The reality is that there are way too many games.
And yet, one more should make me happy.
Because enough ain’t the test…
Guess this belongs here.
Galyonkin says that for the Epic Games store and the industry at large, friends and influencers are far more important engines of game discovery than in-store recommendations. At the moment, Epic has a system in place that allows developers to provide influencers with game codes that come with referral links to the game, offering the influencers a cut of a game’s sale when the link is used. By default, the cut is 5%, a number Epic games currently covers, though developers can decrease or, at their own expense, increase that cut. The program is not intended to be a permanent one.
“Right now a significant part of marketing budgets of big games is allocated to pay influencers,” Galyonkin said on Twitter. "Those are one-off deals. I think having a way for influencers to be able to stream any game and make money without relying solely on big publishers would be awesome.
Every time I see this word, I want to punch something.
Technically Tom et. al. are influencers. How many game do people play just because Tom et. al. love/hate it?
Though I kinda agree with you, preferably said influencer. wink wink
We should form a club. That can either be something like a fight club of like-minded individuals, or a Voltronesque truncheon in which to bludgeon our foes. I’ll leave the details up to you.
I think this is a couple things.
- A very novel idea, and accurate as to how discoverability in a crowded market should be handled.
- Younger people go to influencers first for game recommendations, so this is smart
- Giving the influencers a cut is a great way to get them to check out your game
- This is a very devious practice that is now codified in money.
- This will be abused by some influencers, giving a false sense of honest opinion when in fact they are being paid.
What? This is where that VC money is going? Early promotion of games to pull people to the store?
I mean, if you are going to dislodge people from Steam, it is going to take a lot of effort and money. Doing that without poisoning the goodwill if your audience with #ad deals with influencers and exclusivity deals is walking a fine line.
So wait, is it just us old folks now that read reviews?
Fixed
It seems that reading is a bad influence on you.
I think looking at inspirational pictures posted by positive-thinking influencers could be helpful.
It has, unironically, come up at my work a few times. Not from me (I’m tech side, but work closely with business teams), but there have been a few ‘we need to get this into the sales systems tomorrow otherwise we’ll not get them to the athletes/ influencers in time for event X’.
FWIW, selling a game, delivering the file to the customer, checking for fraud, offering multiple payment systems, to every country on the planet, AND earning a profit…
Does not cost 10% of a game.
I know this because I pay about 5% to some services for exactly that, and they have been in business a long time.
When epic suggest its about 7 or 8% worst case, at the scale they have… Thats cheeky.
If steam offered nothing but payment services for 10% that would be a ripoff, and nobody with any experience of the industry would use it.
Remember the times when we were worried about game reviewers/magazines being bought by companies?
In the age of influencers (and yeah I hate that word too) game companies can just outright admit to pretty much buy positive feedback with incentives (bribes) like these.
This it not good for anyone except the parties who will go down this road and it will put “honest” streamers/reviewers under even more financial pressure.
I’m not sure how it goes on Youtube, but on Twitch, most “influencers” seem to be fairly clear on their opinion of sponsored gameplay, e.g. Fallout76 got creamed, ATLAS was loled at, etc.
But otoh, it depends on the goal, e.g. for ATLAS any coverage was good since otherwise no one would have given a crap about it. So I guess that one could be called a success.
Unity blinked.
Sure, but this was also discussed here when Improbable and Epic teamed up to make their indie fund.
I didn’t realize. All of my improbable discussion was done in the other thread.
In the Galyonkin post above, relevant info:
There seems to be an argument here that Epic is not trying to take Steam customers, they’re trying to create customers out of people who don’t currently use Steam. I think we’re not the target audience of this store. Which I guess should be evidenced enough by their focus on “influencers”.