Epic launched their digital storefront earlier this month to compete with Steam, the leading online retail platform for video games, promising DRM-free games with more money going to the developers. However, the lack of Epic Games Store forums has since caused problems for players of Subnautica.
While this might seem insignificant, the lack of Epic Games Store forums stops players from communicating with the developers. In the case of Subnautica, this prevented players from highlighting a number of problems from a recent update through the new platform.
Many players experienced gameplay becoming pixelated, or only displaying empty screens, and being unable to run the game without using the Epic Games Store launcher. However, these issues were all instead reported through the Steam forums for Subnautica, with no functionality to address bugs or problems with the lack of Epic Games Store forums.
In one case, a developer also responded through the Steam forums to advise on a fix for the issue, explaining that the update problems were limited to Mac users only. With the Epic Games Store attempting to unseat Steam as the leading game retail platform – offering games like Subnautica for free to encourage players to join – this news suggests that Epic still has a long way to go.
Moreover, this space is growing in competition – Discord also announced this month that are planning to release their own digital storefront next year, promising an even greater portion of profits going to the developers. For Discord, the 30 percent cut taken by Steam is unnecessarily high, and “just for the money”.
It isn’t all doom and gloom for the Epic Games Store – some developers have already prioritized securing their games on the new platform, instead of Steam. You can catch up on all the games available on the Epic Games Store in this handy little list, with many more titles listed to come in the near future.
