Since launching in December 2018, the Epic Games Store has been a beacon of both hope and controversy in the PC gaming world. Fortnite and Unreal Engine creators Epic have allowed many smaller games to thrive by offering financial security and exclusivity deals, but on the flip side, those exclusives have earned the ire of gamers worldwide.
While some gamers complain about Epic's exclusivity deals because they simply want all their games on Steam, in many cases they have a point, since the Epic Games Store is missing many features that make Steam a much better place to shop and play games on.
Shopping Cart
It's astonishing that the Epic Games Store has 'store' right in its name and yet has gone over two years with no sign of a shopping cart. If a customer visits literally any online store - like Steam, Amazon, or eBay - and tries to buy something, it gets put in a cart.
This is so the customer can buy multiple things at once and doesn't have to go through the checkout or put their card details in every time. A shopping cart is convenient and encourages people to buy more than one thing at a time. It's truly puzzling why Epic Games hasn't added a cart yet, particularly when it's losing millions of dollars on the store.
Better Mod Support
In July last year, the Epic Games Store finally added mod support to at least partially compete with Valve's fantastic Steam Workshop - a marketplace where mods can easily be searched for, uploaded, and installed. Unfortunately, a year later it's still very much in its infancy.
Only a handful of games support the modding feature through the Epic client, and even for the ones that have it, there simply aren't as many mods available as there would be on Nexus Mods or Steam. Epic needs to push this feature hard if it wants to compete with Steam, as modding is a key part of PC gaming.
A More Attractive Storefront
Steam has spent many years devising multiple iterations of its storefront, so as a result, the main store page is straightforward, attractive, and with lots of options. Epic Games Store, by comparison, tries to be the same but fumbles.
Furthermore, each individual game's store page is oddly set out and missing many features, including simple things to encourage sales like being able to see other games by that developer or publisher, and links to similar titles.
A Customizable Library
While companies such as Valve and Epic like to see their stores as the main part of their gaming clients, to the customers it's actually their gaming library that's the most important feature - the place where all their games are clearly listed, to be played whenever they want.
Steam's user Library has gone through many versions but is highly customizable, with the options for Favorites, categories, and plenty of ways to organize them. Epic Games Store, on the other hand, has the option to list them by date or name. It's really basic and needs to be far more customizable.
Gifting
Despite having the name 'store' in its name, the Epic Games Store is missing many features that customers just expect from pretty much any online storefront, including the ability to gift items. Customers should be allowed to buy games and send them to other people on Epic, as they can with pretty much every online store.
Being able to gift a game to someone is a nice socialization feature, and it encourages people to buy games for friends who might not have bought that game themselves. It's really odd just how many features that would get the company more money Epic is prepared to ignore.
Achievements
Since the days of the Xbox 360, Achievements have been a gaming industry standard. Even if it's just for bragging or collection purposes, Achievements give extra life to a game as they persuade many players to go that extra mile, and it's always nice to see a little pop-up message telling the player that they've done something special.
The fact that the Epic Games Store doesn't have any, apart from the ones that developers put there themselves, is a big oversight that needs correcting.
User Reviews
It took a long time for Epic to add any sort of reviews to the store pages of its games, but when it did it simply added a few official reviews by critics. There is currently no place for user reviews of any kind on the Epic Games Store, whether via the client itself or acknowledgment of the user score on Metacritic.
While Steam does have the problem of review bombing, omitting user reviewing of any type does completely remove any power the customer might have - and most importantly, sends players away from the Epic Games Store in search of user reviews elsewhere. Steam may have its problems, but it's great at giving customers everything they might need from within its client.
Game And Update News
Scroll right down the Epic Games Store's main store page and the user will eventually come to a small list of five games titled 'Recently Updated.' Unlike other lists on this page there is no way to see more games that have received updates, nor is there any way to see what those updates actually entail.
Clicking on the games in the list simply brings the user to that game's store page, which doesn't say anything about any recent patches. Players need to know about new or incoming updates and what they actually do.
Forums Or Some Community Options
If there is one major complaint gamers have about Epic's approach towards its storefront, it's that Epic never seems to think about its customers first. It takes a developer-first approach, which is commendable, but many of the options or improvements that would make users' experiences of the Epic Games Store better are absent.
Other than a general friend list there are no community functions on the Epic Games Store at all, with the studio even closing its Fortnite forum in 2019. There needs to be more ways for players to interact with each other, otherwise, the Epic Games Store will remain a basic experience.
Screenshot And Video Taking Functionality
If there's one thing that players in 2021 love to do, it's taking screenshots, videos, and just generally recording every part of their gaming experience. While there are many programs that allow gamers to do this, Steam has the option to stream and take screenshots built into its client
. With a simple button-push players can record or show off anything they're doing, or take screenshots to share easily on Steam or almost as easily anywhere else. Epic has none of these things, and it really needs to add them to improve the user experience, at least if it wants to be taken seriously as a platform.