author: Konrad Serafinski
Randy Pitchford: "Steam Could be Dying in 5 to 10 years."
Randy Pitchford continues to battle opponents of the Epic Games Store. The CEO of Gearbox Software thinks Steam could be a dying store in a decade and will be replaced by another digital distribution platform.
After Gearbox Software officially announced Borderlands 3, a number of questions arose about how the production would be distributed on PC. Shortly afterwards it became clear that the title would be a temporary exclusive on the Epic Games Store, which naturally met with a wave of criticism from dissatisfied gamers. Randy Pitchford, CEO of Gearbox Studio, defended the decision made by the publisher (2K Games), in response to mass tweets and review bombing of previous installments on Steam.
Pitchford's reaction encouraged users to an even more heated discussion with the studio's CEO. One of Reddit users decided to collect all the entries and create a clear summary of Pitchford's position on the Epic Games Store. The latter does not hide the fact that the EGS cannot provide facilities such as Steam, but reminds us that Borderlands 3 is still a few months away from launch and that by then the two platforms be more equal in terms of provided functionalities.
Pitchford also believes that the exclusivity of the third installment of the Borderlands series will help Epic Games Store to establish an equal footing in its fight against Steam (explaining, by the way, that it will be to the benefit of the entire market). However, the most controversial opinion of Gearbox's CEO is the one he wrote about Steam:
"[Epic Games Store are] the only guys who can really come along to disrupt Steam’s monopoly and help all this get fixed... 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," explains Pitchford
According to Pitchford, Steam will soon have no choice. Either it will become much better (whatever he meant by that), or it will lose the battle for dominance in the PC market. Randy Pitchford concludes the discussion by saying that we are witnessing a kind of breakthrough in the field of digital sales on personal computers:
"At the end of the day when we look back at this moment we’ll realize that this was the moment where the digital stores on PC became unmonopolized, and we’re all going to look back and see how change happened and how costs for developers and publishers to be on stores went down and how that value was passed on to the customers," he continues.
For all those interested in the matter, we recommend that you read the full list of statements by the CEO of Gearbox Software, as well as comments from the users. Will Borderlands 3 really provide the Epic Games Store with another brick to build strong opposition to Steam? We will probably see soon after the launch, which is scheduled for September 13, this year. The title will be available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC (until April 2020 only on the Epic Games Store). Unfortunately, we will probably have to wait a decade for the verification of Pitchard's prophecy related to the future of Valve's platform.
