As someone who seldom plays with friends (I have very few who want to play online), I just pick the store where the games are the cheapest or there's a sale or something. It doesn't really affect me that much.

But if all your friends are on steam, then check before getting a game on Epic, sometimes they don't let you play together. Most of the time they do, though.

As for minor issues, EGS does not have feature parity with Steam or GOG. They don't have user reviews, for example. This makes it a worse user experience.

More importantly, Epic has a habit of anti-competitive or anti-consumer behavior. When EGS first launched, they were keen on doing console-style timed exclusives, even for games that were already purchasable on platforms like Steam.

Lastly, Epic has a history of neglecting or shutting down games. A few of their older games were taken offline permanently when Fortnite started gaining traction. They then purchased a few studios, namely Psyonix (makers of Rocket League), Mediatonic (Fall Guys), and Harmonix (Rock Band/Guitar Hero series). These studios seem to be a shell of what they used to be. Psyonix's first major project under Epic was Rocket Racing in Fortnite, and this project seemed to be prioritized over Rocket League and even caused the removal of core features of Rocket League. Harmonix worked on Fortnite Festival, but that came at the cost of Fuser, which shut down and was delisted about a year after launch. As for Mediatonic, I don't think they worked on anything else yet, but a large portion of the studio was recently laid off. Needless to say, fans of the affected studios aren't happy with Epic as they're being treated as 2nd-class citizens compared to Fortnite players.

Steam and GOG are simply better platforms overall. If you really care about being DRM free and owning your games you go GOG route, otherwise Steam is the king. Epic does not even have a review system.

Epic however is the best source of free games on PC. A lot of the latest games I have played have been from Epic giveaways. Right now they have Outer Worlds and yesterday it was Ghostwire: Tokyo, both of these games I played few months ago after purchasing them through Humble Bundle.

Will I ever buy a game on Epic? Probably not, I prefer Steam, but those that simply refuse to redeem freebies and install their launcher while shouting things like it being spyware are weird.

They're partially owned by Tencent, a big Chinese company. And as Chinese companies are, the government has direct influence over them. And while Tencent is not a majority owner, Tim Sweeney happily took Chinese money and now pays his co-owner a portion of the profits which then go to pay for Chinese gulags.

There are many things, especially hardware, where it's impossible to avoid Chinese companies but simply buying games somewhere else is super easy. It's obviously not a perfect system because even on GOG there are games using UE, but just buying games somewhere else is such a low barrier, it's not an inconvenience at all.

That said, claiming the free games doesn't help them. It helps the developers making those games because Epic has to pay them and won't get anything in return if that doesn't result in users leaving money in EGS for other things.

The first major issue for me was that the launcher was a crypto miner and they didn't tell anyone.

Since then, I have 0 trust in them and refuse to install the launcher. I don't care for the "free games"