The cold war between Epic Games Store and Steam just heated up considerably. Valve's announcement that it was entering the mobile gaming market with the Steam Deck changed the rivalry between the two online storefronts, maybe forever. What had been a simple competition for who could sell the most digital copies could turn into an arms race. If the Epic Games Store wants to stay in the fight, it's going to need to bring its own mobile gaming device to the table.
It's certainly easier said than done to whip up a mobile gaming device for the Epic Games Store. If Valve caught its biggest competitor off-guard with the announcement of the Steam Deck, this particular fight might already be over. If it's going to be several years before Epic can launch its own device, there may not actually be a need for it to even try. However, in the gaming world, it's hard to keep a secret as big as the Steam Deck. It's certainly possible several of the biggest details were kept under wraps, but it seems unlikely Epic had no idea this was coming. If the company knew its biggest competitor was working on this, it stands to reason it's started working on something similar.
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Many challengers to Steam came before the Epic Games Store, but Steam has simply been around too long and seemingly perfected its craft to the point where there didn't seem to be much room for newcomers. Then came the Epic Games Store and its weekly offer of free games. On occasion, it's even offered two or three games at a time. While it's a safe bet that Epic isn't rivaling Valve when it comes to sales numbers, the approach of offering free games and the deep pockets of the company behind Fortnite have kept the competition going. That feature could also be a way for Epic to stay in the race if it does launch a mobile gaming device to face off against the Steam Deck.
There's a decent chance that users of the Steam Deck are going to have access to a pretty extensive library, considering how much longer Steam has been around. However, when it comes to users who are wanting to play new games, Epic could have an advantage. If it's just a matter of wanting to get hands-on stuff users haven't played before, the fact that Epic Games Store is almost always adding new titles to users' libraries could be a big advantage. While Steam offers new free games every now and then, it's not anywhere near the regularity of Epic. While this feature may not be enough to actually beat out the Steam Deck in terms of users and sales numbers, it could keep whatever handheld supports the Epic Games Store.
There is another big reason why it seems like a foregone conclusion that the Epic Games Store will launch a direct competitor to the Steam Deck. Epic is not afraid of losing a little money at the outset in order to establish a foothold in the market. The Epic Games Store gave away more than 750 million games last year, which is a lot of dollars considering the company likely had deals in place where it would reimburse the developers that allowed their games to be on offer. Those games were given away as a way to compete with Steam. In essence, the revenue from Fortnite, one of the biggest earners in the history of video games, is subsidizing its developers' game store. There's no reason to think it wouldn't also start subsidizing a mobile gaming device, at least at the outset.
When it comes to dipping a toe into a new market, there is usually a concern that a company won't have the wherewithal to continue if the bottom line isn't great. Epic has already shown it is willing to take that hit for the short term, and that short term has been a number of years so far. The company has shown that it's willing to suffer on the bottom line, if it thinks there will be a reward in the future. That means that Epic is the perfect company to jump into a market that is largely untested this generation, and then stick with it if the immediate results aren't perfect.
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One of the nice features about the Steam Deck is that it's not running on an operating system that's hard to crack. There has already been talk that Steam's handheld could be adapted to run a Windows OS if someone had the know-how. This would seem to hint that Epic creating its own handheld device doesn't need to come with its own operating system. The company simply needs to come up with a design that is different enough from what's already out there so as not to run into lawsuits or bad word-of-mouth.
Speaking of coming up with a design, there's the groundwork laid there as well. It should come as no surprise that the basic layout of the Steam Deck is similar to the Nintendo Switch with its X, A, Y, and B buttons, two control sticks, and D-pad. All of this surrounds a screen on which the game is displayed. Epic doesn't need to reinvent the wheel in order to launch a competitor utilizing the Epic Games Store, as the specs of what it eventually offers is the key to taking on Steam and Nintendo directly.