Steam vs Epic Games Launcher: 50,000 Games or Free Ones Every Week

Ask which launcher is better and you get an argument. Ask what people actually have installed and you get a much duller answer: both.

That is not fence-sitting, it is what the products are. Steam is a store, a library, a social network and a set of genuinely useful features built up over two decades. Epic is a store with a far better deal for developers and a weekly giveaway aimed at getting the launcher onto your machine. Those are different propositions, they cost nothing to hold simultaneously, and almost nobody who has thought about it picks only one.

The specs side by side

The download sizes are the row most likely to mislead. Steam's 2.4 MB is a stub that fetches the client on first run; Epic's 168.2 MB is the client. Installed, they are much closer, and neither is large enough to matter on a machine that plays games.

What Steam has that Epic does not

Steam has been accumulating features since 2003, and the gap shows in the ones nobody thinks about until they are missing.

The catalogue. Over 50,000 titles, including essentially every indie release, most back catalogue, and the long tail of odd, old and niche games that never reach a curated store. If a PC game exists, it is probably on Steam. This is the single largest practical difference.

Workshop. Valve hosts mods, subscribes you to them, and updates them automatically. For games with modding communities — strategy games, simulators, anything with a decade-long tail — this transforms the experience, and Epic has nothing equivalent. Mods for Epic-store games generally mean manual file management.

Remote Play. Stream a game from your PC to a phone, tablet or another computer on the network. Remote Play Together goes further and lets a local-multiplayer game be played over the internet, with the second player's inputs sent back — so couch co-op works with someone in another city. It is one of the most underrated features either company ships.

User reviews. Steam's review system, whatever its flaws, tells you within thirty seconds whether a game is broken on release. Epic has star ratings collected through a survey shown after you play, which is a deliberately quieter design and much less informative before a purchase.

Family sharing, a mature refund policy, trading cards, forums, screenshots, achievements with global stats. Individually small, collectively the reason libraries stay where they are.

What Epic has that Steam does not

Epic has two things, and one of them is the reason it is on most machines.

A free game every week, yours permanently. Claim it and it is on your account forever, whether you install it or not. This has included substantial, recent, well-reviewed titles rather than only filler. Over a year it adds up to a library worth several hundred pounds for the cost of opening a launcher once a week. There is no catch that has emerged in the years it has been running: Epic is buying installed launchers and account signups, and this is the budget line.

A better deal for developers. Epic takes 12% of a sale where Steam's standard cut is 30% — reducing to 25% above $10 million and 20% above $50 million, so the gap narrows for the largest publishers and stays wide for everyone else. For a small studio, 88% versus 70% is a material difference in whether a game is viable.

That argument is real and it is worth stating plainly: buying directly on Epic sends meaningfully more money to the people who made the game. It is also worth being clear that the saving lands with the developer, not usually with you — prices are typically the same on both stores.

Exclusives are the third thing, and they are the reason Epic has the reputation it does. Paying for timed exclusivity on games players expected elsewhere is what generated most of the ill-feeling toward the store, and it is a legitimate complaint about the tactic rather than the client.

The client quality gap

Epic's launcher is the weaker piece of software and this is not a close call. It is slower to start, heavier at rest, its library view has fewer ways to sort and filter, and its download and patching behaviour has historically been less reliable than Steam's. It has improved. It has not caught up.

Steam's client is not perfect — it is a large application with a long history and it shows in places — but it is the more capable one on nearly every axis that matters day to day.

If you spend hours a week in a launcher rather than in games, that gap is the argument for keeping Steam as the primary.

Which one to install

Your main library, where most purchases go. Steam. The catalogue, Workshop, Remote Play and reviews are not matched, and a library is a long-term commitment.

Free games with no downside. Epic. Install it, claim weekly, close it. There is no reason not to, and the value accumulated over a year is real.

Supporting a small developer with a purchase. Epic, if the game is on both. 88% against 70% is a large difference to a small studio, and it costs you nothing extra.

A game that is exclusive to one. Whichever has it. This is how most people end up with both regardless of preference.

Old, obscure or heavily modded games. Steam, without qualification. The back catalogue and Workshop are both one-sided.

Minimising what runs on your PC. Steam only, and accept missing the giveaways. Both add themselves to Windows startup by default and both let you disable that — worth doing for whichever one you open less.

Practical notes

Neither needs the other closed. Both can be installed and neither needs to be running for the other to work. If Epic is only for the weekly claim, keep it out of startup and open it deliberately.

Purchases do not transfer. A licence belongs to the store you bought it from, permanently. What has improved is cross-play — many games now match Steam and Epic players in the same multiplayer sessions, and some share progression through the publisher's own account.

Both are large downloads once games are involved. The launchers are trivial; the games are not. Both clients resume interrupted downloads, so a dropped connection costs you time rather than progress.

Epic ships as an MSI. If the install fails with a numbered error code rather than a plain message, that is the Windows Installer service talking, and the MSI error guide covers what each code means.

The short version

Steam is where your library should live: 50,000 games, Workshop mods, Remote Play, real reviews, and a client that is simply better software.

Epic is worth installing for a free game every week and for sending developers 88% instead of 70% when you do buy something.

They cost nothing to run together, and that is what most people conclude after arguing about it.

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