Nesrie
3337
If you looked at my list, developers are on it. I did not tell you to go save whatever eco project I am concerned about. I didn’t shit on QT3 just because, and I do understand your position and don’'t require you to say it over and over again as if I have never seen your concerns before.
I think you need to revise your estimates! 250 posts since I went to bed 7 hours ago. Phew.
Epic is certainly affecting PC gaming in terms of the amount of time wasted (both dev time and player time) going back and forth on this topic. ;p
Honestly this reads like trolling at this point
I don’t think this was posted earlier, but it’s hard to keep up. This seems to somewhat summarize the last 3325 posts in this thread.
This is a thought provoking comment from that Verge article (linked above by @pizzaddict) :
I’m waiting for Valve to offer a 15/85 cut for anyone using a development platform besides Unreal Engine. Just overnight kill the Unreal engine’s commercial viability
I’d go with a 10/90 split.
Oghier
3342
One has to assume that Valve will punch back, right? I’m fascinated to see what that will look like.
I doubt Valve would ever be so spiteful. They try to do right by their customers (who are both gamers and devs).
I agree, but it makes me wonder about ways Valve might respond (if at all).
draxen
3345
Me too!
Apparently Valve have a really unusual flat management structure. I’m not sure if it will be suitable to respond effectively to an external threat such as Epic.
I think the word you are all looking for is ‘compete’ something valve hasn’t had to do too much of up until this point.
draxen
3347
Agreed. For 15 years they’ve not had to compete at all. I even remember reading an interview where they said they don’t even bother using financial models. Companies that are firmly entrenched and are forced to suddenly respond to a threat usually don’t fair too well.
EDIT:
Newell says, “None of our choices have been made by financial analysis, we don’t have financial budgets…”
Valve probably has better things to do. And I’m not sure they can legally do it.
Anyway, the argument that they’re better for developers is a bit weird to me. Well, not for now, obviously the upfront money and current lower percentage is good for them. But on a long term view, a) there’s no guarantee it’ll keep being lower, as Epic isn’t anywhere near that reliable, so nothing will necessarily change; b) it implies an implicit? collusion from every app/game store to arrive at an unreasonable 30%, which is a much bigger anti-competitive issue that everyone’s mum on.
It’s not an unreasonable position to have, but it is a bit weird to me.
Epic’s tiny store isn’t competition for the foreseeable future. It could change with a fair number of deals, but that’s guessing.
Great, then there is no problem.
KevinC
3350
They did compete, they just won. They competed (or are competing) against Gamestop and EA and Ubisoft and GMG and others. Amazon tried to get into it, Discord tried to get into it. Steam has just done it better, and for the past several years has a very entrenched position.
I agree that competition for Steam is good, I’m just not a fan of how Epic is doing it: by taking away the choice of where customers can get their games. If EGS had feature parity with Steam, I’d be shopping there because it’s a better deal for developers and because I do want to see competition for Valve. I don’t like them forcing exclusives when they lack many of those features that I find useful in my day-to-day gaming.
If they don’t have feature parity with Steam, they could still try to woo customers via lower prices. That would win over a lot of customers. And sure, that might be against the contracts Steam wants publishers to sign, but there’s competition at work. At that point, if Steam chose to not carry a game due to Epic being able to offer better prices, then so be it. Or Steam could at that point lower their cut or provide another incentive to publishers and everyone wins.
To me that’s real competition, fighting for customer dollars via pricing or features or convenience or some combination of the above.
I have my doubts that it would work.
As pointed out in the article, it’s almost impossible to break into a market without exclusives.
KevinC
3352
I mean, they have the hottest exclusive around. It’s Fortnite. It’s what got everyone to install the EGS.
Nesrie
3353
It’s kind of strange they mention Amazon. Amazon didn’t get to the lead position by saying screw the customers, they’ve have to come to us anyway. They pushed hard, and lost a lot of money… for years, trying to compete and convince people buying online was viable and beneficial and ultimately something they wanted. There was no… force, and not really exclusives. They sold many of the same things the brick and mortar stores sell and still, but they build up a massive and efficient delivery system and a huge amount of products to sell.
And now, if you are successful on Amazon, they copy you, and undercut you and take over the business.
Kind of like if you have a successful Battle Royale game that uses the Unreal engine. :-P
Sort of, except different because if you Battle Royale wasn’t using the Epic store front and Epic didn’t have in-depth knowledge about the customers and could target the customer.
