I wish that was true for all games, sadly not for The Sinking City, listed as $59.99 on EPIC. I have no doubt if it was on Steam consumers could have found pre-order deals for $45-50 from 3rd party stores for a Steam key.
LeeAbe
2673
Yes, but the publishers know they can get $60 for a game, regardless of their costs, so will charge that much. New games seem to be quite inelastic.
in theory new games will be made available by competing devs who can afford to sell them for less, because of epics cut.
I am NOT SAYING THIS WILL HAPPEN. I am saying thats economic theory of a free market. Source: My LSE education :D
LeeAbe
2675
Sure, but if I remember correctly, that theory only works if everyone is selling the exact same product in a perfect world. Say grain in a small geographic area. It doesn’t really work on something like games. With that theory, Apple should have went out of business 20 years ago.
Oghier
2676
Pricing theory is more about supply and demand, not costs. I’m unaware that any business lowers prices because its costs go down, as opposed to doing so due to competitive pressures or a strategic goal of increasing market share (I am not including public utilities).
LeeAbe
2677
Cost still comes into play, at least in a regular marrket, but then price elasticity also comes into play. Games are weird, when they first come out there is that core audience that seems to be willing to pay anything for a game. But after a month it drops off a cliff and they are trying to get everyone else to buy it and still make a profit, that’s where costs comes into it.
On the other hand, while Epic has opened the doors for other companies to resell EGS game codes it appears that Sony is shutting ti down and only allowing you to buy digital games via PSN:
That sounds an awful lot like a financial incentive to make your game exclusive to Steam. Which has been my point all along.
What a load of horseshit.
Grifman
2681
What financial incentive? You’re paying for that in the 30% you are giving up.
LockerK
2682
And when Steam started up, that 30% cut was a lot cheaper than managing all those services yourself. It probably still is for a smaller developer.
Elaborate.
LeeAbe
2683
No, that’s paying 30% for a service. Maybe the service is overpriced, but that’s for the market to decide. Is Epic providing the same service for 12%?
For some publishers and devs (note that I’m not saying clients, because the 30% is not paid by the client) Epic might be offering a better service than Steam, if the sale numbers and minimum guaranteed reports I’ve heard about are true.
Well yes, getting paid to be there is an amazing service, best of any platform right now.
That 30% pays for making your game exclusive to Steam? It doesn’t do that on any other platform with a 30% split.
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.
ShivaX
2689
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.
fdsaion
2691
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.
