Jessica

it logs me out every other time I use it, it's slow and clunky and all the lists take up way too much space, it's very clearly an app built in the Electron era and despite its missteps in that direction recently Steam blows it out of the water completely with the fundamentals of being a decent desktop app

Steam's software updates come with patch notes and bugs appear to go on to be fixed, Epic does not appear to publish any sort of change logs

there's no Linux support whatsoever on Epic, and for those games which do support Mac, Mac builds are often missing which would've been provided via Steam

cloud save sync is more opaque than Steam's used to be (and it's much better now), some games just don't support it, and it's difficult to tell whether they do or not in the official client or from a store page

Epic's purchase flow is very picky about account region, IP region and credit card region, and will flatly refuse to let you buy things if you are vacationing in another country, even if your card and account region match

the way Epic launches game processes causes Epic to become a child process of a game executable if you launch it directly, causing launchers and Steam to see the game as still running when you exit it and Epic is still running in the background

Steam also has the advantage of first party support on Linux and Steam Deck, which means many games work out of the box on Steam which require complex workarounds on Epic

it's just, a lot of paper cuts and larger issues which make it so irritating to use that paying a few bucks to rebuy something on Steam feels worthwhile

It has numerous small annoyances. Unintuitive interface elements. Inefficient loading and memory use. It's competing with steam so the standards for ease of use are very high here. Steam had to work very hard to improve the product enough on ease of use that it overcame the initial resistance to it by the market who were rightly skeptical of the always online DRM it, frankly, is. Add to that the fact that running more than one such local store application has compounding resource eating and inconvenience effects. Further, the current presence, though small, of itch.io in the market does remind people "hey it could be done without running something on your machine that polices your files." Which puts more pressure against accepting the extra inconvenience. The fact that Microsoft keeps shoving their version further into integration with Windows so that PC gamers have to be willing to port over to Linux to get out of that store and even then need to emulate Windows for many games to run adds a baseline level of hassle one way or another which makes the epic store have less turning room in which to not annoy the customer.