Honestly? You’d almost feel bad for Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford. Not only has he been posting through it after the Borderlands movie crashed and burnt, now he’s got everyone making fun of him for an ill-judged prediction he made five years ago: That the Epic Games Store’s resources and willingness to invest them could have Steam looking like a “dying store” by now.
And then, well, Borderlands came crawlin’ back to Steam. Five years after Borderlands 3 was announced as an (initial) Epic Games Store exclusive, Borderlands 4 made its debut announcement at last night’s Gamescom Opening Night Live event. It’s coming to Epic, sure, but it’s no exclusive this time. You’ll be able to pick the game up on day one on Steam if that’s your store of choice.
Cue the internet digging up Pitchford’s 2019 tweetstorm about the Epic Store’s bright and sunny future compared to Steam. “From a track record point of view, my expectation is that Epic’s investment in technology will outpace Valve’s substantially,” wrote Pitchford back in April of that year, “When we look back at Steam in five or ten years, it may look like a dying store and other, competitive stores, will be the place to be.” A little later on, he wrote that “if I were to bet on this (and remember I’ve got a pretty good seat with a great view of this competition), Epic will inevitably surpass Valve on features and quality of service.”
From a track record point of view, my expectation is that Epic’s investment in technology will outpace Valve’s substantially. When we look back at Steam in five or ten years, it may look like a dying store and other, competitive stores, will be the place to be.April 13, 2019
Which, ah, has not quite borne out in the last half-decade. Steam is perhaps more dominant than ever and the internet at large is—for reasons both reasonable and unreasonable—intensely hostile to the idea of switching their storefront of choice from Steam to Epic (or any other launcher).
Onlookers have been keen to point that out in numerous posts making fun of Pitchford’s prediction. “Randy ‘Nostradamus’ Pitchford,” wrote one amused commenter on Reddit. “It can happen aaany minute now!” wrote another. “If Randy says my name is something, I [would] double check my birth certificate,” said a user named ares0027, summing up the general tenor of the internet response to Pitchford’s unearthed prophecy.
Others have simply made fun of the Epic Games Store’s relative lack of features compared to Steam, as well as Steam’s (perceived) inactivity that doesn’t seem to have thwarted its dominance. “Just [interested] in what technology Epic invested [in over these] last years?” wrote one user, to which another responded “Introducing “Shopping Cart®”—now you can pay for more than one item at a time, truly revolutionary tech!” The EGS, infamously, launched without the ability to add multiple games to your basket at a time.
“It’s like other stores are actively trying to be so fucking worse than Steam,” wrote Extreme_Isopod_9414, to which others replied that Valve’s storefront doesn’t really need to do anything to beat its competition. That’s a strategy a user named NJ_Legion_Iced_Tea gave the pithy name: “Sun Tsu’s art of not being a fucking idiot.”
You get the idea. To be judiciously fair to Pitchford, he made that prediction mere months after the EGS launched in late 2018. Innovative projects like the Steam Deck were just a glint in Valve’s eye and no one yet realised that Epic’s strategy would revolve more around handing out free games and buying exclusivity rights than it would around making interesting technical investments. Still, I don’t think it would take a genius to predict that Steam wouldn’t become a “dying store” in a mere five years after that point. At least some of the mockery does feel a little earned.