These are early days for the Epic Games Store, and I’m rooting for its success. But there are some missing features that it needs to be a viable digital storefront longterm.

Without these features, it will increasingly become difficult to discover new games as the store grows, and gamers will grow frustrated of not knowing how good or stable a game is before purchase.

5

Ratings

I don’t personally rate most of the apps I download, but I do look at the ratings others have left. Four or five stars indicates quality. Three suggests a game may be fine but not that original or held back by bugs. One or two typically indicates that a game is a broken hot mess. The Epic Games Store currently lacks ratings of any kind.

On one hand, this replicates the experience of shipping at a physical store. GameStop and Best Buy don’t have ratings provided underneath the games lined on shelves. But scores matter more for digital-only mobile games than consoles. A console game may be buggy, but it’s going to work. That cannot be taken for granted when shipping on a mobile app store.

4

User Reviews

If a score provides you with a general idea, user reviews are where you go for context. They remove the ambiguity from a number. If you see a dozen reviewers all saying that a game crashes halfway through the first level, you know not to give it your money. Sometimes, though, a single new review can indicate that a problem has been fixed. This can mean that despite a low score and a sea of negative feedback, the game is now deserving of your time.

I’ve purchased The Forest Quartet, but I didn’t play it within the two-hour return window. If I had, I probably would have returned it.

The game has promise, but in its current form, I find this PC port to be a bit frustrating. The screen doesn’t scale properly on my Galaxy Z Fold 6.

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 is a foldable smartphone that combines the functionality of a tablet with the convenience of a phone. It features a large, flexible internal screen that automatically picks up where you left off on the cover display.

Even worse, the touch targets are very unclear and unresponsive, leading me to tap the screen at random to see if something happens. That’s not ideal for a puzzle game. Reviews give us a space to communicate back to developers and to warn other gamers.

3

Browsable Categories

Games currently appear on one long page within the Epic Games Store. Features games appear at the top. A few popular titles appear underneath. Then you get Epic’s first-party multiplayer hits. After that, you will see some free-to-play titles, followed by a lengthy list of premium paid games.

But what if you’re looking for a specific type of game? There isn’t yet the ability to open a sidebar or tap a tag that will let you narrow things down by category. You can’t filter for role-playing games or view a list of 2D platformers.

The status quo is viable right now only because the number of games in the Epic Games Store is relatively small and the majority of categories would be mostly empty. Still, even if there are only three games available in a given genre, I’d appreciate the help finding those three games.

2

Android-Specific Parental Controls

Epic has had the kind of mainstream success that it has already implemented account-level parental controls. Unfortunately, there aren’t controls for the mobile app store itself.

I have kids, and there are some games Epic has given away for free that I wouldn’t mind putting on my kids’ tablets. But while I can block them from buying games and viewing the pages of games that exceed a certain content rating, I can’t filter out such games from appearing in the first place. There are certain app names and icons that are a bit much for a four-year-old.

1

Wishlist

You might think a store’s primary function would be to sell you games, but the main way I use app stores isn’t to buy games—it’s to wish for them. I use Steam more as a way to discover what games I want, which I then add to a wishlist. I ultimately won’t buy most of them, but when I do want to buy a game, I have a place to check.

The same is true of how I use Google Play. Sadly, the Play Store is not as good for discovering games, so I tend to use other sources to find good Android games, and then I head to the Play Store to add them to my wishlist.

I’d like to do the same with the mobile Epic Games Store, but so far the option isn’t there.

This is not a takedown of the Epic Games Store. After all, Epic has explicitly stated it’s working on implementing some of these features, such as better parental controls. But until that work is complete, treat this list as a heads-up. There are games to be found in Epic’s store, but for the time being, the experience is rough.