Epic store: buggy launch
- What happened: Players and posts complain Epic’s store launch suffered from bugs and missing features. - The key specific: Reports called out a buggy storefront and feature gaps at launch. - Context/reaction: Critics also allege exclusives driven by Unreal-related deals create monopoly concerns on developer forums (x.com).
Epic Games opened its PC game store on December 6, 2018 with a thin catalog and immediate complaints about missing basics. (polygon.com) Polygon reported the launch went live with 15 announced games, and “not all” were actually on sale that night. TechCrunch called the store “very early-stage” and said it launched with only a small cluster of titles. (polygon.com) (techcrunch.com) Epic’s pitch was money: an 88% revenue share for developers, versus the 70% split common on rival PC stores at the time. Epic also said it would waive Unreal Engine royalties on sales made through its own store. (businesswire.com) The problem for players was that the store arrived without many features they already treated as standard on Steam and other launchers. Epic itself posted a public Trello roadmap on March 14, 2019 to show planned features and “emergent known issues.” (store.epicgames.com) Two of the most cited gaps took years to close. Epic added wishlists in March 2020 and did not add a shopping cart until December 2021, nearly three years after launch. (store.epicgames.com 1) (store.epicgames.com 2) That long gap helped lock in the store’s reputation as sparse and unfinished. PCMag wrote in 2023 that Epic remained a “basic PC gaming marketplace” with a “basic feature set” and “little sense of community.” (pcmag.com) Epic kept expanding the business anyway. On March 9, 2023, it launched self-publishing tools and said the store had more than 68 million monthly active users. (store.epicgames.com) The developer-side economics also kept changing. Epic told developers that, starting January 1, 2025, Unreal Engine royalties could fall from 5% to 3.5% if a game launched simultaneously on the Epic Games Store and at least one other PC or Android store. (forums.unrealengine.com) Critics on forums and social platforms have argued that Epic’s store strategy, engine incentives, and timed exclusives can steer distribution toward one company’s ecosystem. Epic has publicly framed the same policies as lower fees and broader release options for developers. (forums.unrealengine.com) (businesswire.com) The launch complaints never centered on whether Epic had money or ambition. They centered on the simpler fact that, on December 6, 2018, the store went live before it looked finished. (polygon.com) (store.epicgames.com)
