I just took a look through the Epic Games Store, and some of the titles there look incredible. Seriously, it’s a shame. I’d buy several of the games there, including World War Z, if they were on Steam. When the new Epic Games Store launched, I had already resolved to not buying anything from this launcher. Before the controversy was even a thing. It did have a fancy look, but just looking at the launcher and store, I wasn’t impressed. Nothing is easy to find, and the store doesn’t even have a shopping cart functionality. If you want to buy multiple games, you have make multiple purchases.

To add to that, the roadmap for features and bugs is horribly slow. It didn’t have store search to begin with, but has since been added. Code redemption sucked, there was no “offline mode,” or even notifications. Not to mention mod support (listed at 4-6 months away!!!), cloud saves, genre or tag search, and play time tracking. It also misses some features that made Steam so big. User reviews, mod support, other currencies and payment methods, wishlists, achievements, and no shopping cart. Those last few features aren’t even on the feature list for the next few months, not to mention some being listed as 6+ months. You can view the roadmap on Trello here, if you’re interested in keeping up or just want to take a look yourself. Or, just view the picture below.

With all the missing features, arguably the largest ones being 6+ months out, I can’t bring myself to purchase anything from the store. With the Epic Mega Sale going on right now, you get an additional $10 off of games, on top of whatever discount is already applied. Some games normally $30 are going for less than $10. Which would be great, but I already don’t trust the Store. Not since it stole my Steam friends list, and not since they’ve been buying exclusive games from Steam for up to a year. The Fortnite money really sucks. I wanted The Outer Wilds, and The Outer Worlds, but they’ll be Epic exclusives for a while. I have no plans to purchase them until they finally hit Steam. I can’t get the launcher’s offline mode to work for me, without first having to login on a network.

The launcher is slow to load. Even having already launched it, it takes 30+seconds to load just my library. Then other times, I get the launcher loading to just this image. (This appears to happen since I disabled the option in the launcher that minimizes the program to the tray instead of closing it. It hasn’t loaded correctly since, and I’m too lazy to attempt to fix this pile of crap.)

The launcher will stay like this, even after killing the program through task manager and completely relaunching. I can’t fix it sometimes. And, naturally, it renders the games in library unplayable. Why would I spend money on this store if I could possibly lose access to my games randomly? I work off a lot, and the games I want to play, I can’t play them. Compared to Steam, I can access all my games whenever I want. Sometimes an update will prevent me from playing until I download it, but I have so many other games to play, it rarely is an issue.

To the primary point of this article, why would drop money in a launcher that doesn’t offer the best experience? Sure, Origin sucks. But it does work most of the time. Other than the insane number of random updates, I don’t have issues with launching Origin. Or the launcher appearing as the above screenshot. I want to buy these games, but if I can’t play them in the launcher, what’s the point? Not to mention the news of them throwing around millions to get exclusivity for a while, causing games already listed on Steam to get removed until the exclusivity deal ends. This isn’t good for PC gaming as a whole, when you can just buy your way to having some of the most popular games on the market or coming to market.

I won’t be purchasing anything from the Epic Games Store in the near future. Other than the free games, at least that way I won’t feel cheated out of something I actually own.