3357

I said I was out, but I’m waiting on this upload, so a couple of observations -

If the game isn’t anywhere else, then having a lower price doesn’t scan - what’s it lower than? It’s just the price now - so the disparity ceases to become a feature you can tout. It’s hard to use in marketing “this game has a lower price on Epic! Except… it isn’t anywhere else, so we can’t prove that”

I mean, how could you be sure the exclusives on Epic aren’t doing that right now? Maybe our price would have been 40 bucks if it had launched on Steam instead of 30? No way to know! And anything we say to that effect might as well be made up.

I agree that Steam lowering their cut would be great - but this is the lever that is used to make that happen and I’m not sure I see another one that works. Not one individual game, which is nothing given the scope of Steam’s library - but a storefront that pushes that angle. Steam isn’t going to budge over just a few games.

As a developer, I would not forego my Steam sales in exchange for a better cut without significant guarantees. That’s the barrier that has to be surmounted. And to get a better cut (and lower my price), I have to not be on Steam - because Steam doesn’t allow price disparity. So literally the only option to advance that agenda is for someone like Epic to come along with the power to make guarantees so we don’t commit financial suicide by staking our future on a principle only. And no company is going to make guarantees without something in return - i.e. exclusivity, if you are a store.

3358

This doesn’t sound like the counterfeit problem because they, in that case, is not Amazon.

The point is though, Amazon did not get into their lead position using exclusives. They simply did not do that. Please note, Amazon is from the article. They brought it up, not me. I simply think the comparison is kind of garbage.

3359

I think the only point that he was making with that analogy was that they were selling for smaller margins, like Amazon. I don’t think he was trying to take the analogy any further than that.

Amazon was exclusive in that they were the only ones offering 2 day shipping for the longest time. And of course, amazon has their own Exclusive television shows and Android operating system, so later on they developed exclusives, but again, I don’t think that was the point he was making.

Didn’t someone post a Harvard study that looking at how exclusives are necessary to break into an entrenched market?

3360

This is not unusual at all. A lot of industry, new to the market have to run red for awhile. It’s not uncommon enough to point to Amazon and say see.

I think you are comparing now state Amazon instead of then Amazon that took on an industry that no one thought they had a chance against, like Wal-Mart. I mean if you look at what the state of even online shopping was when Amazon began their climb in the market to today… it’s remarkable. It has nothing to do with their TV shows or movies or any digital content. They broke into a market with a clear and entrenched leader that couldn’t dismiss them fast enough, and they did it without exclusives.

Shipping is not an exclusive.

3362

I meant competing with lower prices as opposed to exclusives.

But in terms of right now, we’re not getting lower prices because I can see what prices the games were before they got yanked from Steam. :) Or they’re at the typical price points, i.e. if Borderlands 3 is $60.

3363

True, but they were able to compete on features.

Naturally it’s a very different feature set for brick and mortar versus online shopping. And so Amazon was offering something that Walmart didn’t, the convenience of it all. The ability to order any time, from anywhere, and have it delivered was something novel. And while the entrenched leaders were dismissive, history proves their folly to be so.

Now that said what could Epic do to gain market share? What features could they use? Their pitch has all been developed facing, the feature advantage they offer is wholly on that side. As a consumer, why does it matter to me what the developer cut is? My price is my price.

Now, obviously, as a hobbyist the greater dev cut is something I approve of. But from a general consumer perspective? Why would they care? All things being equal would I buy from a store with a greater dev cut over one without? Yes. But all things are not equal.

And from a consumer goodwill perspective it’s a world of difference. While @legowarrior’s concerns of a Steam monopolistic business practice aren’t invalid, they are also not something that at this time is meaningful. They could do bad things. But despite this and their entrenched position as the 800lb gorilla of PC gaming, they have done a lot of good for PC gaming. They’ve done much to make things better for dev and customer alike.

Could they do more, could they improve on things they do poorly? Certainly! Is having competition to force them to be more active and intentional about such things a potentially good outcome? Absolutely. But past history and performance indicates to me that even in the absence of such competition they would still be, at worst, a benign influence on gaming, and more likely a net positive one. And what Steam has done for me as a PC gamer has earned them much goodwill from me. So all things equal I would be inclined towards Steam for that reason.

But they’re not equal. And those things being not equal is important. I don’t want EGS and the devs that are going there to fail. But neither do I have any enthusiasm for EGS, I simply do not like them at this moment.

3364

Yeah, I get that - it’s just that using a lower price effectively MAKES it exclusive, because Steam won’t take it. Whether you agreed to an exclusive agreement or not. So it amounts to about the same, except that as a developer you go out of business :)

But I believe Metro explicitly called out that they were doing a lower price on Epic vs what they would have charged on Steam - it’s 50 bucks there instead of the traditional 60.
i.e.

And there are other weird price points throughout - 30, 40 - things apart from the traditional $20/$60.
We’re 30.

3365

How much would have to sell the product for on Steam to get the same amount per unit sold as you do on Epic?

Nevermind, that might be too much of a person question. Good luck.

3366

This is probably definitely a bad analogy, but I think any exlusivity bugs me. To whit:

What if some rich person decided to go into the movie business, buys Blockbuster (I think there is one store left and starts offering billions of $$ for new releases such as Avengers End Game, banking on the fact that they are now the exclusive provider of movies and will force everyone to come to their store.

Never mind the store sucks, has no concessions and parking only for 100 people - with the new money they’re going to make, it’s going to be GREAT! Trust them!

3367

All of those features can be used in non-Steam games just by adding them to Steam as non-Steam games. Oh, and cloud saves are expected to go live in the EGS in the next month, or so. So well before the Borderlands 3 release, at least.

But the primary reason exclusivity is even meaningful to consumers is because they are excluded, by virtue of what hardware they own. This cannot be meaningfully compared to the game storefront situation when there is literally no barrier to entry more onerous than a 60MB download to install. No one is actually being excluded, so it’s a bit silly to complain about this style of exclusivity as if it were similar to console-style exclusivity.

I’m not a developer. I agree with him.

Oh, right. You mean the games you can still easily buy at any time if you want?

It’s probably because of how irrational these “consumer” arguments are.

Your analogy doesn’t work because the consumer experience is 95% identical. You’d be going to the same store you always do, only checking out at an alternative line.

3368

I had issues doing this the couple of times I tried it. May have been user error or specific to those games. Definitely miss out on community profiles which make the whole thing easy.

3369

If you want to just make shit up as a conversation tactic, you need to be a bit more subtle about it than this. The lies have to at least be plausible.

3370

If you want to call storefront only exclusives something other than exclusive, go ahead and try and get a hold of Epic Games and every other gaming article out there and tell them to use some other word. Exclusive, as it is being used in relation to Epic Games and the pile of money they’re giving developer to make those games, well, exclusive, does not have anything to do with hardware. It’s a contract.

The consoles require some work, based on what the developers actually say, requires some work to get a game to work on say PC, XBOX, PS4 and sometimes Switch. Heck these days in board games on digital you can buy the game on Steam and on Anroid and on iOS and play with anyone you freaking like. You might even wind up paying for these games more than once to do that, and those devlopers say the only reason you need to buy it multiple times for these different devices is because Google or someone else says they’re not allowed to do a buy it once and have it everywhere approach, but hey at least it’s available, if you want it… they’re not exclusive to one OS or one store.

And you know what i never did with Steam/Valve to begin with, hand them 60 dollars and just ran with it. I started slow with Steam, let them earn my trust, earn more dollars from like a 2.50 game to 15 to 20-30 and years, years not months, later I am paying full price for pre-orders. They earned that through use, through word of mouth… same with Amazon. I didn’t give them a 500 dollar orders the first time I ordered from them, it was like 20 bucks, and after years of dealing with them, I decided hey if I give them money, and there’s a problem I won’t be screwed.

Epic Games wants to, once again, skip past the hard work it takes to actually get customers, and then wants to know why they get resistance.

But hey, just keep telling other customers to fork out the cash and shut the the hell up. I’m sure that will solve something.

3371

The problem is that if they buy the game, it won’t have Linux support. Or big Screen mode, or Workshop.

Which I don’t find compelling arguments, but other people do.

I find the cheaper games and a bigger cut to developers more compelling.

But, I want to following something else. Is it true that if want to sell on both Epic and Steam, you have to sell them both for the same price, even if Epic is taking a smaller cut? What’s with that? Why can’t you sell it for more on steam, so that you get the same cut regardless of the vendor? That seems fair. The developer gets the same amount, and the consumer decides whether the extra steam features are worth it to lay the extra amount. But I found out that steam doesn’t allow that.

3374

This argument, ultimately, boils down to an injury to your sense of fair play.

3375

Right, which I why I deleted after I realized I misread his post :)

3376

I deleted it because I was wrong. Is that a problem? Should not one retract something stated incorrectly?

3377

I have been very clear that I think Epic’s approach, their tone, the way they have to keep walking back things they say, and the slimy thing they did with Metro is not the path to earning trust from anyone but the people they write checks to.

3378

Sigh, I hate it when mommy and daddy and daddy and daddy and daddy and daddy fight.

This thread should be locked for a while so folks can cool off. It’s just the same thing over and over and over.

3380

But, I think for the most part, participants have been respectful even if there is a lot of repetition.