Epic Games Store - 88% split goes to devs

[Brad_Grenz]

Sorry, but this is a very bad analysis that doesn’t even seem to know what point it’s making.

Yes, I said as much in that thread. It’s a rhetorical dead end that ignores the substance of actual arguments about revenue shares.

But the Epic platform is lacking key features (at least for me, I really like having time played tracked and achievements).

Hasn’t the time played counter in Steam been broken, basically, forever?

[AntediluvianArk]

Valve is using their ‘monopolistic position’ to break into the underwear business now! Scaremongers take note.

Gabe Newell's face is unintentionally promoting underwear in China | PC...

[Fishbreath]

Hasn’t the time played counter in Steam been broken, basically, forever?

This is the first time I’ve ever heard anyone intimate that it is.

[Brad_Grenz]

https://www.google.com/search?q=steam+hours+played+wrong

[ShivaX]

the features that people like to claim EGS is useless without.

Nice strawman, did it take a while to make?

[WhollySchmidt]

I feel we need an true expert here to resolve this Monopoly issue.

:)

I mean, this literally exists:

[Aceris]

Instead, you don’t see Steam exhibiting all of the classic forms of monopolistic behaviour because they aren’t a monopoly (probably in any sense of the word), and as far as I understand they aren’t regulated like one either.

Putting the legal thing aside for a moment (because it’s complicated depending on how you defined “the market”.) Steam have a lot of the properties of a dominant market participant within the PC games distribution space. I think the main way it manifests is in substantial rents in being able to maintain the 30% split for so long. Micro tells us that that cut should be pushed down relentlessly by competetive pressure but that hasn’t happened.

Steam has understood for a while now that to maintain their position they have to make gamers like Steam, so they have invested a lot of money and effort into making their storefront have value to gamers.

I think the biggest problem with this debate is attaching moral weight to something being a monopoly, whereas really it’s not a normative term. Steam have certainly been relatively benign as such things go.

But the Epic platform is lacking key features (at least for me, I really like having time played tracked and achievements). The worst thing is that they are trying to build market share using the most anti-consumer technique you could come up with: exclusives. Instead of doing what a company would usually do and using their immense funds to make games on their store cheaper (admittedly they are doing this with their free games), they’re trying to force us to use it.

If Epic grow exponentially from this strategy then all future sites will buy exclusives as well to get a name for themselves, and PC gaming will start to look more like console gaming or mobile gaming.

Yeah, this is more persuasive from a consumer perspective than discussions around “monopoly”. Epic’s behaviour is bad for consumers. Period. That’s true even if they are competing against a “monopoly”.

[KallDrexx]

Nice strawman, did it take a while to make?

Jesus fucking christ why is this thread turning everyone into complete asshats on this forum? I wasn’t even responding to you directly, nor did I say anything overblown or anything. A non-trivial amount of discussion has gone on this thread that always enabled reviews, discussion forums, and plenty of other features that Steam has makes EGS a non-starter for people here.

[LockerK]

Epic is walking back their “we don’t want to do that again” statement, after doing that again.

Tim Sweeney (TimSweeneyEpic)

Tim Sweeney (TimSweeneyEpic)

[Paul_cze]

Vocal minority and all that jazz. I’d put money down that Epic’s EGS sales are doing just fine and the PR of these communities throwing hate is not hurting them. Only Steam knows for sure but I also wouldn’t be surprised if their stats told them only a small fraction of their user base actually interacts with all the features that people like to claim EGS is useless without.

I wonder if it is a vocal minority. Couple years back, Galyonkin (Steamspy guy who works for Epic in charge of the store) did an analysis of the steam users and came to a conclusion that the number of people who buy PC games on steam in larger number (instead of just playing DOTA2 or whatever) is around 1.4 million. PC gaming subreddit (which appears to positively loathe Epic’s exclusivity practices) numbers at 1.2 million subscribers. Of course, it may still be the case that even there the “silent majority” is fine with it.

But to me, the fact that Epic has yet to release a single specific report about sales numbers of any of its exclusives says that the numbers are possibly not worth bragging about. Their vague “2.5 times more Metro Exodus Sold than Last Light” does not fill me with confidence about their sales, given the initially low sales of Last Light and vastly bigger hype and marketing spend of Exodus. Of course though, Deep Silver might have still made a huge profit, depending on how much they got from Epic.

[legowarrior]

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

In the meantime, who is up for some Borderlands 3 in September! That should be awesome.

[meeper]

The game-grouping mechanism doesn’t persist across different computers.

Are you referring to the category system? It was pretty damn shaky at first, but I haven’t had any problem with it for 3 or 4 years and I routinely move my account around to different comptuers.

[legowarrior]

I have lost my categories with steam. I had run steam on a second machine, and it didn’t load the categories. Then I went back to my primary computer, and it uploaded the lack of categories from the other machine. It was lame.

[meeper]

Recently?

[BloodyBattleBrain]

yesterday my steam stopped working, so i reinstalled it, got the games back, but not the categories…very weird.

[KevinC]

Yeah, I haven’t encountered that issue in years and I’m swapping between three different computers.

[AntediluvianArk]

This is the first time I’ve ever heard anyone intimate that it is.

For me, the Steam game time counter is deadly accurate.

For the times I think it didn’t work properly I usually find the culprit after a little investigation. For instance, when you launch a game that requires another third-party launcher to run, if you don’t close that launcher after you exit the game Steam keeps counting hours (or sometimes doesn’t count hours when there is an intermediate 3rd party launcher). Steam doesn’t count hours if you lose connection or play offline also.

I am sure the counter glitches occasionally but a lot of reported errors are due to users not understanding how it works or the ways secondary/tertiary launchers impact it.

[Bluddy]

Categories could definitely use improvement. Most of the syncing happens when you log out of and into steam, instead of all the time. It probably uses similar logic to cloud sync, which only occurs when a game starts and stops running. But only one game can be run at a time on the same account, whereas categories can be modified on several long-running steam processes on multiple machines.

[AK_Icebear]

Is there any reason to trust Sweeny? Flip flopper…

[Nesrie]

Gosh, this is a real surprise.