Epic Games Store - 88% split goes to devs

Story prompt: Some guy used your email to open a bank account. You’re curious and you decide to login. You see a balance of $445,564,343 with a transfer from the Bank of Cyprus.

Yeah you need to do better machine learning/data mining to go beyond that. I don’t know if Steam deploys those kinds of algorithms.

Much of Steam right there.

As was said earlier:

I’m sure we’ve all got legitimate gripes about Steam and how Valve handles certain aspects but calling them lazy is just a bad argument.

Lazy or intentional, it doesn’t matter. The Steam search and labels are not sufficient, as many of us rely on external sites to dig through the pile. Although I very much value Steam as an end-user, they have a lot of room for improvement. If you don’t believe me, just Google ‘steam criticism’ and notice that some of the items were mentioned years ago, but are still unfixed/unresolved, particularly from a dev/indie studio perspective.

Also, exclusivity is not evil. If you feel otherwise, I suspect you don’t work in gaming and don’t understand the costs of business and turning a profit in the industry.

sry that was poorly worded. I meant that Steam could refuse to feature (offer steam keys) for games that were on the epic store even after their exclusivity there runs out and they get sold at other stores.

You’ve kind of gone over the deep in trying to compare this to politics. If you can’t see the difference between Epic opening a store and trying the exclusive model and getting push-back for it and decisions of the leader of a country…

That was an extreme example for illustrative purposes.

I did just that. Some links: Maybe the real problem with Steam is that we’re all too reliant on Steam - Polygon, Valve is not your friend, and Steam is not healthy for gaming - Polygon

I have to admit that I’m more open to the notion that we should have multiple stores after reading/watching that. I still don’t like the notion of exclusives, but I’m more aware now that Valve has been abusing their power, as any monopoly tends to do…

I guess I’ll stick with restricting my purchases to GOG as much as I can. It’s small and has the only philosophy I can wholeheartedly support.

You think so huh? You don’t think Target and Wal-mart and Fred Meyer sell literally the same thing? You think the Tide I get from one store is not found at the other?

They have some exclusives but the customer bases often differ for different reasons.

I have 3 or 4 appstores I use on Android. Google, Amazon, Humble…

How is this Epics fault? Why not blame Valve for demonstrating how lucrative digital distribution is?

So like Steamworks integration, but it magically doesn’t make your game exclusive to Steam! Amazing!

OK this is really, really good. Had they opened with this, I would have been much more receptive to their store as well. And I honestly don’t think they need exclusivity – if they provide good services, they will get user support.

I do wonder how they can offer these things for free, though. Sure, the costs don’t go up by that much per game, but they do go up. Are they assuming the Fortnite cash cow will go on forever?

Exactly this. Plus they’re letting of almost any garbage on to the store has really dilluted it’s value to me as a customer. I buy more games on Fanatical, for example, than I do on Steam directly.

Yeah, it’s shocking how little I buy directly through Steam anymore. Almost always buying from Humble or GMG or Fantatical, etc.

There we go, now those are some fine features.

Yes, this absolutely should’ve been part of their opening salvo.

I know you like to completely discount people who work in certain fields like we don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground, but yes, all the retailers you mention have many brands specific to their store used to create and maintain their clientele.

That you specifically picked one of the name brands to make your point instead of Up & Up, the Target in-store brand of laundry detergent shows how disingenuous you are when involved in these discussions.

I’m out.

I don’t know what industry you’re in, but coming from someone who says something like for people who never leave home and using references like real world, I don’t think you have a leg to stand on when it comes to polite discourse.

What I am pointing out is people choose to shop at certain stores for reasons that don’t have to do exclusivity. There are service differences, experience differences and the store brands are often selling the same thing under a slightly different package. Up and Up isn’t even that old of a brand. They use to call it something else, but I found it doubtful people are shopping Target because all the want is the Up and Up brand. Costco on the other hand has a very high return on their Kirkland brand and there’s a membership fee for them, but again I think it’s ridiculous to claim people are not only shopping at Costco but paying for the right to shop at Costco due to their exclusives. That would be more akin to boutique shopping.