Epic Games Store is rolling out changes to gain traction against its main rival: Steam. In addition to his own game publishing, Tim Sweeney criticized Valve’s platform, more specifically the Steamworks API.

In a statement collected by PC Gamer, Tim Sweeney said that “Steam has caused a real problem for the industry” with the Steamworks API, which does not work outside of the Valve platform. More specifically, the founder, CEO and maximum shareholder Epic Games accused its rival of creating a species vendor lock that prevents multiplayer video game play between different services or platforms:

“They have a classic lock-in strategy where they build these services that only work with their store, and that bit us early on with a number of multiplayer games coming to the Epic Games Store. Steamworks didn’t work on our store, so either they had a limited set of multiplayer features, none at all, or they were just limited to a much smaller audience at the time the Epic Games Store launched, so the games looked like they were broken. And remember that Call of Duty went through the Windows Store debacle a while back where you could only play against other players from the Windows Store, so PC shouldn’t work.“.

In response to Steamworks, the Epic Games Store established a requirement that multiplayer games that are also published on Steam must be compatible with each other. To this end, it has released a solution called Epic Online Services, although Tim Sweeney’s company does not prevent developers from using their own solutions in this regard. Another aspect to consider around the same thing is that Steam requires the use of its own wallet for in-game monetary transactions, while the Epic Games Store offers complete freedom in this regard.

In addition to the requirement for multiplayer titles, The Epic Games Store expressly prohibits pornographic video games. This is in contrast to Steam, which since 2018 has allowed pornographic content even if it is not actual scenes. At this point we enter the debate about moral limits and free speech.

To all of the above is added a a change in the exclusive strategy of the Epic Games Store, which will now focus on big-budget titles because users are most interested in them. Exclusive titles include the upcoming Alan Wake 2 and those from developers such as genDESIGN, PlayDead and Mediatonic acquired by Epic Games.

Another interesting fact is that the total number of users of the Epic Games Store is now 230 million, which is an increase of 36 million compared to last year. Monthly active users increased from 62 million to 68 million, while with a free-to-play video game program that will continue into 2023, a total of 99 titles were offered at a value of $2,240, including PVP.

In short, Epic Games will try to use the same strategy against Steam that it used against Apple to continue its particular vision of open platforms. We’ll see if, in addition to some developers who are starting to return to Steam, they can convince the users as well.