Console wars are a thing of the past. The new war is Epic Games Store vs. Steam, and it could get bloody. For years Steam has been stuck in a “damned if you do damned if you don’t” situation about whether to open the flood gates to any and all games, or to police the storefront. Initially, Steam was a gatekeeper that decided which games went on the platform. Over time this changed, mostly thanks to the now defunct Steam Greenlight. At the moment, if you pay a small fee, you can get your game on the storefront, though Steam still exercise its power and pull a game every once in awhile due to controversy. There’s people yelling for it to not regulate, and then there’s people screaming at it to regulate. It can’t win.
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That said, over the past few years, Steam has mostly kept its hands off, letting countless horrible, illegal, and sometimes repulsive games make it onto the platform. And as a result, Steam has built quite the reputation for being a storefront propped up on 95 percent of garbage.
On the other side of the coin, the new Epic Games Store is tailoring its storefront, but eventually it wants to open the gates up wider. However, that doesn’t mean it’s going to not regulate like Steam has.
Recently, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney was asked by PC Gamer how the company will go about regulation. He responded as follows:
“We’ll have a quality standard that doesn’t accept crappy games,” said Sweeney. “We’ll accept reasonably good quality games, of any scale, whether small indie games to huge triple-A games, and we’ll take everything up to, like, an R-rated movie or an M-rated game. A GTA game would be fine to us, but Epic’s not going to distribute porn games or bloatware or asset flips, or any sort of thing that’s meant to shock players. The PC‘s an open platform and if we don’t distribute it in our store you can still reach consumers directly.”
For those that don’t know: in addition to housing every great PC game, Steam is known to be a haven of porn-esq experiences, asset flips, and just downright terrible games. Sweeney doesn’t outright call Steam out while speaking to PC Gamer, but it’s fairly obvious that there’s a jab there.
Sweeney also doesn’t divulge any details on how it will police its storefront, though he notes it won’t be what it’s like on consoles, which are played by humans before they are approved. But there will be people making judgment calls in some capacity.
