Epic Games Store - 88% split goes to devs

Games
5299

Working without adding an account is different from working without a login. I assume you have a Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or PSN account? You just log in using those. (And no, Epic won’t get access to your Facebook account when you do that).

The benefit is that those companies will have better account security departments than either of Steam or Epic, and that you’ll have one less password to remember.

(And yes, you’ll need to add a credit card if you want to spend money. But if you just want the weekly free games, then I’m pretty sure not.)

5300

None of that mitigates the fact that I am the weakest link in my own security. It’s great that you can use Facebook or whatever to login to EGS (it will be a cold day in Hell before I trust Facebook with anything) but it still means I’ve added another vulnerability to my online life. No thanks.

5301

Would lastpass be an option?

5302

It sounds like you have no accounts anywhere but Steam and QT3, and will never create one anywhere else. I agree that in that situation, EGS will be a total no-go.

But it’s not a security problem.

5303

Like I wrote, if I don’t need a particular account, I don’t create it.

5304

Yes. But that’d only be an issue if you didn’t have an account with any of the supported identity providers. So I can only assume you don’t have an Microsoft account to use with Xbox, or an PSN account, or a Google account. Because if you did, you could use those to log into the EGS.

Look, I don’t care if you use EGS or not. But just say that you don’t want to use it. There’s no need to try to come up with scare stories about account security to justify it.

5305

As not a fan, I can confirm. I have an account since the Shadow Complex giveaway, and it had my standard throwaway password that had been leaked. The login warnings went away as soon as I changed the password.

It’s a security risk, more accurately. And single sign-in still is too, in different ways (but likely much less, due to the capital invested in the providers and the massive potential fines). Unfortunately, everything online is a risk, for the foreseeable future, doubly so if Mr. Barr has his way and demands backdoors everywhere. It’s mostly PayPal that sees my CC, even though they are pretty big assholes for sellers and I wish I didn’t support them.
As an occasional student of security, Epic doesn’t look different from anyone else, for good and bad. I’m not sure if having no account validation is not exploitable in some fashion, but I’ll go with no until I look at it properly.

5306

I did say I don’t want to use it in this thread already, so good for me I guess.

As for the “scare stories” do with them what you will. It’s not controversial in the security field to say the every additional security risk is exactly that.

5307

No, I made the point that the supposed benefit is limited, and I believe it is unlikely to have much impact on PC gaming revenue distributions overall. You came back said that that was like saying no one should be able to unionize if others weren’t able to unionize. Since I never said what Epic should are should not do, that is an irrelevant comment. Then you asked me if I doubted the possibility of larger change, should no one try. Once again, I never said that Epic shouldn’t try anything. So let me make it clear for you, Epic is free to do whatever they want. I’ve never opposed what Epic is doing except for using exclusives - that is the only thing that I don’t like about what they are doing.

5308

Not validating the email is exploitable, but in a very roundabout way.

What the attacker would do is create new accounts in bulk with email + password combos from credential dumps, and hope that the real user doesn’t remember whether they created the account or not. So when they want to try Fortnite, they’ll first try logging in with their normal throwaway password. When it works, they’ll think nothing about it.

The bad guy then waits for the user to add a credit card to the account to buy some v-bucks. Once that happens, they change the password, change the recovery email, lock the real user out, buy some more v-bucks, and then sell the account. I don’t know what the account recovery policies of Epic are, but there’s a good chance that due to the bad guy being the person who actually created the account, their claim on the account ends up looking stronger than the victim’s.

So basically reverse hijacking. Create an account, hope somebody hijacks it without realizing, and does something to make the account valuable.

The hit rate on this kind of attack would be pitiful. And even if you got a hit, these accounts would be hijacked very quickly by somebody else, since they were intentionally created with a password from a public credential dump. I’d bet money that the actual business model behind creating accounts using other people’s email addresses is something that’s intended to scam Epic rather than scam the owner of the email address.

Similar attacks have been theorized with other services that don’t validate email addresses. E.g. create Netflix accounts using somebody else’s email address; Netflix will send them an email to update the payment details, with a link that doesn’t require logging in; do that often enough, and maybe somebody is careless enough to enter their credit card info into your account. Enjoy your free Netflix for a few months.

But I have not heard about this kind of scam happening in practice. And since I work on preventing account hijacking, it’d kind of be my job to hear about it :-P

5309

You’re thinking big. It seems more likely someone will use the wrong e-mail by accident and wind up with something that is close to theirs but not actually theirs or just do it to screw with someone. It’s unlikely to be some sort of worldwide scam attempt. Validating an e-mail before creating an account isn’t even that big of an ask. I am not sure why there’s so much push back against it, especially from the group that thinks push back is just… well bad.

5310

Yes, I suppose you have been careful to avoid actually saying anything about what Epic should do; rather than make a counter argument you just repeat that not everyone gets to benefit. And my question remains the same: So? How is some developers benefiting not better than no developers benefiting? Why do you insist on pointing out the limits to the benefit like it matters to anything being said?

5311

I never said it wasn’t.

Because of course it does matter. If you’ve been following this thread a number of EGS supporters have been touting how this will benefit PC gaming by providing more money to developers. I think it is important to note that this benefit will be very limited. Even if EGS is successful it is unlikely to really change the current pricing for the vast majority of PC games because EGS is so limited in their selection. Why do you insist on ignoring that these benefits will be rather limited given EGS limited number of games for sale?

5312

Well, we actually don’t know the scope of this yet, do we? We don’t know yet how many developers will benefit, or how many developers have reject the deal or are still considering the deal or how many deals Epic plans for make.

So, it really is just what you choice to believe. But, we do know that the developers with games that are actually popular are being offered the deal, so whatever the benefit is currently, it’s not zero.

But, if Epic gets off the ground, I think you might see a lot of developers looking at what is being offered by other stores and asking for more themselves. Steam had already made some concessions around the time Epic had announced their intentions. If steam and valve feel threatened, I am sure more concessions will be made.

Anyway, it’s still early days yet, with the store still not complete. Like steam itself, it will probably be a while before some of the more stubborn members of this forum turn a corner on this.

In the mean time, free games and 10 dollar off deals. Not to shabby for almost no investment on my part.

5313

Strawman, who said it was “zero”? But we know EGS is not going to have hundreds, much less thousands of games like Steam. From everything I’ve read, they intend to maintain a select curated storefront.

What developers want is irrelevant. If EGS is not going to take a game, what leverage does that developer have over Steam? That doesn’t seem to make much sense. Steam will be free to compete with EGS on certain games, and free to maintain current pricing for everyone else.

5314

I don’t think the number of games matter. Most games are just not valuable to either Steam, Epic or even the developer (in terms of monetary gain). Most will never see a profit. Most are money sinks for both the developers and for Steam. We already know this.

Like an angel investor, Valve only needs a handful
of games to succeed on steam for it to be good make up the costs of all the rest. For the longest time, steam was trying to limit the number of indie games on the market, so that it would have to deal with the 99% that just take up room.

So, for the sake of argument you have 100 games coming out from indie developers. For the sake of argument, maybe 10 of them will be good enough to turn a profit of any significance. So, those 10 games will probably pay for the costs of hosting the other 90 and then some.

Now, Epic tries to game the system by figure out what those 10 are and maybe make as offer on 8 of them and maybe 10 or so of the sucky games. Well, even if they snag 5 of the good ones and all the crappy ones, that leaves Steam with 5 games that have to support other 80 crappy games left over, while Epic has 5 good games and now 10 bad ones.

Steam doesn’t care about the 80 crappy games it has, by it sure as hell cares about the 5 good games that it lost to Epic. And since Steam has a pretty open system, it has a tougher time figuring out which of the 100 games will be good before Epic comes in, so in order to keep them on its payroll, it needs to make Epics offer less beneficial by offering better deals to all 100 games. The model that Steam uses doesn’t allow it to pick and choose winners and losers like Epic can (at this point).

Anyway, that’s how I foresee Epics strategy having an outsized effect on Steam because they are trying to target Steams money makers.

Now, Steam doesn’t have offer everyone a better deal. It’s already gamed the system by offer everyone that sells more then a certain amount of units a better deal. Certainly, they can keep doing that instead, and developers that are confident in their game might decide to stick with Steam because of that. But, I think they would still need to lower that amount to make it tempting, which is still a net gain to developers.

5315

First of all, quality and profitability aren’t that related, on anything. Secondly, it’s more like 2. Thirdly, if they indeed were to pay for everyone else, congratulations, whatever doesn’t look successful won’t get funded, we can look forward to (only) endless clones of Minecraft, PUBG and TF2, just like the big boys in Hollywood.
While that would be a mercy to Space Tyrant, whelp, so much for Obra Dinn or Baba, who cares about this ugly, 2d crap where you don’t even kill anything. Let’s do Youtuber’s Life instead, that’s in, right? Oh, look, yep, seems like it has 5 times the sales quality, let’s hope we see more of that instead!

5316

Great the whole popular doesn’t mean good argument. The last stand of the erudite, the elite the first among equal.

Sorry, but the overlap between popular and quality is there, as long as it’s affordable and accessable. And with Epic giving steep discounts like they did during the last sale, I can see it happening more often that games are accessible and affordable (with the noted exception of Linux users. Sorry guys and girls).
Perhaps not 100%, but people like what they like.

As for clones, most indie original concepts are crap. It’s fun to be out there and make something unique, but right now, the best games I’ve played is Dominions 5. That’s 5, after 4 iterations. It’s a unique game, but it’s not breaking new grounds. There are cool 8 bit RPGs out there, trying something newish, but they are still basically RPGs. RTS games are having a mini resurgence with AoE DE, but that’s just an old gams, but brought up to modern standards.

Hell, we here at QT3 are constantly hyped by the idea of whether the next Fantasy Strategy game will recapture the magic of Master of Magic or Fantasy General.

So, don’t give me the argument about popularity or clones. That’s just elitism gone rampant. A snobby attitude that has no basis in reality, but just a shelter for people to feel Superior to others. Good games usually improve on old concepts, not strike out to something brand new, just like art or music.

5317

Interesting concept. I don’t really have a dog in the EGS fight; don’t care much. But I do agree with @peterb upthread that the market, essentially, will decide whether EGS is making good choices in what games to sell, so we really don’t have much to add to that beyond, well, buying or not buying. I am intrigued, though, about this assertion that as long as some people are benefiting, we should be happy for them.

In I guess some sort of cosmic moral sense, the opposite of schadenfreude seems like a reasonable and empathetic sort of reaction. “Hey, I’m glad you got that job!” or “I’m happy you won the lottery!” I’m not sure it’s nearly as valid in the realm of political economy, however. Paying off one group to screw over the rest is a time-honored tactic, especially in capital-labor relations. Divide and conquer has been a part of political and economic strategy since long before Machiavelli. Now, I am not saying EGS is doing anything of the sort, or implying any evil motives, or what not. What I’m suggesting is that, no, the mere fact that one group is benefiting from something does not make that thing in and of itself necessarily good. It might be. It might not be.

5318

That is so not me, though. But fine, you still want to throw a bunch of good games out just because you don’t like the concepts, and I’m still going to say I care a lot more for games that wouldn’t exist in a world of walled gardens, when even Opus Magnum was temporarily rejected by GoG.

They’re not even that close to GMG launch discounts, let alone others, and it remains to be seen what sales of older games are like. Sorry, that’s baseless bullshit.

Usually, yes. Hardly always, because someone has to be first. Factorio, Minecraft of PUBG had slight improvements over what, exactly?