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The Epic Games Store development team is now squarely focused on "the things that players need," says store GM Steve Allison.
After launching the store in 2018, Epic prioritized building features aimed at game publishers, because "there's no store without content," Allison said on a call with PC Gamer this week. Attention was then turned to building the mobile versions of the store, but the time has now come for a major effort to improve the user experience.
That includes a technical overhaul coming mid-year—"We're ripping out the guts of the Epic Games Launcher on PC," Allison said—as well as new social features. There are plans to test "community and forums around some of the top games on the store" and add player profiles, avatars, private messaging, voice chat, and game-independent parties.
Epic remains more cautious than Steam about social features
The addition of forums represents a shift in approach. Back in 2019, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said that the Epic Games Store would not have its own message boards, and encouraged developers to link to external forums.
At the time, Epic also opted not to emulate Steam features like user reviews, presenting its launcher as a light-touch intermediary between developers and players more than a destination in itself. Epic's account system is a good example of that philosophy: Unlike the Steamworks API, which only lets games interface with Steam's social features, Epic's Online Services can connect players across platforms and stores.
That interest in interoperability hasn't been abandoned, but Epic is now open to building a more active community within its launcher, with limits that keep its approach distinct from Valve's.
In the case of user reviews, Epic introduced a system in 2022 that asks random users who've played a game for more than two hours to assign it a star rating. Allison says the system has been "fairly bulletproof" as a way to include player ratings without allowing review bombing.
"The brigading that happens on the Steam platform against games, when they do things like cap a frame rate at 30 frames or whatever, that can turn a game's commercial outcomes upside down, that's something we want to not be able to facilitate," he said.
Steam has introduced features to mitigate review bombing, such as identifying surges in "off-topic" reviews, though the ability to collectively express anger via a mass thumbs-downing is no doubt something some Steam users would say they like about the platform. The moderation of Steam's forums and user groups is also notoriously lax.
Epic may never cater to users who want a free-for-all, but Allison says they know that more social features are desired, and they're going to build them.
"Right now, the first thing we're going to explore is adding a forum and using our trust and safety team to moderate the forums," said Allison. "But we're open to all that stuff now. We still have issues with and believe that those things [such as review bombing] need to be mitigated, but it's on us to figure it out."
Speeding up the launcher
The other big announcement, a technical overhaul of the Epic Launcher, has been in the works since October, and is expected to roll out this summer.
"The goal there is to eliminate the experience that players have where [the Epic Games Store] feels a little slow," said Allison, "Like you go to your library and it takes two seconds to load in, the system resourcing for when it's in tray, the time to load."
Allison said that the improvement is "pretty profound."
In its year in review dispatch, Epic also shared some of the store's statistical achievements from 2025, most notably record spending on third-party games.
Although Epic's user experience doesn't currently match Steam's, it has attracted game developers by offering them a better deal—a lower revenue cut which as of last June doesn't kick in until after a game reaches $1 million in annual sales—and has had success attracting users with its free games program, which Allison plans to continue for the foreseeable future.
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