I’m making a multiplayer game that I want to publish on Steam. It involves services that I think EOS offers, like friend invites, achievements, cloud-saved player data, etc. I’m wondering if I could handle all of this with Steam’s interfaces instead. Should I just use Steam, since that’s where the game will be published, or should I use EOS instead? Can I use EOS in a game that isn’t going to the Epic Games Store?
The Steam plugin also provides those services.
In general, the Unreal online subsystem allows multiple online services plugins.
So, for the Steam version of your game, use the Steam plugin.
For the Epic Store version of your game, use the EOS plugin.
Or, use both, in both stores, and let your users choose.
But EOS makes a point of being a cross-platform solution. Would EOS be the better choice to distribute to more places than Steam? I.e. does using OSS Steam restrict your game to Steam services, while EOS does not?
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I don’t have good numbers on the relative market share of the different stores, sorry. There might be sites on the internet that guess based on some data, but I don’t know how accurate they can be.
The good news is that, if you build for the Unreal subsystem interface, rather than directly for one SDK or the other, switching SDKs will be easier if you later find you chose the right one.
Steam Package & Publish Tool in Code Plugins - UE Marketplace (unrealengine.com) - all in one steam publishing tool says protects from piracy and doesn’t require any sdk, i guess its all in the plgin - but it is 15$ – says online to use steam requires epic online services and online subsystem steam.
if you publish on steam then use steam’s system, other than being a more robust system it is also more trusted generally, has had longer to iron out the kinks, works closer with the largest game distributor on pc and works better on linux as well
if you want to distribute your game on epic then you’ll probably need to implement EOS as well, if you do then I suggest making the implementation a free dlc on steam, so that for people who don’t want to or don’t need to wouldn’t have EOS on their computers