Earlier this month, Epic Games Store shyly announced that their free game giveaways are having “a measurable halo effect across the broader PC ecosystem”, increasing the sales of those games on Steam during the offer period. New Blood Interactive’s Dave Oshry has made the same argument a bit less sympathetically: boosting the profile of games already on Steam is the only reason to release anything on the Epic Games Store, even given Epic’s more generous developer revenue share, because EGS sucks.
The subject came up during a gargantuan interview with RPGsite, which also touches on New Blood’s forthcoming Doom RPG-esque Dungeons of Dusk, Switch 2, parenthood, and Oshry’s favourite brand of coffee. “So, we don’t have any games on EGS, and Blood West is on EGS,” Oshry commented at one point. “HyperStrange controls that. When we took over publishing for Blood West, they were like, ‘Hey, do you want the Epic Games Store stuff?’ I was like, ‘No, I don’t give a shit. What does it sell? Like, five copies a month? They’re like, ‘Not even.’
“But they did a free giveaway for Blood West over Christmas. I think it was – Blood West was free on Christmas or whatever and I thought ‘Oh, man, I guess that’s going to kill some of our Steam sales that week or whatever, during the winter sale.’ It turned out Blood West Steam sales for those two days actually were, like, up 200% because it was just free advertising for Blood West. So, people saw that Blood West was free on EGS, and then they went and bought it on Steam instead, which is hilarious.
“So it’s not a black hole,” he went on. “It actually advertises for other platforms. That’s how bad EGS is. And it sucks because originally the promise of EGS was really good, but you have to build a better store. You can’t beat Steam just with free giveaways and high developer percentages. You could give developers 100% of the royalties if you wanted, but if nobody’s buying. What’s 100% of zero? Like, who gives a shit?
“So, the ideas were there, but they failed to build a better store or a better user experience at all and it’s been like 10 years, and they just haven’t. So, it’s dead. End of story.”
In the same interview, Oshry offered a similar, but slightly more forgiving analysis of GOG (I’ve added some hyperlinks, for context). “Back before Steam opened the floodgates and you could put any old game on there, things were great,” he said. “Steam would be for your new games and GOG would be for all your old games, right? Then Steam let anybody put anything on there, and then all of a sudden who needed GOG anymore?
“The things GOG has been doing with preservation, and updating games, and being able to host things like Fallout London,” he went on. “They have these one-click mod installers now, which is really good. For guys like me, I don’t mind moving files around and shit, modding the old way, but we’re getting to a point now where people are either too old or too young and don’t know how modding works. The fact that you can be like, ‘Oh, man, I really want to play Heroes of Might and Magic 3, and you could just go to GOG and they’ve got, like, a one-click installer to play it on Windows 11 in ultrawide, and the fact that they’re taking the time to do that kind of stuff is great.
“The problem is it’s still 1 to 5% of the sales on Steam, where it used to be closer to 5 or 10%. And GOG’s got a new owner now. One of the CD Projekt Red guys who left just bought GOG out from under CD Projekt Red. It’s independent now. I mean, it was always independent, right? It’s part of CDPR, but now it’s his own company, and he’s been outspoken about what he wants to do, just providing a better experience.
“Everybody roots for GOG, right?” Oshry concluded. “We want GOG to be a great thing, and GOG’s great. It’s just that I don’t have a reason to use GOG or GOG Galaxy instead of Steam. The only thing I’ve got installed on GOG Galaxy right now is Fallout London and The Journeyman Project games, actually. I went back and played those a little bit, and those need to be fucking made to work on modern systems. Holy shit. That was a pain in the ass. But I got them running. I played them for five minutes. I got my nostalgia fix, and I uninstalled it.
“I mean, GOG is great. I love their preservation efforts and everything they’re trying to do, but they need enough people to give a shit, or, how long are they even going to be around?”
All of the above chimes with my feelings as a dead-eyed user of all three platforms. The Epic Games Store has been around for eight years and still doesn’t have a proper screenshot button – take it from me, the average review score for an EGS release would go up 2% if it did. GOG? Great at all that modding stuff, for sure, less good at resisting the siren call of generative AI. Mark can tell you more.
Still, all this is a wee bit “old man yells at cloud”. Oshry seldom lands in the middle of the scale with his opinions, and I really must object to his defeatist rhetoric that “the Internet sucks in 2026. Nothing’s fun anymore. You used to be able to make a cool website, or nobody goes to websites anymore.” Shut up David. Stop insisting that it’s the children who are wrong and go finish making your unofficial Fallout game.
