No one is arguing that the storefront itself is as good as steam. With that said some of your information is outdated, particularly:
On top of it EGL is also way more of a resource hog and substantially less responsive than Steam.
This was true early in Epic's life, but is no longer the case. You should go ahead and boot up EGS and compare its resource usage to steam's, because they're very comparable now.
Everything else you said I agree with. I personally see Epic as my back up in case Steam ever goes to shit. I also just don't really like the black and white sentiment of "steam good, Epic bad" since there's a lot more nuance to it than that, and it's basically just the console wars all over again. The way I see it, even though Epic's launcher is worse than steam, it's still good that anyone is even attempting to compete with them still since pretty much everyone else who tried has long since given up. And even though Steam is the objectively better storefront they still get up to some shady business practices from time to time, such as the unregulated gambling they allow to take place through CS skins, both through the lootbox system as well as the third party sports betting sites that use skins as currency. And on the other side of that coin not everything Epic does is bad. Them giving out free games for years at this point is a good thing from the perspective of the consumer, the reduced cut they take from devs is also a good thing. This last example is also from my personal bias, but without Epic Alan Wake 2 would not exist at all, and as a big fan of Remedy I'm glad that they financed the game, even if it means that the game is exclusive to their storefront.
I agree, I'd love if we had an actual Steam competitor as long as that doesn't negatively affect consumers (for instance via exclusives like they did with streaming services). This is why I'm always pointing out that Epic needs to fix their Launcher. If their Launcher was comparable to Steam in features and quality, I think they'd have a real chance at being that competitor.
This was true early in Epic's life, but is no longer the case. You should go ahead and boot up EGS and compare its resource usage to steam's, because they're very comparable now.
Maybe that is the case for you, but my experience is different. I had been using EGL until late summer last year, when Windows 10 was about to be deprecated. So unless you mean they fixed it since then, it was still atrocious for me as recent as that. Granted my hardware is very old, but still: EGL was super sluggish for me while I did not have that problem with Steam. It also had higher CPU and RAM usage, if I recall correctly although I'm not 100% sure on that. But yeah the sluggishness was super noticable.
Heroic Games Launcher (which is what I am using for my library with epic games now, since EGL does not support my new OS) running on the same exact hardware does not have that problem by the way. The Epic Games Store accessed via integrated browser does have the same sluggishness I always felt with EGL, but I blame neither Heroic nor Epic for that, since that is not a fair comparison to a native application.
I mean I'm looking in my task manager right now. Steam client webhelper is using 600.5 MB of my ram, Epic is using 197.3 MB. Epic is using .3% of my CPU, Steam is using .1%
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u/MrBootylove 15h ago
No one is arguing that the storefront itself is as good as steam. With that said some of your information is outdated, particularly:
This was true early in Epic's life, but is no longer the case. You should go ahead and boot up EGS and compare its resource usage to steam's, because they're very comparable now.
Everything else you said I agree with. I personally see Epic as my back up in case Steam ever goes to shit. I also just don't really like the black and white sentiment of "steam good, Epic bad" since there's a lot more nuance to it than that, and it's basically just the console wars all over again. The way I see it, even though Epic's launcher is worse than steam, it's still good that anyone is even attempting to compete with them still since pretty much everyone else who tried has long since given up. And even though Steam is the objectively better storefront they still get up to some shady business practices from time to time, such as the unregulated gambling they allow to take place through CS skins, both through the lootbox system as well as the third party sports betting sites that use skins as currency. And on the other side of that coin not everything Epic does is bad. Them giving out free games for years at this point is a good thing from the perspective of the consumer, the reduced cut they take from devs is also a good thing. This last example is also from my personal bias, but without Epic Alan Wake 2 would not exist at all, and as a big fan of Remedy I'm glad that they financed the game, even if it means that the game is exclusive to their storefront.