There’s a Rebel Galaxy thread parallel to this one with similar disussions and they are blending together for me a bit :)
Yeah, I knew but I haunt the Rebel Galaxy thread.
Which I am looking forward to Outlaw.
And I appreciate your, and everyone, contributing to his conversation. It’s definitely nice to get the inside view on top of the customer view.
Appreciate it!
To be clear (maybe?), what I was trying to tease apart was the bit where you said that for 1st parties it was ‘not ideal, but could be understood’ - with the clear implication that for other studios, that doesn’t apply. And I’m trying to understand why you think it’s different, since the company’s goal in both cases is identical.
Oh gosh. I want the exact opposite to you. I want more competition in available marketplaces. If every customer chooses Steam and refuses to use any other store then we end up with a monopoly. What prevents Steam from then increasing their revenue share?
50%/70%?
What keeps them honest?
Monopolies are terrible, terrible for the consumer.
I think you might be confusing for what we want for what we got which is also different from what is being presented.
I’d want something more like Movies Anywhere if given the choice. I buy the game at whatever store I want. I use a platform or a client that organizes my stuff in the way I like best but behind it all is a place that stores it all so when I move to a different machine, buy a different machine, my house burns down… whatever, my account is mine.
We don’t have that in gaming. Steam is as close as we’ve got and Movie Anywhere is still relatively new anyway.
I want this too :)
I want more competition too! You know what is competition? When a game is available on all possible stores and I can choose where to buy according to who offers me the best deal when it comes to pricing, features, bonuses etc!
Artificially restricting games to single place (that happens to be the most barebones and worst one that does not apparently even comply with EU law at the moment) is the opposite of competition.
Basically for the reason I stated above. In case of first party, I also wish they were available everywhere. But that ship has sailed already, for EA and Activision games at least. But I was kinda hoping that third parties wouldn’t go for this as well.
We both know that’s not happening, and I think you should probably take a step back and wait for at least six months to see how things play out. More than one “good” store will be fine in the long run. GoG has the “old games” thing and their own games to keep them plenty solvent. No one is going away anytime soon IMO except maybe some of the key mills that churn out cheap keys daily in bundles.
To flip this to a glass half full conversation, there is no way that all these great independent games exist today without digital storefronts for them to live on. There probably isn’t a vast library of games from the DOS era available today without digital distribution. Whether it’s 30% or 12% that is taken by the store, the bottom line is that people can sell a hell of a lot more games today than we saw in previous eras of PC gaming. PC Gaming has grown significantly since say, 1998. That’s the year Half-Life first launched.
If the “problem” now is having to install an extra place to find them, well that hardly seems like a problem at all.
I would like that too but I also understand that first you have to drive adoption. Even Steam had to do this by first having exclusive games. It’s the chicken or the egg. Without initial users there is no store and without exclusive titles there are little/no users.
EDIT:
I full agree it’s a terrible thing though. Exclusivity is bad. But what choice do “store creators” have?
It’s the single best approach for driving adoption :(
Yeah, and I think what I’m trying to get across here is that the ship hasn’t sailed there anymore than it has for third parties.
It’s a per-title choice that a developer makes, and I’m asserting that making a distinction between a third party and a first party, when there’s no hardware as part of the equation, is pretty meaningless.
Except that the first parties have a lot more money, and begrudging a poorer third party the potential of making a better return, while shrugging at the wealthy first party for doing the same thing, feels a little weird to me.
So the difference with Steam, and maybe it’s just a different way of perceiving it is early on it seemed like there were games only on Steam but for feature reasons not for reasons that seem more artificial.
For example, we’re on Steam to use their DRM, it’s either that or that always online or 3 install limit that was going on. We’re going on Steam because the way they do their multiplayer makes it possible for us to do multiplayer, so it was either Steam or no MP or some awful experience we didn’t like doing anymore. Were there money reasons… sure… but there was also a clear benefit… to the customer.
That is a bit disengenious though. I am not shrugging at the wealthy first party doing it. I dislike it just as much. But they are doing it and no amount of annoyed forum posts is going to change EA’s mind. But at least EA provides some nice value - by paying 25 euros per year, I get access to around 80 games on Origin with new ones being added quite often, including their AAAs.
I really wonder how is it going to work out for you though. If Epic didn’t pay you for the exclusivity (I assume they did but admit it is guess work and you probably cannot confirm nor deny, which is understandable), will the sales on Epic Store make you what you would make if you put your game everywhere? I have my doubts :)
Btw, I am just watching the 1 hour gameplay demo you did. It looks like a fantastic game, honestly.
Does anyone know if the Epic store exclusive games are exclusive in perpetuity?
Everything I’ve read so far seems to indicate that they are exclusive only for a set period of time which is a much lesser evil in my opinion.
If anyone knows of any perpetual exclusives please shout up.
Well none are perpetual, aside from Fortnite, as of now. At least as far as I’ve seen. Hades and RG:O certainly are only limited time exclusives.
I really am not trying to be disingenuous or put words in your mouth - but it’s a very common sentiment.
“we understand because they are first party, that’s just the way it is”. So many people say it’s understandable, or OK, or whatever for a first party to do that, while in the same breath decrying an indie. And to me it just feels like it’s because that’s the status quo.
But they’re not decrying the indie either, not really. You’d be first party too if you sold it on your storefront or just on your website.
You’r not being decried, as you put it, for being indie… it’s the third party part that’s key.
I’m actually surprised that more indies don’t self-publish, self-host on their own websites. The added cost to do this in time is non-trivial but if you’re planning on releasing games in the future it seems worthwhile. That way you gain 100% of the profit and don’t have to adhere to any rules/restrictions.
And again, my question is why is it not OK for a 3rd party, but OK for a 1st party. The first party can put their games on any storefront they want (see Witcher 3). Why is it OK for them to make their game exclusive to one store.
Although I have this sense of deja-vu - upstream I’m pretty sure you told me you did NOT say it was OK for them to do that, and that just leaves me confused.
It’s so not worth it as a primary point of sale. Audience size way too small. (and you have to maintain that separate SKU, separate patching, etc.)
Perhaps that’s a gap in the marketplace. A self-hosted peer2peer Steam-like? :)