Over the last few days, Epic Games founder and CEO, Tim Sweeney, has been tweeting about his storefront and Steam. This all came to a head on Thursday when he stated the following in the tweet below.

If Steam committed to a permanent 88% revenue share for all developers and publishers without major strings attached, Epic would hastily organize a retreat from exclusives (while honoring our partner commitments) and consider putting our own games on Steam.

— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) April 25, 2019

Many have seen the Epic Store as something to be hostile towards; something that is stealing games from their comfort zone of Steam and will mean they can no longer have a single source for games. This is the same backlash Ubisoft, EA, and other individual companies are facing when they create their own storefronts for their own games. However, one must argue that there is a difference here: Not only is Epic offering games from many developers, but they are doing the same as Steam in almost every way.

Sure there is a lack of the bedroom developed tripe such as Yohjo Simulator and asset flips. Some have even said, “You are bringing exclusivity into a platform that doesn’t want it,” which I’d add that other storefronts such as the Windows 10 store and GOG have done respectively with their games, as Steam does with Valve games. Others, of course, have said that the Epic Store is “Taking away options and freedom from consumers,” in one sense, yes. In many others, no.

While Epic is offering many exclusives for its platform it is not holding your steam account hostage until you buy an exclusive. The point that Sweeney seems to be making is, it is just another launcher like uPlay, the Windows 10 store, Battle.net, GOG, and others. The difference between Epic and Steam is how Epic is taking 12% and the developer/publisher take 88%, meanwhile, over on steam the split is 30% to the developer’s 70%.

Nonetheless, one could and should argue without a rebuttal that the Epic store is still under major construction. In the image above you can see a recent view of the Epic Game Store’s roadmap which has some major parts of the storefront body, such as a Shopping Cart, slated to come in six months or more. The Epic Store isn’t perfect, as we can see, but does offer a lot including free games every two weeks which means your catalog is always expanding without having to spend a dime.

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