The Epic First Run programme allows developers of any size to claim 100% of revenue if they agree to make their game exclusive on the Epic Games Store for six months.
After the six months are up, the game will revert to the standard Epic Games Store revenue split of 88% for the developer and 12% for Epic Games.
Weren’t they already doing this, and are just making it public with this announcement? So how many months do I have to wait until I can play Valve’s games off of Steam, like on GOG?
It’s almost like Valve invests their 30% cut into more than just CDN bandwidth and exclusivity contracts. They use it to build a compelling platform that people actually want to use.
Say what you will about epic, but this is compelling as hell for Devs. Hopefully this puts more pressure on Steam to reduce their cut. Competition is good.
If you’re so against epic, have a little patience and wait until it comes to steam 6 months later. That’s what I’ll be doing. But don’t just mindlessly shit in epic because you (as a consumer) don’t like their business model intended to attract devs. You can dislike something while also recognising the good in it.
I never truly understood the hate for epic. They’ve made some of the best games of all time, give away 1-2 games for free every single week, and they ensure that most annoying kids are in fortnite and not games that adults want to play. Oh noooo. You have to open a separate launcher to play your video game! The horror!
No review system for games, no return policy, no community tabs or markets, no appear offline mode, they allow shitcoins and nfts on their platform, forcing their launcher onto games they own (Rocket League that launches through Epic but I bought it on Steam), collecting a metric fuckton of user data and input, and finally very close connections with Tencent. Sure i’m missing a bunch more.
One more thing - really annoying how if you click a game in the sidebar it launches it instead of going to the game in your library. It’d be fine to have a smaller launch button in the same space, but having the whole thing do it is not very intuitive.
Yeah, if that launcher is not so suck ass at what it does that I have to resort to Heroic Launcher. Not to mention some of the games on Epic just… weird, like Epic Skyrim doesn’t work with SKSE
My view is that it incentiveses exclusives in the PC space, as opposed to lowering Steam’s charge for their services. My biggest concern for gaming is that we end up just like streaming services. A bunch of exclusives and a marketplace that is such a mess you can barely find what service has what you want.
It’s a fair concern, but I don’t think anything has remained exclusive on epic, they all come to Steam eventually. If that changes and epic starts incentivising permanent exclusivity, then I’ll be upset. But as it is right now, I have no issues with epic.
I know so many people call those situations a “mess”, but I’m still in favor of it: Each potential service option keeps the other in check through competition. I only get to use so many streaming services for so cheap because they’re lowering their prices in a bid to seem more appealing than the others. When it comes to game stores, their unique features (like say, Xbox’s game pass) can make them more compelling.
Granted, 90% of that last argument has just been “Steam has Xfeature, and YStore doesn’t…so I prefer Steam”
I’m not so sure, this seems like a less compelling deal than what Epic was offering before, which didn’t seem to be working out so well for devs.
Before, they were outright paying for exclusivity, offering studios and publishers huge sums of money to make up for the revenue they lose by not being on Steam, and then some. And they often paid for 12+ months of exclusivity. You were guaranteed profitability regardless of whether or not your game actually succeeded.
In order to break even in the new program, your game needs to retain 70% of the customers that would have bought it day 1 on Steam instead. That seems an impossibly high target to hit, given how much Epic has struggled to make EGS succeed even when they were thowing a lot more money around.
I just use Heroic and like 90% of my epic library just works. Admittedly, still won’t spend anything on epic, but then, I like Heroic more than Steam at the moment…
How is it competition when you only have one place to get it? Isn’t that just a monopoly? Sure it’s temporary, but there’s nothing competitive about “buy here or nowhere.”
I don’t think that’s the same thing as a monopoly. Or at the very least it’s not nearly as bad. The presence of Epic on the market has been great for developers, because they can get good deals at epic AND Valve has been forced to reevaluate their prices.
No, he is being downvoted for using the “think of the children” argument. Nobody, is saying anything remote to what he is saying about devs and artists. It is so dumb and so lazy that is hard even trying to start arguing.
Game dev here, please stop licking these dirty boots. 99% of the money goes way up the ladder and into the heads of people with 0 interest in making fun games
God I hate Epic. I hate them with every fiber of my being. The fact that I have to have their crappy, insecure game store bloatware just to try to learn Unreal for personal projects is dumb. Hence why I am learning Unity and Godot.
As a long time Unity user, Unity sucks ass. All of the good things about unity are the things they bought like cinemachine and textmesh pro.
Unity technologies can’t for the life of them make a damn decision and stick with it. As a result, Unity has a decade plus of technical bloat and debt that can never be fully paid because of the need for backwards compatibility.
Oh, I know. I headed a major project which involved usurping the root level of geometry in the Unity engine and injecting massive amounts of data into it and we actually found some major flaws in their underlying logic which only would come up when you hit the levels of throughput that we were dealing with. Getting them to admit to the fault was pulling teeth, but they did fix it once they were confronted live with the issue. So that’s good on them at least. But that aside, the project went well and the tool at the other end is nothing short of incredible. I’d still rather work in Unity than Unreal for most of the types of projects I tend to do.
I played a game for like 2 hours and 30ish minutes, 30 minutes longer than their allowed refund window because I forgot to close it when I went to the bathroom after deciding I didn’t want to keep playing, and my buddy who played with me had like 2 hours and 14 minutes.
They accepted his refund request no problem and denied mine even after I got a supervisor involved.
I will never ever use their service again, they can keep my $70 but they’ll never get another dime. Fuck em and their bribery of game developers.
So, you don’t like Epic because they didn’t offer a refund beyond the refund window? Idk man, I don’t like them for many reasons but this seems a bit off
I don’t like that they inconsistently enforce the 2 hour window. The reasons I don’t like Epic include a lot more than just this one situation, but it sure enforced my opinion of them. I see how you can boil down my anecdote to your version, though.
I mean, he was <15 minutes off the cutoff, you were 30 minutes. It’s not unusual for there to be a little bit of leeway with these things. If you both played exactly like 2:15 and one of you got a refund and the other didn’t then I’d say yeah you’re justified in being outraged, but as it stands… you’re mad because they were did your friend a solid and made an exception and not you; which just seems like a selfish take … be happy either of you got cut a break.
They did more than they said they would, not as much as you wanted them to do.
Don’t forget www.crytek.com is still around too and still making CryEngine (there were some bad years where they were struggling to pay people, but they seem to be in a good place again). Lots of work going on behind the scenes to improve this engine for Crysis 4 and Hunt Showdown from what I understand.
There’s also the (heavily modified at this point) cryengine derived o3de.org.
I think they should double their offer and keep the duration adjustable:
Be one week exclusive, get 100% for two weeks,
Be one month exclusive, get 100% for two months.
Then, it becomes a game for the publisher. Launch on Epic and if there are no transactions, abort after one day. But if there are sales, hold on a bit to pocket the 100%.
Publishers will gamble and stay on Epic a bit longer to get better percentages from the strongest fans but they have to end exclusivity to capture the entire market.
Lure in devs with an unsustainably good deal -> try to lock them in to semi-exclusivity -> use this to pull customers away from valve and other marketplaces -> monopolize the market -> turn around and sell out to shareholders by milking as much money and data as they can from players and developers -> profit
Do you believe there’s a present where Epic’s games’ management could actually have a mindset that there’s a future where Epic games could actually have a monopoly on the video game market?
From our generation, no. We’re all locked in on Steam (and I hope some of you are supporting GOG too).
But the Fortnite generation? Who once they get tired of the game and has been gathering every free game on EGS? Guess what? All their games are in on place! On Epic. Just exactly how steam users are now.
It’s the long long plan and I can see EGS being the Zoomer and (whatever gen is next in line) platform of choice.
I wouldn’t bet money on it but I can see the logic.
Eh if people want to use the epic launcher that’s their choice. I think it’s a worse user experience than steam so even with a bunch of free games idk if that many zoomers would use it exclusively. But maybe you’re right.
I’m much more worried about what happens when Gaben dies and who takes over after him. I can see a future where Epic drops ungodly amounts of money to aquire steam.
Games exclusive to launchers isn’t healthy for the industry, we don’t need more of that right now. I’m a zoomer, granted I am on the older side, and I’m mostly invested in steam since it’s what I ended up accumulating a lot of games on, it’s what was popular at the time I got into PC gaming. I could definitely see that same thing happening for younger people with Epic.
Unless Gabe trains a successor that doesn’t take the company public it’s almost certain gonna go public, get bought out and go through Enshitification.
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