Let me be practical for a minute – I really wanted to dungeon crawl on a game … I wishlisted it on stream and two weeks ago they yanked it and put it on epic exclusive. Now look I get all the business end of that …blah blah… but gosh it is annoying, and I just don’t want to enter a credit card in that new place.
Turns out it is great dungeon crawler from what I can see of reviews. I will wait and see.
Officially I haven’t epic games yet, and I think I do dislike exclusives.
Well there it is, Epic won…
;)
dsmart
2817
Except I never actually wrote that. You did.
Please don’t bring back dead fights three days after the dust has settled.
dsmart
2819
Yeah, because there have been such riveting discussions during those 3 days. Get a grip.
SAYS THE GUY WHO–
*ahem* Whew I almost got carried away there.
So … Borderlands 3 is the first 6-month EPIC store exclusive game.
Wonder if we will see shorter exclusivity time frames for other games now?
Bluddy
2823
I sure hope so. I’d be much more understanding towards Epic and the devs that go there if it were a 3-month window.
I won’t buy any games on EGS unless they’re permanently exclusive to the store – even then I’m not so sure. I’m probably in the minority on this, but my stance does make me wonder if at some point Epic will start making games permanently exclusive to their store.
So, what your saying is the only way to break into the market is to have permanent exclusives? Or is there some other criteria that might make you consider buying a game from EGS?
Because it sounds to me, and I might be wrong, that we are really dealing with a market that is closed to competition of any sort and that we only grudgingly buy anything outside of steam because we are forced to. That doesn’t seem like a health market place.
Prices are set by devs, though, aren’t they? It’s not exactly the same as Wal-Mart vs Target, where the stores can choose how much markup they put on a product.
We only buy grudgingly anything outside of Steam because Steam offers by far the best god damn service and feature set on the market. If someone actually takes on Steam with quality of service, features and pricing, they will be able to get established. If they fund good new games in addition to that (instead of restricting customer choice when it comes to existing third party games), they will have no problem attracting people.
Right now Epic is worthless because they do not offer even the most basic stuff like playtime tracking or family sharing, and they give me worse product for same or more money - and force me to go to them if I want it (fortunately I have some dignity and self-restraint, so I am perfectly fine waiting for better and cheaper versions of the games I want that they made exclusive to them).
That said, I understand why publishers and developers take the Epic deal (well unless they are Gollop who decided to piss off their crowdfunding community). It is awesome to get ton of money upfront, especially when you have the console versions anyway and on PC you will be able to sell it everywhere too, eventually.
I’m not saying that at all. It only applies to me insofar as how likely I am to purchase something from EGS.
What would it take aside from exclusives to make me buy from another store? First off, the company would have to be committed for the long haul. Epic already gave up on PC gaming once. That alone is enough to make me balk on them. They could provide better features. GOG’s lack of DRM is a good one. Steam has lots of features, but many of them are half-baked. The overlay browser, for example, doesn’t support bookmarks. The game-grouping mechanism doesn’t persist across different computers. There are lots of areas where a competitor could improve upon Steam. Given enough time, I think they could win over people.
The PC market didn’t strike me as unhealthy before Epic.
Yes but that’s because Steam is relatively benevolent.
They’re essentially a monopoly.
They aren’t a natural monopoly, so if Steam suddenly started acting rampantly anti-consumer, we could just buy games from a different store. But Steam has our libraries, over a decade of past purchases. That’s a bit worrying, and not great for the market as a whole.
Gabe Newell owns a controlling interest in Valve. What if he was hit by a bus and his wife or kids decided to sell to Tencent? That could absolutely happen.
That pretty much sums up my feelings.
Nesrie
2832
I’m sure putting our trust in a company that abandoned the PC market before has no risks at all.
The reason I’m leery of competition in the PC gaming market is because I am so invested in the Steam platform.
Because all my goods are digital - what happens if Epic successfully dislodges Steam? I have thousands of games that are on the platform, and if it goes under then ‘poof’, it’s all gone. I might be more interested in it if Steam wasn’t so good (if imperfect) to me as a customer - but right now I have a company that has the best software that holds all my purchases over the last 15 years.
I recognize that this is irrational - but I don’t want Epic or any other storefront to come in and drive off Steam. You can tell me that Valve isn’t going anywhere, but I already lost 20 or so games on Impulse back in the day.
