Epic Games Store - 88% split goes to devs

The actual emails are perfectly fine, what isn’t fine is Sweeney talking about how great it is that games can be on multiple stores out of the other side of his mouth.

I don’t see it as malice, but as shrewd business.

You literally described it as punitive.

Punitive and a shrewd business move aren’t mutually exclusive, in my opinion.

No not public monitors, monitors within epic HQ. It’s not exactly abnormal to show those things to internal visible areas to employees, I’ve been a part of several companies that had monitors with internal revenue numbers in different formats.

Epic has never disclosed any sort of finances or transaction values to internal employees? And to be clear I don’t even mean just exact financial figures but sales figures and userbase figures that can easily be translated to financial values.

No, but punitive has a pretty clear moral implication.

Fair enough, probably just a different interpretation of text and tone. I didn’t read it that way, just that Epic is going to play hardball in situations like that. If you’re an indie and want onto the store, sign here. Otherwise it’s probably not worth the investment for them.

I can’t speak for Bluddy though so I’ll let him clarify (or not) what his intentions were. :)

I think Epic is indeed playing hardball. It seems evident from the way they go through steam wishlist numbers, looking for games to sign up. They are able to offer developers a hefty paycheck, and they want to leverage everything they can to make that happen. This level of aggression (business aggression – they’re not killing anyone) shows me that they’re very capable of politely making examples of developers who refuse their offers. They do NOT want this to become a trend.

The funny part of this is that it is the insecurity of developers that leads them to sign up, while the fact that Epic chose to contact a specific developer almost certainly means the devs will do just fine on their own. Epic is picking winners here – it’s not a charity, and they’re not making offers to devs who are trying to get their name out. The very act of receiving an email from Epic is already a sign that you’ve hit a sufficiently high bar for them to notice you. Epic bets on small developers being risk averse enough to take the money early on (and potentially lose early sales), and that bet has seemed to pay off, at least for Epic itself.

Maybe so, but I don’t harbor any animosity for those who take the offer, such as Travis. Now I do have somewhat of a different stance with those who promised certain platforms, particularly for crowd funded games. Doesn’t mean I want them to fail though, just that I do not approve of that.

Travis didn’t do it for the money. He knows he would have done just fine on steam. He’s got some idealistic thing playing out in his mind, where steam finally listens to small developers and this is his way to send a message. He’s also one of the few who actually cares about the 30% cut AFAIK.

There are monitors displaying information in various areas, but none of it is financial in nature. Financial information shared internally broadly is extremely limited, it is more of a need-to-know basis (dependent on role and department.)

If you’re a public company, this type of disclosure almost certainly violates securities laws. As discussed above, Epic isn’t a public company, but any competent accountant (or lawyer) would discourage them from doing this.

(A monitor showing the stock price or whatever is fine, but generally a public company can’t disclose financials to insiders with no business reason to know them before the relevant reporting requirements are met.)

What is this even supposed to mean? What aggression? What “example” is being made? What you call “going through wishlist numbers”, in an attempt to frame it as predatory, could just as easily be called “looking for promising projects”. You really have to stretch to interpret a very mild, “hey, would you be interested in a possible exclusivity deal?” inquiry which ended with no hard feelings on either side as “hardball”.

You seem to have both an exaggerated sense of how much of a “sure thing” any given game development process is, and a weird resentment that their strategy involves finding games that look like they will be good. I think for many of the developers it’s way more about having the money they need to get to a shipping product than it is about their sales after that point. As for Epic’s perspective. Of course they are looking to sign promising games. That’s the whole point! They want the games to be attractive enough to lure a user base to the store, otherwise what would be the point?

It’s very much playing hardball. They’re not looking for projects starting out. They don’t care how far along the project is. They don’t care about the blowback. They just want to grab the projects. Sorry if you don’t see it that way, but these are aggressive tactics in my book.

What data or insight do you have to be able to say what someone does or doesn’t care about?

I’m looking at your company’s recent behavior.

EDIT: Leaving this here https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1157561177708404738

It certainly doesn’t seem like Epic wants to work for any of those games. Have they even gone after a game that didn’t build awareness and attention and had extended wishlists on Steam? I mean they went after DARQ after the Steam announcement, not before.

What does Tim’s support of the Ooblets announcement have to do with your statement around what someone does or doesn’t care about?

I don’t really have a dog in this fight, but I’ve been keeping up with the thread out of curiousity. However, this might just be the biggest line of Bullshit I’ve seen in the entire thread. Also, it’s coming from someone who likes to call others out for how they “know” something, or asking for sources.

Why would they need to “work”? What work does Steam do? They’re just a distribution platform, you come to them with your game and hope they’ll publish it.

Epic is curating their store rather than accepting all comers, something Steam hasn’t done for many years now. It’s a different approach, and it does require human effort.