Epic Games Store - 88% split goes to devs

No, Epics multiplayer backend is engine agnostic, platform agnostic and free to use.

Valve spent over a decade building up an infrastructure that would appeal to game developers and would save them on back-end infrastructure costs. I’m sure they sold that to devs. And even then, at Valve’s most powerful industry-controlling moment they never demanded exclusivity to their platform. Sure they built up Steamworks to appeal to devs and tie them to Steam, yet they never told any dev that they couldn’t sell on another store.

I know there is a desperate attempt to somehow link Valve’s work with Epic’s tactics yet Valve took well over a decade to build up a system that would appeal to developers and never once demanded exclusives.

Amusingly in the decade Valve was building up this infrastructure Epic’s gaming division abandoned the PC market entirely to exclusively sell their games on console. Valve stuck around when Epic deemed it too risky (outside of engine work). Valve put in the hard work to sustain and grow the PC market when Epic jumped ship. Now Epic comes crashing in throwing cash and wants everyone to applaud at their recent rediscovery of interest in the PC market.

I wonder how the market would’ve reacted if Valve HAD used Epic’s tactics.

They would’ve let Valve burn. As it was people were pissed they needed to install Steam to play Half Life 2. If they’d made deals with other companies to force people to use Steam people would’ve flipped the fuck out.

Steam was terrible at launch. It took a long time for steam to actually become a good platform.

Devs have implemented their own separate systems outside of Steamworks for sales off of Steam, and it used to much more common.

e.g. Paradox used to run their own key registration / DLC / multiplayer servers parallel to Steamworks but around 2015/2016 they decided that it was not worth it and moved fully to Steamworks (including giving equivalent Steam keys out for all their properties)

Many otherwise “dead” multiplayer schemes have been revived by porting to Steamworks MP (e.g. Civ4, AOE2’s re-release, Supreme Commander).

Wait, really? Time to get the old co-op gang back together.

While this does sound very cool, it also doesn’t exist yet.

The discoverability issue with steam isn’t really a good argument for the EGS. I have always felt that the developers that complain about this see this as a “My game has issues being found” which begs the question, how much did they spend on marketing?

I think that a lot of indie devs use store page access and a hope and a prayer as their marketing strategy, and they blame Steam for nobody buying their games.

To steams credit, I have bought games I found in my discoverability queue, especially during sales. It isn’t a perfect system, but blaming the storefront for your lack of marketing is a tad disingenuous. It isn’t their job to make your game go viral.

This. Developers got used to the old days of Steam, where just putting your game up for sale was enough. They expect those days to continue, but there’s just no way. There are so many ways to build up a community and hype about their game (assuming it’s good), but they tend to favor not doing these things:

  1. Find a small publisher who will push your marketing angle.
  2. Look into social media stuff you can do, such as streaming your game on Twitch or even on Steam itself.
  3. Open a discord server for your company/game. A game without a discord server nowadays is asking to sell less.
  4. You can even stream your game development itself on twitch, as Andy does on Pocketwatch’s twitch channel.
  5. Embrace your community and make them happy. Happy community = people who will do free advertising and work for you.
  6. If your game is narrative-based, you can’t really spoil it by launching Early Access. But if it’s system-based and you’re a small dev, your best bet nowadays is to launch on Early Access, if only to build up hype and get people to try the game early, and most crucially, to have people act as your testers. Frozen Synapse 2 died because of bugs and took Mode 7 down with it. These bugs would have been caught had the game first been released as early access.

Is this them saying they are not doing Epic exclusives?

I thought it was them saying they’re not doing Bethesda exclusives.

This is pretty interesting. I thought for sure they’d make them Beth.net exclusive.

Hopefully a sign more companies are listening to customer feedback about PC exclusives.

This signals that Bethesda weren’t happy with the pre-order numbers for Rage 2 and with how Fallout 76 performed on PC last year.

Apparently, it will operate in a similar fashion to Ubisoft. If you’re someone who still buys your PC games at retail, the codes will be for the Bethesda Launcher, and it’s the same for 3rd party keys.

That is an excellent news for Rage 2. Game looks too promising to be sent to die as an exclusive on Bethsoft store.

These pledges of non-exclusivity are coming fast and hot now.

Sure, but they were also forging the path. It’s not like Steam is a state secret. Anyone can download it and see what features it offers. Hell, Epic doesn’t even have a fucking shopping cart. They’re behind basically every store front on the internet. They could’ve hired a company to build them a webpage with more functionality than they included with their store front.

Here is a picture of a SquareSpace website:


Cost: $18 a month.

Then this still sucks tbh, making retail automatically inferior version…

Observation, from No Code, (they made Stories Untold) is now an Epic Store exclusive. Published by Devolver Digital, which up until a month ago was talking mad shit on social media about companies signing exclusivity deals with stores.

The money hats were of finest quality.