JANUARY 2020 PCWorld 115STALEMATE
Not that Epic has faltered. Quite the contrary.
Given how resistant people are to change,
how much of a head start Valve had, the Epic
Games Store has had a remarkable first year.
I’m sure that with battle lines now drawn, the
conflict will only intensify in 2020. Valve can’t
rest easy yet.
Neither can Epic though. There’s so much
work left to do, and the longer the Epic Games
Store exists the more glaring its shortcomings.
Not long after the store’s debut, Epic put
together a road map (go.pcworld.com/eprm).
The idea was to give both fans and detractors a
window into the development process. If the
lack of cloud saves was stopping you from
using the Epic Games Store? You could look at
the Trello board and see that cloud saves were
slated for May.
Then Epic missed basically every milestone
it set. No surprise, maybe. Software
development is volatile. But Epic essentially shot
itself in the foot, announcing self-imposed
deadlines that it then blew past. Cloud saves
eventually rolled out to certain games in August,
not May. “Player Play Time Tracking,” originally
slated for the summer, launched at the end of
September along with a much-needed List View
(go.pcworld.com/view). Filtering the store by
genre didn’t happen until October.
Hell, until a few weeks ago you couldn’t
even see how much disk space most of your
installed games took up.
And there are still conspicuous holes in
Epic’s feature set. A Wishlist interface was
originally slated for summer, but Epic