Epic Games Store - 88% split goes to devs

Games
2220

I realize that an innumerable number of corporations are collecting an astonishing amount of information about my daily activity, possibly without my explicit consent and using it or selling it. It sucks but I recognize the reality. The US is really behind on individual legal protections (thanks GOP!).

I realize that in the grand scheme of things what Epic is doing is probably a tiny drop in a bucket compared to Facebook (which I am not on) is and has done. A storm in an egg cup if you will. A first world problem.

Despite that, arguing that having the Epic client installed is a default or natural state of affairs is absurd. They are a very late comer in an already bloated market ready to topple over. The gaming market on the PC has been a buyer’s market for half a decade easily. I already have near a dozen clients installed and own an absurd amount of games (not even mentioning console).

So hell yeah, Epic needs to bend over backwards, carefully dot all of their Is and cross all of theirTs, and stop anti-consumer practices. Installing Epic is not guaranteed, some default state, or a certainty by any measure. I bet I could ignore the Epic Game Store for the rest of my life and barely notice any impact on my hobby. Hell, I never need to buy another game again and I could live in blissful gaming heaven. So Epic has quite a tall hill to climb, entering the market a decade late. Perhaps a Sisyphean task.

I’m okay if that makes me a hypocrite, fool, or ignoramus. Spoiler alert, I already was.

I already had the Epic Games client installed a while back to play Paragon and the new Unreal, both abandoned (like possibly the store if it doesn’t succeed or bring in Fortnite levels of cash). I’ve uninstalled since then.

And to be honest, the folks swooping in to froth about tin foil hats, convenience, racism, privacy hypocrisy, and some sweet Epic exclusives aren’t doing much to endear me to the store or client.

I’m happy to wait and see if Epic can get their shit straightened out and ease off the anti-competitive practices. I have so much awesome gaming right now and Epic needs to earn its place in this strong buyer’s market.

I too want competition for Steam and, I already have quite a bit of that given the amount of clients I have installed and how much more than 50% of my purchases are on GOG, itch, direct from devs, EA, Ubi, Blizzard, and others.

2221

As i’ve said somewhere else here on Qt3 previously, i think we’re in a “generational” change moment. 13 old kids don’t care about Steam… or Call of Duty or whatever, because it’s all new to them. That’s the marketshare Epic is aiming at.

It’s an annoying argument i know not least because apparently (?) there are scrubs mad at Epic because they associate Fortnite with kids and therefore Epic Games Store is bad. OTOH only a few people here Qt3 would seriously argue that Fortnite wasn’t both mostly successful with and at this point aimed at kids, and (imo) they’d clearly be wrong.

I also seriously wonder if Steam’s sales figures are declining. I don’t know, but my gut instinct is that this is true - they’ve sold so many hundreds of $5 games i think the market is completely saturated and also, the market for Steam is getting older and leaving or cutting back on gaming. Steam usage stats have also declined last year for the first time ever. This also to me indicates we’re seeing a generational turnover event right now, especially with dramatic cuts across the industry.

Epic was smart enough to realize how to pivot to Battle Royal and get there first. They’re also smart enough to copy Valve and realize that the path forward for them is not more Fortnite but grabbing the user base that they have and making them customers over the long term. That’s what they’re spending those billions on. It doesn’t mean they will be successful. The biggest form of advertising for kids, Youtube videos, are pretty platform agnostic [ie people watching Youtube videoes don’t care on what platform a game was actually running when they made the recording] and make selling the platform rather than the game a whole lot harder, but they can certainly try. It helps that if their market are kids, in general, kids are going to be far less sensitive to data scraping than adults.

2222

Well, for me, part of the leeriness of Epic is the feeling I always get when I see someone with a ton of money move into a space and splash the money around initially promising benefits to the consumer or producers.

Because ultimately, like Wal-Mart and Amazon buying market share, I know that ultimately profit is their bottom line. They’re not giving developers a better deal because they love developers. They’re not buying exclusives because they love developers. They’re doing it because they’re trying to acquire market share. And they’re trying to acquire market share to make a lot of money off of me and other gamers.

That’s fine, but I don’t trust these companies to not go EA’s way, once they think they have us by the balls.

2223

For me, I want them to gain market share. I think competition is healthy for Steam and us as consumers. I just dislike the way they’re conducting business.

This predates Epic, but I’m already fed up with businesses today not trying to compete for customers but instead pouring money into making sure customers don’t have a choice. Rampant mergers, cable companies divvying up territory to make sure they don’t have to compete with each other and spending piles of money to make sure cities can’t create municipal broadband or to throw legal wrenches into things like Google Fiber, and on and on.

To me, Epic throwing a bunch of money at developers to lock them up and deprive me of a choice of what platform I prefer is just more of that, and it really rubs me the wrong way. Steam as a client and a service has plenty of room for improvement, I would happily throw some money Epic’s way if they provided a better user experience. Instead of making a better store and platform, they spend the money on forcing me to use it for certain games. I don’t like that at all, and I have no plans on supporting that.

2224

I think we’re saying the same thing. When I’m talking about the Wal-Marts of the world, I’m talking about anti-competitive practices. Selling at losses to drive other companies out, then jacking the prices when the monopoly has been obtained. Things like that.

I have no issue with competition. I’m not a “mom and pop store” kind of guy. I just know these companies are voracious, and have no belief that they will treat me well once they have the market share they bought.

2225

We’re in agreement, yep. I didn’t realize my post sounded like I was disagreeing until I re-read it.

2226

It’s not like steam competition has ever really survived long, if not backed by a big publisher, or a starting niche. There are companies that sell steam keys, but they really only survive because Steam allows it. Like Amazon sellers.

Desura, Impulse, Gamespot (which was impulse) and others have all come and gone. And that’s just the ones I know about off the top of my head. So, the question is, how does a company get up and running and survive?

2227

Those were all very small fish trying to out compete the dominant force in the market.

With Epic taking less of a cut, they and the publishers could consistently woo customers over on price alone. I’d shop there if their shopping/store experience were better than Steam’s, but it’s far behind. I’d shop there if they had a better refund policy, live customer service like Origin does, or any number of things. If they invest in cool things like home streaming (I use Steam Link constantly at home), a VR platform, an even better Steam Workshop, any of that would woo me over.

2228

That’s a piece I’ve been curious about. Clearly the Epic client has a huge install base already from Fortnite gamers. I don’t have any hard data about demographics but I would guess that the age data skews younger (the generational changes you mention).

Will Epic be able to convert this group–gamers raised on a Free-to-Play Games-as-a-Service game that demands all attention and time–into a group that buys games like Metro Exodus and Phantom Point at closer to the full $60 price point? Essentially turning consumers into the Steam dilettante consumer that buys widely and builds large backlogs?

That is uncertain, but I suppose we’ll see.

2229

From reddit: https://www.thegamer.com/epic-boss-says-developers-win-game-store-wars-not-consumers/

So basically, it’s not a bug – it’s a feature. He doesn’t think the consumer experience can be significantly improved on, so the only thing to do is to get developers with exclusivity. I don’t know why any consumer would want to support this kind of store.

2230

As a consumer, I kind of agree with him?

I don’t think the consumer experience can be significantly improved on, in most of my Steam games I just click on Install, and then click on play. Like the Epic Store does. The only feature that is nice to have is the mod Workshop.

That said, again as a customer, Epic Store isn’t attractive, but because of price, not extra features.

2231

It sounds like he is saying that only the better product will make a difference.

It’s an interesting philosophy. The idea that consumers of games don’t want a relationship with a store, but just the game itself (and maybe a relationship with the developer) makes some sense, doesn’t it?

2232

Yeah, the Workshop is awesome. I wish Dominions 5 would take advantage of it.

2233

I don’t agree, but even supposing that were the case - shouldn’t they be providing an equivalent consumer experience, instead of a worse one?

2234

I think this is an admission that he simply cannot compete with Steam on features. While he says this, Steam is polishing the heck out of its controller API, allowing you to use any controller you want with any game; it’s even further improving Linux compatibility, so Linux is now just as good to run games on as Windows – something unheard of even a couple of years back. Steam keeps pushing the boundary on the consumer experience regardless of its market share, and I think he’s acknowledging that he can’t compete with that.

But I think this is flawed reasoning. GOG has shown that a company can build good will with gamers, and get them to use another store, especially one with curation. And the easy way to get confidence in your store is to give customers the games they already bought on Steam – something Epic has the money to do. Customers will naturally realize the value of having multiple stores that compete if you give them customer-facing features and don’t force anti-consumer measures such as exclusivity.

2235

My point is, they are already 95% equivalent. At least for my use case.

2236

Very challenging to compete with Steam’s long tail, but they can cover what the vast majority of users care about, which is buying and playing games. I don’t care about controller support, steamworks, achievements, forums, etc either.

2237

My takeaway from Tim Sweeny’s strategy is that Epic is desperate to end the buyer’s market that has existed in PC gaming for a while and force a seller’s market.

Third party key sellers operate on razer thin margins to push prices down on new titles and many publishers discount games steeply a few months after launch and bundle aggressively during the long tail. Currently we have tons of storefronts competing along with a phenomenal oversupply by means of volume of new titles being released every week.

Epic seems desperate to end that buyer’s market and forcing exclusives is one method. There is now no choice for consumers when going to purchase Metro Exodus. You buy from Epic at their set price or you don’t.

I’m sure this appeals to developers, but I wonder how the strategy will pan out long term while there is still rampant oversupply and overproduction.

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A tangent to this I have been thinking about. Epic is introducing the standard digital distribution (clients that install games locally) market at an interesting time. It seems like the next battleground just around the corner is streaming where Google, Valve, Microsoft, and Sony are already staking ground and trying to capture market share. Streaming is exciting for the big players since it is a form of perfect DRM (which makes me wince).

2238

Yes. He sees the current market and says, ‘this needs disruption’, while I look at the current market and say, ‘this is the best gaming has ever been.’ I would love some tweaks to improve the situation for small devs, but given the basic economics, there’s nothing you can do except let a lot of devs fail.

This is the fundamental economic problem. Small devs don’t consider whether there’s money to be made. They have a dream of making a game, and they make it, whether the market exists or not, and whether they have the ability/money to market their game or not. Epic is selecting a few winners (generally the indies who were already going to win), but that’s not going to change anything.

2239

I’ve also been thinking along these lines. It feels a little like the battle over HD-DVD when streaming was around the corner, and Epic is like Sony putting Blu-ray in every PS3.

Aside from always-online DRM, it’s also worth considering the implications of the streaming model for the indies who are going to Epic for a bigger share of the pie. The more they hurt the bottom lines of the distributors, the faster the switch to streaming will happen. Streaming will almost certainly entail a subscription model of a fixed rate per month. How will indies fare in such a market? As you say, these are all issues tangential to this discussion, but they’re going to become a lot more relevant.