GMG just sells keys, they aren’t trying to compete.
Can’t they? Why not? There is nothing wrong with having more competition, especially if that competition can reduce prices for consumers and increase revenue for developers.
You talk about features, but in the end, only two things are important.
1). Is it available?
2). Does it fit my budget?
If I have a PC, and the game is on Epic, the game is available. There barrier to entry is not a new PC or console, it’s not a subscription. It’s a webstore.
And if it’s available, I will buy it when the game fits my budget. So, if it goes on sale on Epic first or sold cheaper on Epic, that’s where I am going to buy it.
The rest is just mumbo jumbo sales crap. Like a moon roof on a car. Sure, it’s neat, but if it’s too pricy, I don’t care about the moon roof. If the care doesn’t run, I don’t care about the moon roof.
In the end, we are talking about a completely elastic commodity, and in those cases, the market will decide.
In the meantime, I am in favor of having more markets available in the long term, which means robust independent stores that aren’t reliant on Steam’s largesse.
I have seen companies rely on YouTube, or Facebook, or Amazon, and when the terms of service change, or when something profitable occurs, they get wrecked by the very platform they rely on (especially on Amazon). So, you will forgive me if I don’t trust the long term viability of Greenman Gaming, or Gamergate, or fanatical, and would prefer to have more services compete directly with Steam.
I think at this point the plan is pretty clear:
Ignore any consumer backlash until you reach critical mass so that even negative voices won’t really matter in the end/have not much of a choice.
I mean this approach does often enough work, let’s see if it can in this case but I’m certainly rooting for it to fail like any other approach that treats consumers in this way.
It should be noted that GreenManGaming (and many other key resellers) only have cheaper games by reducing their margins. For the most part publishers still get 70% of MSRP while GMG is just taking 10% or so to fuel a lot of their discounts. It’s not easy to sustain that and in fact in their IPO filings they have yet to be profitable and they have an EBITDA margin of 3%, which from my understanding is their operating costs are extremely close to matching revenue.
So a lot of these key resellers don’t seem to have a clear path towards a profitable storefront, even if you put them in the same category as Steam and Epic’s store.
I always wondered what GMG’s business model was. I kinda figured the mafiya was using it to launder money in the west.
This worked for Captain Marvel.
Another one
At least in this case it wasn’t ‘stolen’ from Steam, it was announced just today.
Now developers aren’t even listing their games on Steam, how the hell am I supposed to wishlist it.
They don’t need your money. Millions of Fortnite kids are buying their games.
I’d love to see stats on Fortnite players that have bought other games on the store. I can imagine the percentage is quite low.
Be ready for Borderlands 3 on Epic store, btw. It runs on UE4 so they have an even better revenue share than usual.
That tweet is from three months ago.
But maybe it’s true. That’s ok :) I’m happy to wait a year or more for the game to be on Steam, on sale and fully patched. It’s not like my backlog is shrinking.
I’d be happy to see it on the Epic store. Not so happy to see it be an exclusive on the store.
Maybe it is because it says Duval in his Twitter name which I first read as Devil but does he not resemble Satan to a certain extent in that photo?
Steam? Epic? Doesn’t matter to me. I doubleclick an icon and I play.
Agree to disagree Bluddy. What I saw is the same promise that Facebook made news publishers and that didn’t end in a pretty way for them. “Come to us, and we’ll make everyone rich. You can trust us.”. But as soon as Facebook had you, bam, changes in the terms.
YouTube is a similar situation. They make the rules and dictate the actions. Content creators are at their mercy without a new platform to go to
You can’t be dependent on a single platform, because then you end up being at the mercy of that platform. With Epic, sure they have exclusives, but those are timed exclusive, so you will see those games on other store fronts after only a single year, and as long as the game isn’t tied to a single platform, developers will have more options and more sale in how their games are marketed or treated.
Agree to disagree indeed.
This is really bad if true: Epic Games Launcher collects your Steam friends and play history.