The Epic Game Store Adds Achievements

While people have more or less gotten over their earlier beef with the Epic Game Store, the fact that it remains a generally inferior service to Steam remains a big reason why in spite of all the exclusives and free games it hasn’t really proven to be a worthwhile competitor. The UI isn’t as nice, the storefront is still a bit of a mess to navigate, and a lot of the small things that makes gaming rewarding, like the trading card system and achievements, are absent.

While it’s unlikely the Epic Game Store will be implementing anything like the former, the latter is at least finally making its way to the system, as it was just revealed that Ark: Survival Evolved is going to be beta testing an early version of the system.

Over on Twitter, they barely elaborated:

Certain games on the Epic Games Store may begin to display achievements as you unlock them. This is an early version of the feature and you can expect to see changes & adjustments. We'll have more info to share on achievements in the future, so stay tuned!

For the time being achievements are tracked silently and in the background, so you’ll only know if you got one when you leave the game and check manually, but it sounds like that’s going to change real soon. As for why Ark: Survival Evolved was the first game to test this system, we’re not entirely sure. If I had to wager, it’s probably because it’s one of the more popular multiplayer games on the client and they wanted to test it with something big, but not so big (Fortnite) that it could possibly hurt their own revenue.

In any case, this is a step in a direction for the Epic Game Store. They’re still in a distant second to Steam, but it’s more than possible to close that gap.