Week 5: Steam Vs Epic Games

 Welcome to Week 5 of UX Design Roundup where this week we are diving into the realm of video games.  Video games are one of the purest arenas for user experience, but one aspect that gets taken for granted is the marketplace where you buy them.  This week we will be pitting Valve's marketplace Steam against a trending newcomer Epic Games.  You may be wondering, what happened to Week 1?  I distinctly remember it running toward a sleeping bear with a big stick, but I had stuff to do so I left.  It's probably just running late...

Steam

The game developer Valve created the marketplace to digitally distribute their own titles but quickly began adding on titles from other companies as well.  Years later, it has grown into a massive community of independent and AAA game designers, gamers, and content creators.  With thousands of titles up for grabs, the challenge of organizing everything becomes very real.

Steam uses a community-based tagging system to classify games in addition to set categories.  It also lets content creators act as curators for specific collections of games to help users discover titles they like without using algorithms based on previous game time.  If you're like me and own over a hundred games, Steam also does a great job of allowing you to organize your titles into specific shelves or filter out only those installed.

Navigating the website has a minor learning curve, but it could be much worse without the good intuitive design they rely on.  The service also offers a variety of bells and whistles (such as loyalty points and trading cards) that some may find useful but don't add a whole lot to the overall experience.  Not really bad per see, but I wouldn't call it streamlined either.

Epic Games

Epic has put a ton of money into trying to knock Steam down a peg and has aggressively recruited game developers to list their titles with its service.  As a result, they have landed some exclusive titles which bring large player bases (such as Rocket League) and many smaller indie shops.  They have also enticed waves of users to their platform by giving away free games every week.  Say what you want, free stuff is always going to attract a crowd.

Sadly, Epic hasn't been able to match the user experience Steam has.  The marketplace is structured, but without the curators and a robust filtering system, it can be tricky to find what you want.  The individual game pages also don't have important information prominently listed such as if the game supports multiplayer or VR.  The information is there, but it's not as well organized.

The games library uses a card system to display games you own, but sorting through the list gets hard fast when many titles get involved.  There is little to no control over the order which complicates matters.  When it comes to finding news or manage DLC's for a particular title, the card system has few options and makes finding what you need incredibly challenging.

Conclusion

Epic is going to have a solid player base as long as they keep giving away free stuff, but if they want them to stick around for any length of time they need to start improving the experience of their store.  Steam simply does a better job of keeping their gamers connected and informed while not getting in the way of the games themselves.  It'll be interesting to see how things shake out in the coming days.  As for now, it's time for us to go, but I'll see you next week for another UX Design Roundup.