Great Computer War - Decisive Battle

The big cinematic duel between Team Iron Man and Team Captain America is nothing compared to the civil war that broke out on PC in 2019. Epic Games, a well-known computer game developer with the Unreal series to its credit, has decided to forge the huge financial success of Fortnite: Battle Royale into competition with the years of sole rule of Valve's online digital distribution service for computer games and software, Steam.

Over the course of twelve months, we have seen consistent attacks targeting Steam. Epic Games attacked from two sides - with expensive exclusive offers and a really interesting offer of free games. While developers quickly realized that breaking Steam's dominance could benefit them, players were divided into two antagonistic camps.

Epic's main weapon in the fight for players was free-to-play games. When they run out, we'll see how much this strategy really cost.

While Valve was grumbled about being passive and ignoring developer needs, Epic failed to provide core features in its launcher and suffered a major blow to its image with the Hong Kong controversy and bizarre statements from Tim Sweeney, the CEO. And while the Steam team initially seemed to have a numerical advantage, or at least more authority online, the fight became more evenly matched with subsequent free games and new features on the Epic Games Store.

Interestingly, the major publishers, still focused on selling games through their own platforms, have begun to take sides. Epic was quickly joined by Ubisoft, and a few weeks ago Electronic Arts decided to end its long estrangement from Steam by moving many of its games back to the Valve store.

Valve still didn't care much about the competition—a visual library overhaul is hardly the answer to Epic Games' offensive.

Next year will be the turning point of the entire battle. The Epic Games Store and their free-to-play venture is only expected to last until the end of 2019. Once players are no longer rewarded with weekly free candy from the creators of Fortnite, Valve will finally say "check" - we'll see how many users stay on the platform, not only playing free games, but also buying new ones. It may turn out that the platform's position is greatly inflated, and it may become a niche like GOG Galaxy or uPlay. But Epic's policies could also permanently damage Steam. We can prepare for new surprises. Whatever happens, in twelve months we will be able to determine who won this match.