Epic's other other problem

When Epic announced that their digital storefront would be opening itself up to games from other publishers in a bid to eclipse Valve's Steam service, the general reaction from developer-friendly games media outlets was positive. People who spent a lot of time talking to developers, and none at all talking to average consumers, were convinced that Steam was desperately in need of a new competitor, one that would somehow succeed where GoG, Origin, Uplay, and even Microsoft's built-in Windows 10 storefront had not.

The assumption, one which even Epic seemed to share, was that Fortnite had given Epic a large enough base of customers that could be leveraged to take market share away from Steam, while their richer-for-developers revenue cut would necessarily pull disgruntled indie devs away from the more established platform. I have doubts about both points, of course, but it turns out that we're didn't need to wait all that long for the loyalty of Epic's customer base to be tested. The test has come in the form of a competing game: Apex Legends, which combines Battle Royale and Hero Shooter gameplay into a package that's become the top game on Twitch, dethroning Epic's Fortnite less than a week after its launch.

This is the customer base on whose loyalty the success of Epic's storefront depends, already abandoning Epic in favour of a newer, shinier game that is every bit as finished and polished as Fortnite, but with the more conventional look and gameplay of the Titanfall series. These are the customers that are supposed to abandon Steam, which they've been happily using for years, and buy into yet another ecosystem, even though that ecosystem offers nothing by way of features that are absent or inadequate on the platform they already use.

Steam's perplexing software survey

With Windows 7 gradually declining, and Windows 10 slowing gaining, in the overall OS marketplace, it should come as no surprise at all that VALVe's Steam user base is moving in the opposite directions. As reported by MSPowerUser:

Gaming network Steam has released their hardware survey numbers for the month ending October 2017 and like many numbers in recent months, it does not read as good news for Microsoft’s latest operating system.

The numbers show a massive drop in the usage of Windows 10 amongst gamers, down 17.14% from last month, with Windows 7 surging 22.59% [...] this has actually been a trend for at least the last 3 months and appears to be accelerating.

Steam's gamers embraced Windows 10 much more quickly than the OS market as a whole, especially during its first year of release, so it's unclear why they seem to be moving so sharply in the other direction now, although PC Gamer attributes it to "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' popularity in China."

While the numbers above look frightening for Microsoft, especially with its renewed focus on PC gaming with Windows 10, a look at the language stats reveals what is almost certainly happening. Simplified Chinese shot up nearly 27 percent in October. It now consists of more than half of the user base, while English dropped 13.4 percent in the same month, landing at 21.24 percent.

Bluehole has sold more than 13 million copies of PUBG globally, with growing interest from Chinese gamers. China, which has reportedly considered banning PUBG, represents the game's biggest region by player population [...] It's possible that some users have also downgraded from Windows 10 to Windows 7, but the bulk of that OS shift is down to PUBG's insane growth in China.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is currently something of a phenomenon in PC gaming, but I seem to detect a whiff of the same pre-existing narrative that I've blogged about previously. Although it also bears mentioning that it's not good news for Microsoft for China, a huge market, to still be so devoted to Windows 7 that it skews Steam's software survey results when more Chinese players join up; even if PC Gamer's hypothesis is correct, it's not necessarily good news for the Redmond crew.

I suppose time will tell; with competitors like Epic Games' Fortnite also throwing their hats into the Battle Royale game genre's ring, we should eventually see PUBG start to slow some of its meteoric growth, at which point we'll know if the Steam software survey is tracking PUBG's trajectory. I can't help but think that Win10's Game Mode, which breaks games and isn't fixed yet, might also have something to do with this trend, though.