Newzoo director of market intelligence Emmanuel Rosier says the Epic Games Store overhaul Epic Games has promised for this year will not be enough to close the gap with Steam. Speaking to PC Gamer, Rosier said: “I don’t really see how they can turn that around, because Steam has become so inevitable.”
What the Epic Games Store overhaul changes
Epic detailed its launcher overhaul back in February, and said in June that the app would start up five times faster on average once the work lands. The storefront side of the update adds personalised game recommendations, quick-access categories and patch notes displayed on the shop page itself, along with Linux support.
Quick-access categories replace scrolling through the full catalogue to find anything outside the front page, and putting patch notes on the shop page removes the need to chase update details through social posts or a separate news feed. Personalised recommendations and in-store patch notes are features Steam has carried for years, and Epic’s launcher has run largely unchanged since it arrived at the end of 2018.
Why Steam is hard to dislodge
Rosier’s scepticism centres on how people actually use the Epic Games Store. Free games are the store’s main hook, but he argues they do not translate into engagement: players log in, claim the game, and move on without playing it. “It’s almost like collecting games rather than actually playing them,” he said. That cuts against Epic’s own case for the store, and it lines up with a wider pattern: a free giveaway can boost sales for the same game on Steam, as happened with Blood West, even while Epic is handing it out for nothing.
The premise behind Rosier’s pessimism is that Steam is now “inevitable”: too large for new players to avoid, and too embedded in existing libraries, friends lists and wishlists for long-time users to leave. Epic has tried to compete on price since 2018, first with exclusivity deals and then with the free weekly games programme, but neither has moved enough of Steam’s user base to build the network effect a rival storefront needs. A faster launcher and a redesigned shop front fix friction. They do not fix the reason people default to Steam in the first place.
Where the coverage splits
Epic disputes the framing. Asked about Rosier’s comments, the company said its “data tells a very different story,” without detailing what that data shows. By our arithmetic, the report carrying that rebuttal ran roughly 17.8 hours after PC Gamer first published Rosier’s interview, which puts Epic’s pushback on the record within a single working day of the original piece running. Other coverage of the same interview summarised Rosier’s view more bluntly, calling the overhaul “too little, too late.” All the accounts agree on what Rosier said. They disagree on how much weight to give Epic’s rebuttal.
None of this affects games already bought through the Epic Games Store: those keep working through the existing launcher regardless of how the overhaul lands. What is actually at stake is whether publishers get a reason to launch day-and-date on Epic instead of Steam-exclusive, and whether the free games programme keeps paying for itself if most of what it hands out goes unplayed rather than played. A faster, better-organised storefront might raise the odds of a claimed game actually getting opened. It does nothing to change why a player picked Epic over Steam for that game in the first place. Rosier’s answer, for now, is no.
