Key Highlights:
- The official Epic Games Store community post dropped a much requested feature.
- This feature applies to game pre-orders only.
- However, the scope of the feature remains quite limited, and EGS is far behind Valve’s Steam client in terms of feature parity.
Part of the appeal of the PC gaming scene is in its sheer breadth of options, which range across multiple genres, publishers, experiences and of course, game launchers. While Steam remains the king of all PC game launchers to date, rivals such as the Epic Games Store (EGS) have not been far behind, threatening to topple over its dominance.
To this extent, Epic Games has recently added in a feature that remained a staple of Steam pre-orders until quite recently, which is very much appreciated.
The Epic Games Store Finally Adds the Ability to Pre-Load Games
As mentioned in the community post from the Epic Games Store, pre-loading is currently live for specific products. The pre-load feature will be made available to players around 120 hours (or 5 days) ahead of the official launch, and will be distributed via an encrypted build.
This means that players will still need to download a decryption key (albeit automated), to access (and decrypt) the game during launch. Products that support pre-loading will have the same explicitly mentioned on their EGS store page.
Furthermore, existing developers can also choose to enable the same by creating a ‘private discussion’, and/or speak to their Account Manager and request access from the Self-Publishing Tools.
As always, this process does not guarantee pre-loads for all PC titles, and is partly dependent on the game publisher’s policies as well.
There’s Still a Lot More Epic Needs to Do in Order to Catch Up to Valve
Despite having over 300 million users worldwide, the Epic Games store is still far, far behind in terms of feature parity with regards to Valve’s Steam PC gaming platform. However, the ability to pre-load titles is quite appreciated, and should leverage some form of balance between the two rival platforms.
That being said, the pre-load feature isn’t exactly perfect either. The feature is only available for select PC titles currently, making it a rather disappointing revelation. EGS’s policies also don’t exactly mention a clear cut way for enabling the same, and it most certainly will take some time for the feature to trickle down to other games.
In sharp contrast, Steam offers pre-loads for multiple games, and has for years.
Also Read: Xbox Game Pass Gets 90+ Titles for Gamers; Here’s the Complete List
The situation gets even more dire when we take into account the other missing features within EGS, especially when compared to Steam.
Perhaps the most glaring omission would be in the lack of a community driven review system on EGS. Unlike Steam, the Epic Games store currently has no way for users to rate and review products in their library, which is quite unfortunate.
While Steam’s solution isn’t perfect either, it does help would be players get a grasp of what the game can be like, and of potential performance and/or progression difficulties.
Other omissions included a lack of a shopping cart, which was thankfully added later on, followed by a complete disregard for macOS and Linux platforms. The EGS launcher is currently Windows only, and does not support macOS or Linux builds of games in any way.
It’s quite a shame, given much influence Epic Games has over the PC gaming industry. Such features should be a part of the client by default, and not labelled as future additions.
EGS is sure to add in these features later, but they’re already late to the party, which does not give a rather positive outlook.
