5 days ago
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Steven Allison acknowledges some people will always say "F— Epic", as focus finally shifts to player experience.
Epic has released its usual stream of annual stats for the Epic Games Store, including a big increase in third-party spending and a confirmation of a notable drop in Fortnite playtime. But alongside that the publisher-developer, engine-maker and storefront owner is also promising some major improvements to the oft-maligned store itself.
The headline improvements come in the form of much better speed, more features - noticeably social ones from player to player - and a cross-platform library between your PC and your mobile phone.
"We have a lot of things we need to fix," admitted Epic Games Store vice president and general manager Steven Allison said, during an interview with Eurogamer. "We have needed to fix them for years. We've been really focused on developer tooling and all the things we do there. But last year, we finally started to point more of our resources towards player experience stuff, all the things that our players have needed, wanted, and all critics rightfully take us to task on.
"We got a lot of stuff out the door last year, and this year is going to be probably the best year for that stuff on the 'big rocks'. And the big rocks are: the launcher sucks. Let's call it what it is. It's really slow," he continued.
"It makes calls to our back-end services to refresh every time you click around, and depending on your connection, you'll have to wait a couple seconds. And that just doesn't feel good, especially when people are comparing and contrasting and dual using one that doesn't do that."
Work on the architecture started in November 2025, he says, and is making "great progress. We're basically pulling the guts out, putting new guts in." Those speed improvements should appear for players around May or June, according to Allison, and Epic's official press release states "this summer".
"It should start to feel good, be faster and people be like, 'Holy shit. It doesn't suck so much.' And that will be a win for us."
It was a pretty candid acknowledgement from Allison, who seems well aware of the criticisms Epic has faced for its user experience. Another of those, in the Epic Games Store's lack of functionality compared to its main rivals such as Steam, is also now finally being addressed. He went on, "We have no social framework in the store, like other stores - even console platforms - [which] have the ability to communicate with your friends, and we just kind of stripped that out during Covid and never brought it back."
As a result, Epic is set to bring 'community spaces' to the Epic Games Store, adding avatars, player profiles and private messaging to cross-platform text chat, and adding voice chat and game independent parties from Q2 this year (Allison noted this is coming in May, to be precise). A cross-platform library will come in the autumn, along with new 'library management' functionality, region-specific storefronts, and a launch of the store on iOS in Japan in March and Brazil in June.
All this marks the first proper step towards addressing some of the many player-facing issues that have been raised by users over the years, from those lacking social functions to wider community features such as user reviews. One more that's set to arrive per Allison, that should go down especially well amongst internet users of a specific age missing the bygone era of static, non-instant-messaging communication: "a kind of forum-type experience," as he put it, which is set to arrive in test form later this year.
The prevailing question at this point is: what's taken the company, by no means short on resources, so long to pull these seemingly foundational features together?
Allison's answer was that it was "a two-sided marketplace," and "super complicated and hard" at first, as the store's sheer number of users on launch - approximately 30m users in the first 14 months - meant primarily focusing on the developer side. "We've got to get developers in the door, they are not going to deal with a back end where we have to do everything manually with them," and so "we really focused on that because free games was so powerful at the beginning," as an incentive to get the players to match the developers.
The store itself, Allison is keen to mention during our conversation, was ultimately launched as the "tip of the spear" for getting developers to a much higher revenue share of 88 percent to 12 percent, vs. Steam's infamous 30 percent cut (something currently the subject of a £656m consumer lawsuit here in the UK).
"It isn't that we ignored it," Allison said, "but we had to get out of the super manual onboarding of important titles. We had to build the tools for self-publishing, and that took us, like, almost three years. It was a major focus of our engineering."
At the same time, Allison seemed very much cognizant of the issues players have had with the storefront. Now, the company is spending "the majority of our engineering time, focus and capacity on player facing features that we know we have to get to," he said.
"The criticism is all fair…" he continued. Citing a particularly blunt subreddit. "r/fuckepic - there are people that feel that way, and we respect that. But we know the players are going to be happy when those features show up, and we just gotta knock them out.
"And so I hope, like, two years from now, we're not really having this conversation anymore. The multi platform stuff is cool, the social stuff maybe is better than anyone's doing." The goal, within that period, is that Epic is no longer "in a deficiency [compared] to expected features."
"We're trying to attack all the big buckets of things that are fair criticisms, and we have to do the work. We just have to do the work."
English (US) ·