instead of a physical disc.

The rest, as they say, is history. Steam became the dominant platform for PC gaming, digital or otherwise. Most of the new games you buy even at retail will activate via Valve’s system. Steam makes tens of billions of dollars a year in digital sales, and Steam activation codes are available from dozens of third-party resellers. Thousands of developers and publishers, from world-striding colossi like Ubisoft and Square-Enix to the smallest one-person teams, use it. It’s the Amazon of PC gaming. Valve is barely a developer anymore: they’re the de facto publisher and distribution platform for a huge portion of the industry.

If you want to complete, you need your own Orange Box, your own “killer app” to use an antiquated phrase. And if such an app exists, it’s Fortnite. Initially a fairly tame Minecraft-zombie shooter mashup, Epic pivoted the game’s focus following the success of indie hit Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds. They introduced a free-to-play Battle Royale mode, and while not the first or last of its kind, it’s become the dominant game on PCs, consoles, and even mobile.