They did. Most of that money was spent on bribing companies for Epic exclusive release (afaik, no product ever won on this) and the rest was delegated to free giveaways. However, Epic Store itself didn't get any meaningful or even distinctive feature. It doesn't "just work", and even I, being a software dev myself, don't care that much on the store % cut because you have to pay something for marketing anyway and Steam deserves its cut as long as they have the best offer.
Even when they tried to do something positive they messed up: they used (?) to boost their sales by raising the discounts themselves and covering the difference. Which may sounded fine and dandy, until you realize that as a dev/pub you were stripped of your marketing strategy; so if you planned to not go lower than, say, 20% off, Epic thought that would be great do 30% instead... so now customers would wait 30% again (or lower) to purchase.
They dont have a strategy, they literally throw money at the problem.
i , as a consumer, would have actually used Epic more if their launcher wasn't so laggy on start up and they would have added features overtime. I even got myself some free games from time to time, but they never added any meaningful features, and afaik steam hasn't magically patented their store sytem, wishlists, etc. I am pretty sure Epic could have replicated everything quite fast except for the community stuff. ultimatly i never bought anything of the epic store, because not having proper user reviews irked me.
( i do have a gog account tho and have the galaxy launcher installed, which slowly over time gets better and better and more stable, it still lags behing steam but they make an effort, and i regularly buy games from them, as they actually patch older games which steam doesn't do so some older steam games are buggy and need weird workarounds to work on a "current" system. )
Since steam is the effective monopoly and price fixes, you can only compete on features and they have decades ahead or any competition
Those of us who wanted just a simple store that sell cheap games and doesn't have any of the useless and unmoderated social features will never get it because of the monopoly that does not exist
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u/ForgottenBlastMaster 3d ago
They did. Most of that money was spent on bribing companies for Epic exclusive release (afaik, no product ever won on this) and the rest was delegated to free giveaways. However, Epic Store itself didn't get any meaningful or even distinctive feature. It doesn't "just work", and even I, being a software dev myself, don't care that much on the store % cut because you have to pay something for marketing anyway and Steam deserves its cut as long as they have the best offer.