5171

And here is the first one I’ve come across…

http://www.oddworld.com/soulstorm/

5172

Sure. If, as a developer, I could weigh up the pros and cons and decide between paying more for the fully-featured platform or earning more on the bare-bones option, that would be great.

That decision doesn’t meaningfully exist, though. Because of their ridiculously dominant market share, I have to sell through Steam. They desperately need real competition. Valve have gotten far too complacent.

5173

RinWorld made millions many times over before going on Steam. There are other projects (Starsector) doing fine without being on Steam. So yes, there is a meaningful decision for developers.

5174

Yeah, and Minecraft made a billion dollars. Great.

It wasn’t a hypothetical: I am a developer and I couldn’t survive if I chose not to sell on Steam.

As much as I love Steam and am grateful for the opportunities it has afforded it is not healthy for it to have such a dominant position.

5176

The one feature that still makes EGS a non-starter for me is the lack of achievements. Yes, I know. They’re silly, and stuff like modding or better security may have more importance to most people, but it’s the sole reason I haven’t even played any free EGS games, let alone bought one. (And yes. GOG goes in the same bucket for a lot of games.) I love achievements, and if I see a game has them on one client, but not the other, the latter will have less value to me.

According to the EGS roadmap, achievements are in the 6+ months category, which probably means a long time out since Epic is already behind from when it was first published. I might’ve bought Borderlands 3 on EGS, but for this.

5177

So here’s a question - is EGS ever going to move beyond a curated list of games, or will at some point they move to being a more universal store like Steam? I ask that question because one of the reasons some people say they support EGS is because they are paying developers more, and will provide competition for Steam. But if they only have a limited number of games, then how much will this help all developers? How much competition will they provide if they are competing in selling only a limited number of games? Have they said what their longer term plans are?

5178

This is absolutely key. Epic is always going to be curated. They don’t want to deal with supporting every game in existence – they want to pick the winners and take most of the revenue, leaving Steam with the games that sell less (although, by clearing out the store of chosen winners, presumably other games will do better – thanks Epic!). Epic isn’t about helping the poor Indies who can barely get by. They’re about cashing in on the ones who are almost certainly going to succeed. So their 88% - assuming they can keep it at that point - is distributed among near-sure winners, which is so much easier than having to carry the cost of services for games that sell less, or for keys that are sold by competitors, as Steam does.

5180

I thought the idea was to eventually expand a lot though? Offer a lot more games.

I mean, curation doesn’t mean not spoiled for choice. It’s the difference between Target and the Ebay. Sure, eBay has it beat with the sheer number of items for sale, and all the sellers, but that doesn’t mean that Target doesn’t offer competition in terms of goods and services.

Target is a curated list of items, but it still has a lot of items and brands. eBay has more, but it’s all in there, and if you don’t know what you are looking for, it’s tough to find anything. You can’t browse eBay easily. You can go to a target store and just look around (or the website).

Every day, Steam is looking a bit more like eBay. Just go look volumes of sellers.

Although, in case people take offense to my comment, let me reiterate, this is just my experience with Target vs eBay. Obviously, your experience May differ. That doesn’t mean my experience is a lie, or wrong, although if it is, I am happy to learn about other people’s experiences in this matter.

As I mentioned, the goal for me is to have Epic no longer require exclusive deals in the next year.

5181

I expect they’ll relax their curation in the future, when they have the tools and infrastructure to support several orders of magnitude more titles, just like Steam did.

5182

If so, then the EGS revenue split is unlikely to come to all Steam games even if Steam does adjust their pricing. There’s no reason why Steam couldn’t implement favored pricing for games that they are competing with EGS for, and everyone else pays full freight. So in the end, only a handful of developer that are probably going to be successful anyway, will see any benefits of the new pricing tier. So it sounds like EGS isn’t really a full on competitor to Steam but is just trying to skim the cream off the top.

5183

Oh, like the Apple of the gaming industry?

Well, now I feel compelled to hate Epic. Those elitist fucks! How dare they sell over priced walled garden shit!

5184

Shrug. I like free shit, gamecount++, and their $10 off everything sale was stellar.

5185

No, I kid. I thought it was just a silly joke. Hopefully people take it as such.

My understanding is that Apple makes a solid product. It’s use case and price don’t fit my needs at all, but some people really enjoy having Apple products that just work and work together.

Hopefully my sense of humor does not derail this thread.

5186

Hahahah if only such a thing were possible.

5187

The question is will they succeed enough to justify the payola? I think there’s enough backlash that it will take years before there’s any shot of profitability- I don’t know if Epic’s going to be for the long haul- especially if folks show they’re willing to wait for these games.

So far just about everything Epic has moneyhatted has been primarily single-player, and single-player stuff is easy to wait on. Imagine if Epic got an exclusive on say, Tekken 8. That would move things.

5188

I don’t know, I’m pretty sure a big chunk of my library wouldn’t exist without an open store like Steam. And not that many are crap, I promise. :)
As to the “Target vs eBay” displays (although it’s not really the same, since every product has a single entry on Steam, and they have more information, and …), it’s one of the things that is out of my experience. I usually search for a game I’m already interested in, look at some info on Steam, and add it, or not, to my isthereanydeal waitlist. I have enough of them that I really don’t care for recommendations.

5189

Valve actually rolled this out late last year, around the time EGS launched:

5190

I strongly disagree. Thus far the amount of developer interest and results have generally exceeded expectations.

5191

“person” = gamergater with years of dogpiling his scum followers onto various causes and “controversies”. I dont believe he’s had any problems. This is an e-celeb hunting for clicks and followers and to rile the hate mobs up and keep them baying at something.

5192

So here’s my $0.02 on the whole EGS thing, apropos of nothing:

I don’t blame any developer that takes the Epic money - particularly indie devs - unless that dev has made, for example, crowdfund promises about supporting Steam, and situations like that. Even if they offer refunds to affected backers, simply getting your investment back is pretty cold comfort to people who might’ve waited months or years.

Development is expensive, and we all have bills to pay. Epic’s bag of cash, and their offers to guarantee revenue to a point, would be very lucrative to a small developer. Take care of yourselves, first. You’re making an entertainment product, and you don’t owe anyone else anything.

I also actually sympathize with Epic’s perspective, that buying exclusivity is a necessary short-to-medium term “evil”, in order to pry some meaningful marketshare away from the entrenched, de facto monopoly enjoyed by Steam.

I see a lot of takes on the internet that basically say that Epic could do the same thing by simply offering a better product than Steam, but I think that’s extremely naive (for lack of a better word). People really under-estimate the value of sheer commercial inertia - people have their game collections and friends on Steam. Steam is what they are familiar with. You could offer a “better” social media website than Facebook tomorrow (if it doesn’t already exist), but Facebook’s sheer inertia as the dominant service would steamroll it.

So if you’re Epic, looking at that landscape, buying away games and “forcing” consumers to make your launcher part of their gaming routine, makes some sense. Like I said - I sympathize with it. And I like to note that most of the people talking about restricting “choice” didn’t care one whit about all of the games over the years that have come to Steam, and only Steam - regardless of whether there was a bag of money involved.

However, what I will also say, is this argument would ring less hollow from Epic, if their launcher/store wasn’t also materially worse than Steam in pretty much every way. Launching a Steam competitor in 2018 without a freaking SHOPPING CART, is just embarrassing. They aren’t even trying to compete on actual features and usability right now.