Epic Games has been making waves in the last few months, and though some of the feedback has been positive, a lot of gamers are angry with the successful developer and their attempts to compete with Valve and Steam. The core rejection that many gamers are voicing, is that Epic has been pushing way too hard on paid exclusives, all while ignoring other areas of their services. The focus on paid exclusives has drawn a ton of ire from PC gamers as multiple titles forego existing deals to jump onboard with Epic and their boatloads of cash. The executives at the company have consistently defended the strategy, but gamers continue to be angry.
To assuage some of these concerns, Epic has begun plugging away at a whole host of new features for the storefront, as part of an ongoing development roadmap that lays out long-term plans for the service. You can find the full roadmap in its current form over here. Epic Games planned to introduce a variety of new and requested features in the coming months. Shopping carts, wishlists, friend lists and social features where among the many planned ideas Epic has on the docket, but pace has been too slow for some. This whole thing was also to be bundled with a full SDK for developers to build additional functionality into their games. Problem is, it turns out that this may have been a little too much too fast for Epic to deal with.
The short version is this, that Epic is struggling to cope with the amount of work this new SDK has created when combined with ongoing development on their various projects, including the Epic Games Store itself. And all this means that there’s more bad news coming for Epic, as the plan they had in place has been pulled, citing problems with development of the underlying tech. The announcement came via a blog post that claims a delay in production was the cause of this change of plans:
We’re continuing to refine the services to provide support for all platforms and stores in preparation for opening up the SDK for broad public release. Building the foundation has taken more time than anticipated and as a result we are taking down the roadmap ahead of GDC 2020, where we will share definitive plans and will provide an updated vision for the future of Epic Online Services.
The revocation of the previously laid plans is bad news for some, most notably developers who were banking on the rollout of this online infrastructure as part of their own plans. So while a firm release date is not longer set for the SDK, the removal of the public roadmap does cast some doubt on Epic’s future in this particularly controversial effort, only time will tell if Epic can manage to deliver on promises and redeem their worsening reputation.