The Epic Games Store still lags behind its behemoth of a competitor Steam in features, but it’s rolling out a crucial one: Achievements.
Achievements haven’t been implemented in every game yet. Ark: Survival Evolved seems to be the only title that supports it currently. A new pop-out menu appears when an achievement is unlocked.
Epic tweeted that this feature is in early development and that the final achievement system may be altered over time. It also stated players may see achievements pop-up in “certain games,” meaning that there’s potential that Ark might not be the only title to display them at the moment. However, achievements for other games will be tracked in the background, so when the feature is widely implemented, players’ previous accolades will be counted.
Epic is slowly adding crucial elements to its store that are par for the course in its competitors. Earlier this year, it implemented wishlists, download throttling, and self-service refunds. It will then move on to features such as add-on discovery and price adjusted game bundles next. The company stated services like gifting and user reviews are farther in the future. The company’s road map is accessible via a public Trello board with further details.
The Epic Games Store has taken on a ton of criticism regarding its lack of features since its launch nearly two years ago. The company has made incredibly competitive strides against Steam, such as offering a larger cut of revenue to developers and signing exclusivity deals that allow game makers to be in the black before their title ships.
It seems to be paying off. These practices, combined with massive sales and offering big games like Grand Theft Auto V for free, resulted in Epic’s biggest month ever for the platform in June with 61 million users and 13 million peak concurrents.
Still, Steam has around 100 million users and hit 21 million peak concurrents earlier in March. Epic has certainly closed the gap over the last year and a half thanks to its revenue and exclusivity deals, not to mention the Epic Games Store being the only place on PC to access Fornite. Time will tell if it can dethrone Valve’s service as the premier PC gaming marketplace.
