As the Epic Games Store continues to grow, picking up exclusive after exclusive and announcing a long list of features that players will see over the next year, it continues to be compared to Steam. There’s no doubt that Valve’s long-running digital store is a behemoth in the PC game market, and has had a long time to develop many of the features players take for granted as part of the experience.
But there’s something else Steam users have come to take for part and parcel as part of their gaming experience — dealing with an unwieldy store that often buries gems under a pile of garbage.
While Valve used to vet the games that release on its store, it has long since quit, even allowing games that draw outrage from its own community to appear on the store only to be removed after backlash.
But those games aren’t the only problem. Players also have to dig through games that are just poor in quality, scams that ride off the popularity of other games hoping players aren’t smart enough to realize they’ve spent $30 on the wrong thing.
Epic has no intention of dealing with these kinds of issues. In fact, when Epic’s CEO Tim Sweeny spoke with PCGamer earlier this week, he made it very clear that Epic intends to police the games that appear on its store, making sure they meet a specific “quality standard.”
We’ll have a quality standard that doesn’t accept crappy games. 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.
Sweeny went on to add that the store won’t be distributing porn games, either — something that does appear on Steam, mostly in the form of Hentai games. Nor will the store allow “bloatware or asset flips, or any sort of thing that’s meant to shock players.”
For those that might be upset by this fact, he noted that since the PC is an open platform, developers of any game that don’t meet Epic’s standards can still find other ways to reach players.
As for how Epic plans to assure games meet their quality standards, Sweeny didn’t have a clear answer for that. He simply noted that the company will “be aware of the quality of what’s submitted prior to making a decision to list it in the store — somehow.”
He also noted that humans will most likely be making the call. As the store grows this is going to become a rather large endeavor, but it will be interesting to see how it works out.
