Epic Games Store - 88% split goes to devs

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.

Having thought this over a bit more, IMO there’s little point in reading these companies mission statements, tweets, PR interviews, etc. Just look at what they do in practice, today.

For me it’s pretty obvious Epic isn’t providing a better feature set to consumers. So all the heartache of trying to parse Sweeney’s conflicting statements and actions is moot - the service isn’t superior for me. Once it’s equivalent with Steam then I’ll worry about comparing their principles, but not until then.

I think they were talking not of games that were on Steam simply, as every damn game is on Steam the moment is announced, but games like Metro that had a preorder so people had already paid money for the Steam version.

I don’t think that epics plan is really to win people over from steam as much as it is to give the fortnite players (who already have accounts and have familiarity with epic and their store) something to play once (inevitably) fortnite starts to wane. Thats a huge market.

If I was a Fortnite player looking for a new game I’d sooner install Origin and play Apex rather than buy games from completely unrelated genres just because I happen to have the launcher installed already.

Yep. Gamers can definitely only have an interest in one genre. I only play Zaxxon clones as that was my first (not Pong) game.

If Epic can develop a diverse enough library, I think you will very likely find that a portion of their Fortnite players will happily try out some other game they have seen streamed or which has popped up on the store front page and caught their attention.

There is very little friction since they are already on the store and likely already have payment info on file from back when they bought their first battle pass or skin.

Yeah, a small portion. One look at my friends list that I’ve developed over the last 15 years, and looking at the friends of friends profiles and I can tell you that the pattern is very clear - those of us who have broader genre interests and frequently check out new hot things are in minority. Most just move from one big thing to the next, with games like WoW, Dota 2, Pubg and Apex dominating the played time charts.

Occasionally I’ll get whispers from people who see me playing a new game, asking me if it’s cool and then checking it out in the store, followed by weeks of them doing nothing but playing the games they’ve already been playing for the past few months.

Once Fortnite well dries up it’s game over for Epic and their store. They’ll go back to living off engine licenses and Steam will roll them over.

I had a gaming conversation at work once.

-Do you game?
-Yes
-What console?
-I play on PC
-Oh! I guess you play… WoW
-Nope.
-Counter Strike?
-No
-League of Legends?
-Not my coup of tea.
-O_O (looks at me as if there are no more games on the entire planet) What games do you play then?
-Uhh… stuff? (Names 3 or 4 games I played that month, which surprise surprise, they haven’t heard of).

It’s weird, because for example if I mention I watched X or Y film, and they haven’t heard of it, it’s ok, everyone knows there are thousands of movies and no one expects to watch all of them and it’s normal if someone happen to watch one you didn’t. But with games lots of people only know the 8-9 big perennial games/series and 2-3 new AAA games per year, and that’s it.

$500 million in Fortnite transactions?

Wow, has discourse messed the formatting up there for me. I see the picture with the headline two or three characters per line down the side of it and “ying a game” left over to fit under the picture.

Ying: A Game. Latest EGS exclusive confirmed!

Heh.

“We’ve brought in close to half a billion dollars so far in gross, and out of that half a billion dollars of gross, 88% of that has gone back to developers,” Stelzer said.

It doesn’t seem so.

And this is what I ventured to guess time ago

Galyonkin also suggested that the PC exclusivity strategy is a temporary one Epic will back away from once its PC storefront is properly established.

But if 88% went back to Epic they’d still be telling the truth. They develop Fortnite.

Yeah I really wouldn’t put it past them to be including Fortnite battlepasses and such in that figure. Most of their numbers are without context.

Wouldn’t be in that case 100%? Precisely because they develop it? /shrug