The Epic Games Store is about to inherit Steam's biggest problem

gamesradar.com:

Epic has announced (opens in new tab) that developers are now able to self-publish their own games on the Epic Games Store, which means the store is about to inherit Steam's biggest problem.

Now the only barrier to getting your game on the Epic Store is a $100 submission fee and a handful of approval requirements. For example, if your game has achievements on other platforms, it has to have achievements on Epic, and if there's online multiplayer, it must be compatible with any version released on other PC stores. Games must also "download, install, launch and function consistently."

Epic's billing this as a way to help developers reach a "growing audience of over 68 million monthly active users." Steam last reported (opens in new tab) its monthly active user count as 132 million back in 2021, though that number's likely grown and there's certainly a fair amount of crossover between Steam and Epic users. Epic does still have the advantage of a universal 88/12 revenue split in favor of developers - Steam offers a 70/30 split for all but the biggest games.

Until now, Epic's seemingly been hand-selecting the games released on its store, and while certainly not every game on the platform is a banger, the new release section is much easier to navigate than it is on Steam. As of this writing, a dozen games have been released on Epic in the month of March so far. On Steam, 35 games have been released on the single day of March 9 alone.

There are well over 60,000 games on Steam now, and this is both the platform's greatest strength and its  biggest weakness. It's a positive for indies to be able to sell their games in as many places as possible, but the sheer volume of games on Steam means that it's tough to sort out the hidden