112 PCWorld JANUARY 2020FEATURE EPIC GAMES STORE’S FIGHT AGAINST STEAM
already—and that 40 percent of them didn’t
have a corresponding Steam account.
Pretty impressive.
Anecdotally, the flood of exclusives has
caused me to open the Epic Games Store
more often than any other Valve competitor.
Uplay is a three-times-a-year launcher. Origin,
usually once-a-year. But Epic’s been open on
my PC more days than not.
But maybe the best evidence that
exclusives work is the fact that Epic continues
making deals. Circular reasoning perhaps, but
with some deals reputedly topping $10 million
(go.pcworld.com/10ml), it’s hard to imagine
Epic would throw that kind of money around
without seeing some return on investment.
Developers continue to opt in as well, even
knowing it’s bound to attract negativeattention. That too is a decent endorsement.
And then there’s Red Dead Redemption II.
Released on the Rockstar launcher and the
Epic Games Store in November, it hit Steam
only a month later. That’s a short window,
much shorter than the year-long deals Epic’s
struck with most developers. So how did it
fare? Valve’s stats say it peaked at 11,876
players (go.pcworld.com/vlst) its first day on
Steam. By contrast, Grand Theft Auto V
peaked at 104,000.
There are a ton of caveats to those
numbers, including the fact that Red Dead’s
PC version is pretty janky and that it launched
on the Rockstar launcher in addition to Epic’s
storefront last month. It’s hard to do A/B
comparisons when you don’t control any of
the variables.