Epic Games Store - 88% split goes to devs

This is why they got 1.25 Billion in investments.

There’s only one divedivedive. I mean on any single given website at any one time, of course. I don’t always get to them in time to claim the name.

As far as my real name goes, apparently some joker of a doctor in Pennsylvania set up a Gmail account same as mine, just without the dots between the first and last name, which are invisible to google. Which makes me wonder, why do they even let you set up two accounts that are functionally identical if that’s the case?

Then there’s that restaurant that serves up a brain reuben, which is about the weirdest sandwich ever invented.

I’m pretty safe with both my online name and my real name — I’m only aware of two other people with my real name in the world, one of which is a relative and the other is in the Dutch Antilles. And I’ve reinforced that by not having a firstname.lastname style email address. I don’t think I’ve ever received an accidental email in that way.

There’s another Balasarius out there. He grabbed a Youtube and Twitch account before me. Also, the Shroud of the Avatar portal thingy. It’s so frustrating to try to log in, it says no you have an account, oh I must have forgot the password, please send it to me, wait-wait-wait, where the hell is my password reset email?!

They all go to the same email address, but you can create filters and rules based on those differences. For instance, redirect all the email you receive to the account with a dot in the name to junk, then use that when signing up for various websites online.

This seems fairly exciting, but I wonder how long will it take for Epic Launcher to be as useful as Steam is. Because if it is just barebones launcher, most people will probably not going to want to switch unless Epic offers some amazing prices.

And I understand that 70/30 is looking like not such a great deal anymore, but isn’t humble and some other stores offering much better split already?

Like if you use Humble Widget, you get 95%, AND the gamer can use Steam (which most gamers already have and like), so it is a win win.

I look forward to competition that forces Steam to improve, but this…

…is why I won’t be giving them a chance until they can prove they’ve figured security out.

Or makes Fortnite exclusive.

Yeah, it bothered me to not really own the game but get access to it at Steam’s whim. The cheap games finally got me. When you can buy a game for under $5, often a bundle of games for under $5, I don’t feel like I’m risking all that much.

Fortnite already is exclusive to epic launcher on PC, no?

Yes. 45

Cool, an even eight game launchers.

I think that’s the most important thing that so many of these “no, we totally care about indies” efforts seem to be missing. It’s great to say you’re going to help indies, there are plenty of great games that fail only because they can’t be seen. But none of that matters if you can’t get consumers on your platform because you didn’t offer THEM anything. It’s the reason GOG has gone nowhere since their “we have everyone’s back catalog with no DRM” appeal ran out. They’ve just been playing catchup with copies of Steam features since then.

Right now, Epic’s strategy seems to be “we have Fortnite so we’ll get consumers buying things by default” but I’m not sure how true that will actually be.

What, entirely? That’s an amazing deal, Unreal royalties are 5% of revenue.

I think they’re making a mistake calling it the Epic Games Store. This gives it the impression that it’s proprietary.

The affiliate program makes a lot of sense. I always wondered why Steam didn’t do that.

And finally, my feeling is the lack of DRM is going to push away mid-size studios. Indies don’t care and AAA+ games use their own DRM, but this will keep away games like Prey.

Then again, if you’re using Unreal, saving 17% of your revenue (12% from the base cut, and 5% for Unreal) is a pretty big carrot!

Where does it say no DRM? I’m looking at Sweeny’s announcement and it doesn’t talk about DRM at all.

Sergey told me on twitter there is no storewide DRM, only what developers decide to use themselves.

I’m all for let them fight, as long as Valve doesn’t fold and take with it my backlog.

Humble widget is something completely different. That’s something you embed on your own site, which requires lots of marketing (even more than Steam) to funnel people to your own site to get the 95%. You still have to handle payment processing, refunds, chargebacks, steam code distribution etc… all yourself when you do that.

Makes sense for Epic - take 12% instead of 5%.