this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2024
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They could offer their games DRM-free, guarantee that their multiplayer games have LAN or provide servers and/or at least provide that information clearly to the consumer, write an open source drop-in replacement for Steam Input and Workshop, guarantee more uptime on their matchmaking/friends servers, retain old versions of games that they distribute, and allow for user-customized or open source clients to fit all sorts of UI preferences, off the top of my head.
Those things are up to developers / publishers, not the marketplace.
GOG mandates that all games must be DRM-free, so when I shop there, I know what I'm getting. Valve has tags that tell me if a game supports LAN, but developers aren't required to report that, so I can't tell if a multiplayer game I'm buying is built to last if the developer didn't think to list it; if they were required to, that would be different. People lean on Steam Input and Workshop because those features are made easy for them, but using them means you don't get those benefits outside of Steam, so there should be an open, third party alternative that developers can easily switch to if they're familiar with developing for Steam; a company running a non-Steam store has an incentive to develop this. Matchmaking and friends servers, as they exist today, are frequently provided by the storefront, so when Steam servers go down for maintenance and I'm in the middle of an online match of Skullgirls, we get disconnected, and we have to wait until they come back up; there are ways to increase uptime and prevent this interruption, but Valve hasn't improved the situation in at least 15 years.
If EGS mandated those things it would be as successful as GOG. Which is irrelevant compared to Steam. Steam didn't become successful because of tags. It's because they were first.
GOG is successful and profitable. EGS loses hundreds of millions of dollars.
Boutique shop successful, therefore Amazon is not a monopoly.
GOG succeeds in one key area that gives me a reason to shop there. Steam succeeds in other areas. Epic succeeds in none. If GOG wants to supplant Steam, they need to be good in that key area and the areas that I value from Steam. If Epic wants to supplant Steam, they need to give a single shit about what their customers want.