5234

Dude it was a joke. It’s ok to let it slide.

5235

I love that I’m reading a thread where people (and I’m deliberately not replying to anyone specific) are making the (paraphrased) argument “stores that choose what they want to sell are unreasonable and anti-consumer.”

5236

To be 100% honest, I don’t care that much if Epic only does this temporarily. I buy games on the cheap anyway, and I don’t mind waiting a year to get it elsewhere, probably on GOG. And it better be at a discount. If the companies expect to sell it a year later at full price, then this proves the exact opposite of what @legowarrior is claiming: that exclusivity is actually harming the consumer, because fake scarcity is causing the price to remain high for longer than it normally would.

Also, my fear is that Epic will not only keep doing this for a very long time, but that what they really want is to get games to be exclusive with them forever. Think about it – currently, exclusivity forever is a hard sell, because the store is unproven. But if the store does prove itself, developers will be more willing to be exclusive forever. They won’t need any more money to convince them – all they want to know is that they won’t lose sales long-term. So the actual result will probably, once again, be that the customer is screwed even harder.

I think this is a very likely outcome, and probably Epic’s real plan. This is made even more likely to happen by the fact that @Lunarstorm seems to suggest they’re doing well. If their current strategy is profitable, then there’s no reason for Epic to ever stop doing this. If you have the tools to predict which steam game will sell well, and you can calculate how much you expect them to sell, and you have the cash, you can always offer the devs less than what you think they’ll actually earn. You’re just laying out the money ahead of time. It’s like an insurance company for game sales – the better your actuaries, the better you can locate the Indies that’ll sell well and place them in your pool. Your goal is to get the best pool possible and offer them insurance aka money up front. Indies are so risk averse, you can massively undercut what you think they’ll actually make and still come out ahead. So this trend probably isn’t stopping anytime soon, no matter what Sweeney says. Instead, assuming the store succeeds, we’re going to get more and more Indies agreeing to permanent exclusivity rather than temporary exclusivity.

5238

So, bigger developers that do more games that legowarrior deems worthy. Somehow, because he doesn’t have a voice.
Cultural guilds deciding what should be in big stores weren’t exactly golden ages of creativity. Payola was full of similar songs, the age before Netflix had crappy copy after crappy copy, the pre-steam age was all about grey and brown FPS and WoW-killers.

That’s not a hard guess. :p but if their plan is to guess the most profitable games, they’ll fail, like everyone else did. Before even trying to be an actual competitor.

(ah, you deleted it. It’s not controversial, so I hope it’s OK.)
You won’t. It could be, but it’s not profitable (or easy, or without forcing your way) to improve stuff to the average person (though Proton is surprisingly popular at killing dual booting). Unless you count Stadia or Android, I guess.

5239

Who has failed? Who has tried to pick off the winners right before they release? Nobody’s done that, partly because it’s just so slimy. This isn’t a publisher betting before a game is even made. It’s not crowdfunding, giving money after seeing an alpha (or just an idea). This is a game that’s about to be sold, and Epic can view the number of wishlists that have this game (and presumably some other data), and they can swoop in and make an offer. The offer doesn’t have to be high either – small developers are living within very modest means. And these developers, as clueless about financing as ever, will fall for it more often than not.

5240

Looking at the Trello roadmap - am I correct in seeing no plans for Linux support, at all? I see an Android store on there, but even that’s in the 6+ month bucket.

5241

This is my concern also, as voiced a few thousand posts ago. I suspect EGS / devs optimal outcome is to restrict supply, allowing them to maintain higher prices for longer. The consumer loses because the producer and distributor capture a larger share of the economic rents.

5242

Those are still projections of sales to be multiplied by some factor, although the pre-ordering culture may have a bigger effect than I’m thinking. But that also makes them a tentalizing target for projects like Godus and Star Citizen.

As far as I’m aware, no. They could save a lot of the hassle Steam has to deal with with their legacy choices, as there wasn’t much of a clue on how to deal with system libraries on commercial games - home computers get more frequent updates and games need lower level interfaces than most software. Even the EGS client is built on open source that runs anywhere.
I do understand that it’s not a profitable priority, Valve only went for it after being somewhat threatened about losing their lunch money, but with exclusives, some ports will just be dropped or not even considered. Unless they plan/do most of the work to run it on Stadia.

5243

Otherwise stated: competing with an entrenched market leader requires a significant capital investment. That’s not an argument against making the attempt.

So? This is like saying no one should be able to unionize as long as you are unable to unionize…

So it sounds like there are no downsides, since the existence of the EGS doesn’t eradicate the existence of Steam. It’s not a zero sum game. Funneling their profits into certain Indie games only increases the amount of funding for developers over all. It probably frees up investment capital from other parties these games might have otherwise used, too. And that’s totally ignoring the attempt to just make selling games digitally more profitable by altering the standard for revenue splits.

You are aware that basically the entire music and television industries work on a model like this, right? Novel publishing, too? TV shows are bought based on pilot quality. Indie movies get signed based on their performance on the festival circuit. Publishing houses sign nearly finished manuscripts. And record labels scour the world for up and coming music acts.

5244

Nope, you’re right, more power to them. Except I won’t be using them anymore because their store isn’t very good, I don’t like the way they are doing business, and their owner seems to be an ass. Of course I will take any free games they offer, but I am done buying from them.

Edit to add: no one is saying EGS shouldn’t exist, most of us just don’t like the exclusives.

5245

It’s not on the roadmap, but look at the jobs posted. For example:

https://epicgames.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Epic_Games/job/Cary-NC/DevOps-Engineer_R1085-1

Qualifications

  • Proven experience with Linux, and cloud computing technologies such as AWS, or other cloud computing environment

So it’s likely in the plans, but not terribly close.

5246

That sounds like a backend job, not a client dev.

5247

Maybe, although they also have a spot for a Backend Engineer, so it seems like they may be different things. But IANAEpicEmployee, so it’s just guesswork.

5248

Yep, nothing there shouts Linux client to me. And while Valve’s initial excursion into Linux was mostly precautionary, I give them credit for sticking with it after the threat of UWP was dead and buried, knowing what a small segment it is that’ll probably never be profitable. Extra weird for EGS to make no mention because UE4 works fine in Linux.

Although, Epic has to suffer through Workday which does garner some sympathy.

5249

A simple question, why would anyone buy a game on EGS if it also available on Steam?

It’s a no-brainer. Buy on steam, always.

You want to support a store that exists by single game fueled funny money replete with CCP funding using exclusivity to force your hand (which future facing IS highly dubious) or you go with our old bedrock benevolent overlords. :)

5250

Well, there is the chance that if EGS slimy tactics are successful then the entire market moves in that direction - limited features, distribution only, at minimal margins and lower prices. You’ll be happy, but I’ll sorely miss all the niche features we’ve mentioned (which you seem oblivious to) if Steam concludes this market structure can’t support them.

Even if EGS does match some of Steam features, there will be duplication in the market and no guarantee it’s to the consumers benefit.

5251

Seriously folks. Ease off. “I don’t like exclusives, I dont like that they dont take the consumer experience seriously, and I don’t understand how EGS is profitable in the long term” is all you need to say. There’s a lot of conspiracy theorising nonsense about Epic’s intentions here, whereas the truth is almost certainly that their plan looks like this:

  1. Gain market share through exclusives to get the client on more desktops and establish credibility with developers as a place that can move a lot of product
  2. ???
  3. Profit

Where stage 2 is actually a whole let of learning about the market and how to succeed in it, followed by the development of an actually profitable strategy.

5252

I’m pretty blunt about it. Given the crap that the EGS is, I don’t want Epic in the PC marketplace period. I don’t like their store, I don’t trust them with my credit card given all the security issues EGS has, and their business strategy is bad for my wallet.

Steam’s monopoly is better for me than Epic’s “competition”, and I’d be fine with Valve going brutal on companies that took Epic money if that’s what it took to get Epic out of the market.

5253

I think Steam know that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Going brutal on companies that tool a good deal from epic would be anticompetetive behaviour.

I do think they should tighten up their contract so that if you use their storefront for prerelease marketing you can’t pull the game and sell it somewhere else. But that’s a future thing.

5254

The more you tighten your grip, the more will slip through your fingers. Everyone is fine with Steam because they’re mostly benevolent, even if with (exaggerated) issues, but that would mean the end of that on the back of the mind of most people. Of course, they could always charge a fee or something if devs don’t follow through, even if someone else ends up paying it.