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Yes. I didn't at first, but one of the sales when they had you use the discovery queue thing to earn cards I tried it out and really liked the idea and have looked through it a few times and added things to my wishlist before. I also look at the new games list but shit gets buried so fast there that it's pretty much meaningless a lot of the time. 9050 games in 1 year is an average of nearly 25 games a day and I sure as fuck don't look at Steam every day. It's too much and a LOT of it has no reason to be there. As far as what they can do? A lot of this shit is legitimately just asset flips of stuff from Unity or whatever. Ban shit like that. Remove it from the store, ban the person who puts that kind of thing up. Having to pay $100 to put the shit up is obviously not stopping them since they can get it back anyway so they need to figure something else out. Maybe restrict what can be put on the new release page via some sort of criteria? I'm sure there's lots of things that are a lot more direct then everything they've done so far put together. That last statement is mostly hyperbole because I know they HAVE been trying to do things it just seems like it has no actual impact sometimes and comes really slowly. Part of the problem with their system being so great and open and easy to make use of is the scum of the industry will be there to exploit it in any way they can. A big part of it is the achievements and trading card shit. To be fair, I THINK they starting restricting games being able to have them through some means or another late last year? I don't remember for sure but I thought I saw something about it since that's how these people made their money back since there are people that will pay $1 for shit that isn't even really a game if it will give them achievements and steam cards. Not sure how thorough it is though.

Steam wouldn't have this problem either if they did ANYTHING about it. Literally the most they've done to stem the tide is stop Greenlight (and replace it with a system that just made it so people had to pay them first instead of getting votes to throw up all over the store), and overhauling the curator system so that they can let other people do the work they should probably have somebody doing themselves. The discovery thing is one of the best features they've added in quite a while I think. They had the right idea with opening the platform to people who want to make games and have a centralized place to get them some exposure, but they had NOTHING in place to stop abuse of the system and have done nearly nothing to stop it from happening since it became an issue in like 2014 and it only gets worse as time goes on. Steam is a great platform that is literally buried under heaps of shit and it's hurting them. If Epic really can ramp up their storefront quickly, they'll be in a prime place to take a share. If Valve can sort some things out though they can cement their hold because Epic's roadmap puts them even pretending to be comparable to steam a minimum of 6 months out (more for a few things). Also, the "Recently Shipped Features" section makes me lol every time I see it because imaging an online store without some of those features is ridiculous. Here's the roadmap in question: https://trello.com/b/GXLc34hk/epic-games-store-roadmap

It's almost impossible to find anything on Steam anymore unless you know exactly what your looking for. Trying to browse new games is nearly impossible sometimes because there is so much shoveleare and asset flips being thrown up that everything gets buried. There were over 9000 (lol) games released on Steam in 2018 and it's been nearly that bad for the past few years. They don't even pretend to police what's going on at all. It's pretty much WHY their refund policy improved. And they know it too. They've actively invited bigger names in the gaming community to voice opinions on how to improve the state of things on the platform but only made minor changes without addressing the core problems. Having said that, you're right though. Nobody has the options they have right now and they have done a LOT of good in there with the lazy fuck fest. But competition is not a bad thing for something like this and I wish Epic and whoever else tries their hand at taking them on luck. Even if it only amounts to Steam improving it'll be for the better.

They have it planned out to get it to the point that Steam is at, but they're just kind of failing at basic store features in general right now which is why I don't care for it. The paying for exclusives thing isn't going to be forever either and they've said as much. Seems like they mostly are trying to get a foothold. Yes, it's stupid and annoying but it's nothing new. It's a MUCH better platform for developers though (they only take a 12% cut vs Steams 30%) so I wouldn't be surprised if it starts to take off when they finally work through their roadmap of planned features.

Wouldn't surprise me if it was. They have the money to throw around and Gearbox doesn't give a fuck. I honestly don't know why it matters all that much. It's still on PC regardless of how you buy it and Steam needs the damn competition so that maybe someday Valve can dislodge their head from their ass. My only complaint is Epic needs to ramp up their fucking launcher updates if they actually want to be that competition. Their roadmap is a fucking joke. How do you launch a storefront that doesn't have a fucking SHOPPING CART?? Never mind everything else.