Epic Games Store - 88% split goes to devs

I’m pretty sure you’re talking about operating profit and so am I. Operating profit is “a profit from business operations (gross profit less operating expenses) before deduction of interest and taxes”. 5% op profit is really low. My business aims for 30%. If you’d rather make it net profit after interest and taxes, I think 5% is still low but more acceptable.

Businesses absolutely can and do make decisions based on op profit, so either I’m not understanding what they mean by the 5% figure or we’re talking past each other. MasterCard manages a 50% operating profit, so I don’t think they’re calculating it the same way retail does.

Of course businesses make decisions based on profit and expected profit. Another poster doubted this, not me. ;)

Let’s shift the perspective around. Maybe you understand me better that way. Such a digital store is no wholesale business. It’s not the classic “buy big boxes, sell small units” model. Once their store is up and running, their operating costs are close to zero because they don’t have to buy product. Product and the variable costs are only created when the customer clicks on “buy”. They spend ca. 7% of the incoming money to pay their bills, and a significant part of their costs are only caused at the time of sale, for example the 2% for the credit card company. The taxes are simply passed through and the publisher share is also simply passed on.
So it comes down to this: Epic spends 7% to get 12%. I’ve had a couple of beers, but the 5% they make are hopefully a margin of 71.4%. Such a margin on a 99.99+% automated business is quite healthy, especially if you get the money immediately and with 100% certainty.

I see your point, although I’m not sure you get to remove the payment to the dev from the calculation. Either way, I do agree that it should be a stable income stream one they’re established. That may very well be more important than margins however they’re calculated.

Well there it is.gif

“These exclusives don’t come to stores for free; they’re a result of some combination of marketing commitments, development funding, or revenue guarantees. This all helps developers.”

Revenue guarantees, if you’re not familiar with the term, simply mean Epic will promise that a game sold on its store will generate a certain amount of income for a developer. If the game fails to meet that threshold, Epic will find a way to make up the difference.

D’uh, right?

That thread is interesting. 28K upvotes, so many that it prompted Tim Sweeney to post.

I am glad at least about this:

Re Epic Games store: Epic does not share user data with Tencent or any other company. We don’t share it, sell it, or broker access to it for advertising like so many other companies do.

I’m the founder and controlling shareholder of Epic and would never allow this to happen.

The language related to sharing data with the parent companies refers to Epic Games Inc. It’s a US-based company. This language exists because when you buy an Epic game in certain territories (like Europe), the seller of record is our local (e.g. European) subsidiary company for tax purposes, but the data is ultimately stored by Epic Games Inc.

Tencent is not a parent company of Epic. Tencent is an independent company that’s a minority investor in Epic, alongside many others. However they do not have any sort of access to our customer data.

The other language around data in the EULA generally exists to cover the cases where we use third party service providers as part of operating our online services. For example, our game servers and databases are hosted on Amazon Web Services. However these third parties do not have the right to use or access Epic customer data in any way except for providing that service.

Impressive numbers.

Perhaps someone there should call Chris Roberts and teach him a thing or 2.

Working game, large revenues.

Honestly, it’s not the best example. We’re talking about a failing game that changed direction by copying a winning formula and happened to win the lottery. It’s a black swan.

Even more feature creep, a Battle Royale mode!

I heard it was going to be in DerpSpace, so why not Star Citizen also!

A battle royale with a $4000 buy in sounds like exactly the kind of thing Chris Roberts would pursue. But I’m of the opinion Star Citizen is more money laundering scheme than game right now.

Next free game is… What Remains of Edith Finch

Of course I just bought it during the winter sale. :|

Very cool. I played a lot of Subnautica this weekend. Really loving their free games so far. Super Meat Boy is still too hard for me. Bring on Edith Finch!

You could refund it if you didn’t play it much yet.
I do not know if the 2 hour window applies because the game is about 2 hours long.
It is a very interesting, somewhat inventive experience though.

I’ll keep my order, as I prefer having it on Steam, such is life. ;)
It was in a sale bundle of 3 games with Donut County and Gorogoa, which are both also very good.

Really didn’t see this coming:

I guess if they decided they needed to sell their games outside UPlay due to limited reach or whatever, Epic Store probably offers the best deal.

I wonder how many steam users who planned on buying the game and still plan on playing after this news will get it on Uplay instead of Epic store.

I know that I would, since I already have a bunch of Uplay titles from Steam purchases, so decision is already made for me.

Getting it on Uplay instead of the Epic Games store is a non-brainer, especially with Fanatical’s 12% sales offer:

https://www.fanatical.com/en/bundle/tom-clancy-s-the-division-2

Most likely purchasing on the Epic Store just provides a uPlay key anyway.