Warframe has been consuming basically all of my game time. It took a long time of playing off and on for it to really click with me like it has now where Ive stuck with it. I’m actually a bit glad though because it’s left this ocean of different things in the game I can do and it’s been great.
They have the money and the technical talent to make a good launcher. They just appear to choose not to.
This is completely the case. You can’t tell me the makers of Unreal Engine couldn’t figure out how to replicate at least some of the more commonly used features of Steam. Of course they can do it. Someone somewhere in the corporate ladder decided they don’t need the extra features to compete with steam. Maybe burning money on the exclusivity contracts and game giveaways will work out in the long run, but I doubt that when they flat out said they’re spending more money than they earn in their 800+ person layoff just a few months ago.
Instead of offering anything to be a better platform they are burning money on the platform in hopes they can pay their way to dominance by paid exclusivivity and giving away games. One of those isn’t bad for users. Now consider what Epic offers beyond being able to buy and download a game. Nothing. Epic is only a storefront and they’ve had years to work on this at this point. Steam has gained dominance and maintains it in no small part due to all the additional features available to everyone. Do you use the steam workshop for any of your games? Have you used the steam community forums to troubleshoot a problem? Do you use big picture mode for a more console like experience? Do you customize your controller settings with the pretty expansive controller support built into steam? The overlay? How about the custom profiles and badges and trading cards? Epic is only a storefront. That’s it. That’s all that’s on offer. So they supplement it with bribing devs to be exclusive to their store and giving away games to try and attract users.