I believe you; I have no first-hand experience with this at all, I just looked at the 70/30 split and figured it was equitable, coming from a regular publishing background. Thanks for all the elucidation; much appreciated!
I might be wrong, but for now I’m not worried about it because I think this opening has been partially created by developers - particularly indies - not feeling like Valve’s earning their 30%. Of course that’s not necessarily totally fair - everybody thinks their game is worthy of prime front page placement - but nevertheless few are happy with Steam’s discoverability and promotion over the past few years. Then you add in all the Steam key selling stores that still take 30% for doing basically nothing because they can and it’s easy to see why Epic asking a much lower cut would be attractive even with their client lacking many relevant features.
I thought they took less, which is why they are so often able to sell games cheaper than steam does.
So hey…this is new:
Oh and to reply to the ‘epic only has 6 indie games’… thats VERY temporary. I know a LOT of devs who have asked to be listed on there. Including me. I’ll happily sell Democracy 3 and Production Line and Big Pharma on the epic store. Why wouldn’t I?
I bet within a month there are 30 games on there, and within 2 months 100. 6 months 1,000.
Some shots fired:
To throw out a data point with regard to splits. We (the developer) saw about 18% of MSRP on the first game I developed in the late 90’s/early 2000’s after the retailers, publisher, distributor, and licensing took their cuts. We received about 28% for the second game I was involved in. The idea of receiving 70% would have been a dream! :)
Yep. Again, if you’re a developer it makes sense to sell your game on this store. As a consumer, the only reason to buy here today is if the game is exclusive and you have to have it. Time will tell if the audience is big enough to make that extra 18% worth it, and how quickly Epic builds out features to catch up with all the other stores.
The posting of bugs to a now-defunct Steam game forum is pretty hilarious.
TBH, i expect 95% of indie games on the epic store to still be available on steam. But given the option of pointing website links, or tweeted links, or advertising links to the store that gives 88% vs the 70% one, I think the answer is obvious.
I think people underestimate how attractive it is for a dev who is preparing to struggle for visibility in the tidal wave of games on Steam to first launch on a smaller storefront created by someone with deep pockets and a bigger rev share, and an eyeball set that may have only partial overlap with Steam.
I know some devs hate Steam’s discussion area, but I can’t count the number of times I found an answer to a tech issue there and nowhere else. The fact that Epic won’t offer the same is a pretty big disincentive for me to not buy any 3rd party games from them.
I mean, we’ll probably just host our own (which we will also then have a little more control over)
You might, but others won’t. And those forums may be shut down, is yet another place for my registration info to be stolen, etc. I get why you’re excited but for me as a consumer it’s all just a minor pain in the ass.
Durante summed it up well too
No one should blame devs for taking a lucrative business deal, even if it means that their players will get fewer features or have to wait. However, I’ll certainly blame some of them for their hollow justifications of it.
More importantly, I’ll blame Epic for apparently having big pockets for exclusivity deals, but not funding development of even very basic features before launching.
Sure. I get it.
Maybe my concept of pain in the ass has never fully recalibrated from when I had to edit my config.sys and downloads were left overnight and I had to get mailed patches. Modern everything pretty much seems ridiculously convenient to me. Uphill in the snow both ways and all that.
It’s definitely minor, but given the choice between minor pain in the ass and none at all, I’ll opt out whenever possible. :)
Right now the Epic store is abysmal, frankly. I can find fuck-all about the games they have listed. There’s no forums for me to look for impressions or discussions to enlighten me on what the store can’t be bothered to do.
Honestly, do you know what ended up happening when I was trying to find info about Hades and Ashen? I pulled up their pages on Steam. That’s probably not a great sign for the new kid in town wanting to challenge the reigning king. Give me something here, whether it be better prices, features, convenience, or some kind of perk. Right now the Epic store offers nothing, other than getting developers to force the choice on me. And this is coming from someone that already has the client installed for Fortnite.
I want to see some real competition to Steam and I’m all for developers getting more of a cut but Epic is offering me zero when it comes to making me want to make the switch, and I think that’s going to be a problem for them.
As a dev, and watching the evolution of other stores, I just expect this to take a little time. Keeping a project like this under wraps and delivering it in a short time globally is non-trivial, and I expect Epic to nimbly add features and change things in response to metrics and user feedback. I mean, that’s kind of what they do? See Unreal Engine & Fortnite.
Importantly, Epic has the money to do that and to weather slow success.
No, it’s pretty much take 30% from everywhere I’ve looked. They can sell for less because they’re paying for nothing except their website and transaction fees when they sell Steam keys; it’s all profit. Some of them won’t even commit to initial front page presence; they’re just abusing indies who are so desperate for visibility they’ll put their games on anything.
Maybe. I suppose it depends on what features you’re looking for in a store. They’ve already stated that any publicly visible system where the end user can interact would be opt-in which is a huge negative to me.
I also don’t like their Support-a-Creator program with Epic paying people to play their exclusive games, but I don’t follow that crowd anyway, so it’s a minor complaint.
If they all jump on Epic as exclusives they’re just shifting the problem from one storefront to another, unless Epic decides to curate what’s offered… and we know how loved that is.
Oh, Epic is indeed curating. It’s not anything goes.
I’m just pointing out that if you are an indie the prospect of getting onto a curated store in front of all those eyes at a higher royalty is not unattractive.
It’s not like just going on some random store starting from zero - it’s moving to a storefront which already has a large inbuilt audience that you may not have tapped before, with effectively guaranteed placement.