Epic Games Store - 88% split goes to devs

Games
581

I was having trouble getting my thoughts together, but I think they basically amount to this: we know that EA, Activision and Ubisoft are selfish assholes. They’ve proven it time and again. I avoid giving them money whenever I can. What we didn’t expect is for Indies to be assholes as well.

Indies who feel Valve doesn’t respect them could have banded together and negotiated with Valve. They could have gone to GOG. They could have created their own storefront, keeping close to 100%, while distributing Steam keys exclusively through that store. This would have shown consideration for their users, and understanding that we don’t want to encourage a proliferation of incompatible digital goods in the PC space. Instead, they went and joined yet another incompatible storefront with exclusivity, giving new life to the concept of exclusivity and incompatibility on the PC. It’s a dick move. As a result, I certainly will not treat these Indies favorably in the future. I don’t consider them any better than the asshole AAA publishers anymore.

582

edit eh, deleted response. Don’t wanna argue anymore.

583

I don’t think this is a fair assessment. Some developers/publishers are making business decisions. I don’t agree with them for reasons stated, and I question how hard they’ve really looked at the customer side of things and their most obvious competitors when they made said decisions but let’s be an asshole is not going to be a factor in that decision making process.

It’s pretty clear certain needs from a dev’s perspective is not being met by Valve/Steam. This might be one of the bigger pushes to address that regardless of the outcome but it’s not a screw you attempt at their customer base.

584

I don’t blame you. :)
I’ve been watching your gameplay video, and it looks great. Something I would like to play. But I will most likely wait until it gets to GOG, or until the Epic store is more ready for prime time.

I have no problem with dealing with another store. But I think Epic should have waited until they had more features in place before they launched.

That said, I wish you the best, and hope to be playing your game soon.

585

I’ll be there day one for the game (very, very few games would I say that for). Just make sure it’s 2019 and not 2020, okay?

586

No, they actually can’t.

587

You should really…just back away from this…because wow…take a walk maybe. Go outside. Take a breath.

588

That’s funny, I see it the other way around: people want the convenience and simplicity of a console in pc, to have unified everything in a single platform/store/community, that’s why they want everything on Steam.

PC historically has always been open, which meant sometimes there was a clusterfuck in some areas, like for example messaging. Some people using icq, other aim, other xfire, other irc, etc. Or voIP: some communities used Teamspeak, others mumble, other just Steam chats…

It happens even in apis, there was a time where we had 3 competing systems: direct 3d vs glide vs open gl.

589

Oh I love it when people complain about installing yet another game store and at the same time they install the 100th app on their phone.

The more competition Steam has, the better!

590

Well, all 100 apps came from the same store. :)

If I want to find an app on my phone, there’s one place I need to look. There’s only one login to remember to buy it, one place to store my credit card information, etc. If I had to juggle six different stores and payment profiles on my phone I’d be a little annoyed too. Having the option is great, but being forced to would be a bit annoying.

I don’t think it’s the one-time install of an application on the computer that bothers some people.

591

I’m not complaining about another game store, but this is not the same thing. At. All. For starters, I only have one store on my phone. And installing apps from that store is like installing games from just Steam, not installing multiple stores.

One issue with multiple game stores though, is that you can accidentally buy the same game twice (especially older games on sale). Or just trying to remember where you have what. With 2-3 stores, I guess it’s not a big deal. But in a future with 20 stores? Maybe it will be.

592

If I’m ever concerned about a trend I try to think of the long, long term future. Usually that makes me feel better.

Maybe 20 years from now I’ll have an AI that purchases games directly from hundreds of stores run by publishers, and it will aggregate various features like achievements and cloud saves. Perhaps there will be a new DRM scheme or none at all, and at that point I can just buy cloud storage to host my games and ensure they’ll never be unavailable if a store dies.

Changes in digital stores are absolutely inevitable. There will be more of them. We’re in the awkward transition phase right now. Sorry.

593

The AAAs are also just making business decisions when they do what they do. Trump is also making business decisions (when he shouldn’t be, but can you fault him for trying to do well? /s). There are different ways to make business decisions.

When Epic approaches you with cash for exclusivity, you can say “I don’t know, I’ve got my issues with Steam but this sounds like exactly the kind of uncompetitive practices my customers hate the most with regard to AAAs and consoles. Plus, you’re fragmenting the ecosystem even more, and many of my customers won’t like that.”

When Epic approaches you with cash for exclusivity, you can say “why don’t you prove yourself to be a good store first and foremost with good customer service – then we can talk about exclusivity. I mean, all those Fortnite players are supposed to be instant buyers, right?”

When Epic approaches you with cash for exclusivity, you can say “you know, a year+ sounds like an awful long time. How about we do one to two months instead?”

When Epic approaches you with cash for exclusivity, you can say “I’ve really got a message to send to Steam, but GOG is a small store that’s earned its place in the PC gaming community, so why don’t we publish on there as well?”

Or you just take their cash.

(BTW I definitely didn’t mean to make this an attack on @tbaldree specifically. Different companies do have different reasons for doing what they do. I’m just describing my reaction – perhaps too strongly for others’ tastes, but I’m not going to hide it just because one of those companies happens to be on here. )

594

Hell, if I was Travis or anyone else I would jump at the higher revenue split. I just wish customers were getting a carrot (better deals, a more feature-rich client, a rewards/loyalty program) than a stick (that game you had wishlisted on Steam? Well you install our client and buy from us or you’re not getting it for a long while).

595

That’s why I buy non-Steam games on my Xbox One.

596

Almost 600 posts in a few days. Few times this has happened in QT3.

So obviously people feel passionate about. I’ve been skirting a bit the polemic for now, but I will give now my two cents:

-I don’t have anything against the concept of Epic launching a new store. The more adjusted profit share ratio is good for developers.

-In general, I just buy games wherever it’s cheaper. I already have accounts (and games) in: Steam, GoG, Origin, Uplay, Blizzard and Humble Bundle, hell, even I had a few in Impulse. Hell I have FH3 in the windows Store, now that I remember. My steam collection dwarfes the games I have in any other store, and if a game is in several stores I will choose Steam. But I’m a cheapskate and if a game is, let’s say, 5€ cheaper in another place than in Steam, I will use that. Always supposing the launcher has a minimum of compentency. So I guess I value all the features Steam have by an ammount of… 3-4€. Hell, the ‘feature’ I’m paying mostly here is ‘having the game appear together other hundreds of games’, it’s neat to have all of them there.

-The other features?
Cloud saving is nice, but in practice 95% time I don’t really use it, with the way I play games.
Forums? As everyone knows the Steam forums themselves aren’t very good, but it’s nice to have the security of having a dedicated forum where you can query technical or gameplay doubts of any game you have.
Achievements? I ignore them.
Steam cards? I actively dislike them.
Linux? family sharing? BPM? Don’t use them.
Regional pricing? Hah I would like for Steam to use regional pricing here in Spain and have cheaper prices, but we are classified as ‘Western Europe’, even if in reality we have much smaller salaries than in USA or Germany :/. Coincidentally the piracy rate is higher here, almost in the same proportion, I wonder why…
Steam Workshop? Ok, integrated user content browsing and downloading is good, it’s one of the few features that I’m positive to, although rarely it’s going to be a deciding factor. The convenience is nice but I won’t complain if I have to download two mods for a website in zip files and modify a .ini file. I work in IT, for me it’s as effortless as breathing.

-So if I’m a cheapskate, I guess the most convenient thing to me is for every game to be in all stores, that way it increases the chance there is a sale somewhere at any given moment, or even the stores compenting between them.

-That said, I’m not against the concept of exclusivities. They are free to do them, the same way people are free to ignore the game if they don’t like the exclusivity. Exclusivity or not, I’m still going to use the same parameters to decide if I buy a game, its quality, the price, the genre, etc. I guess the store’s quality also influence that purchase decision, but that only affects the Windows Store, the rest are imo good enough: they open fast, don’t consume too many resources, download the game without problems, and launching the game is just a click.

-Speaking of this temporal exclusivity Epic is doing with indie games, I suspect the fact most people are not taking in account, it’s how appealing can be for an indie dev to be paid a fixed amount of money, be from a publisher or from a store owner. The moneyhat, in other words.
In case you didn’t know, the amount of revenue generated by the average indie game in Steam has been fallen for the last two years. It’s a so risky business now, even more than it was before, and it always was a risky business from the start lol.
In that business climate, I imagine being paid x amount upfront, even if in exchange they lose in potential total profits, is very appealing right now.
Read this https://www.goldenkronehotel.com/wp/2018/08/26/the-indie-post-apocalypse/
Don’t you think that after reading that, it isn’t so strange?
Mind you, the indies being moneyhatted right now are the bigger, more known devs, in truth that article applies more to new, unkown indies. But it’s my guess is that even the established indies are starting to feel the pressure…

-I suspect this issue with the Epic store and exclusivities is so hot, so discussed in the forums, because people know deep down that it actually can work, they may not use if they can, but the day a favorite game of their is released first on the Epic store, they will fall in line. In a way that’s people are complaining so loudly. If they truly believed they are going to limit themselves to Steam and that’s it, there is no need for this so lengthy discussion, that would be their stance and that’s enough said.
But… remember the MW2 boycott?

It’s so easy to to play the hardass on Internet, seated in your comfy chair, but when push come to shove…

597

It will be fun to see how EPIC reacts once they run into the same problems as Steam.
It’s easy enough to offer what they do atm and for the first wave of devs but I’m curious where they will draw the line because people act like “indie” is a meaningful descriptor.
No offense to anyone who has already a deal with Epic because at this moment in time it might actually bring you more exposure due to the whole nature of it being new and thus in the news but that’s a pretty priviliged group of people and actually a step back to the old publisher/developer dynamic.
Handpicking works for established “indies” but doing so goes very much against the whole concept of indies and it also doesn’t solve what I would call the “indie paradox”.
Every indie wants visibility but if every indie got it then it’d be spread so thin that it’s meaningless and you can’t resolve this problem. There is only so much time anyone can be exposed to a game and thus it comes down to determining who deserves more exposure which opens its own can of worms (and Steam certainly hasn’t solved that one but I’d expect even less so from others and Steam as a plattform is still a 100x times better than for example the android app store).
So yeah Epic is a nice option atm for those devs who are prominently featured on the EPIC store (for the moment) but that’s not a “feature” which will last (and if it does it becomes just another niche store).

e: I’m also curious if Steam will retaliate. One obvious way would be to offer no steam keys for sales through the epic store (which would be fair but another example why “competition” doesn’t neccessarily help the customer).

598

I don’t understand people who complain about Steam lack of curation.

I’ve never seem any of those ‘garbage, clone done with unity assets’ games that they always complain of. And I much prefer that everyone can enter that super small indie like Illwinter not being able to publish their games.
Some months ago, GoG was not allowing the last Zachtronics game in their store, that’s the issue with curation.

Nor I understand the arguments saying discoverability is bad. There are curators, game reviews, game tags, friend lists, wishlists, the discover queue, etc. Just because your game doesn’t have visibility in Steam doesn’t mean there is a problem, that’s working as intended. A game in a store with 10.000 games isn’t going to appear for most people, that’s pure math.

599

There are new instances every day. Every. Day.

600

I am sure of it.

I don’t see them! They don’t appear on my frontpage or on the ‘similar games’ feature.