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.
It's pro-publisher and pro-developer. What benefit does this give me as a consumer? I get to have fun watching Bobby Kotick and the other game studio execs buy a sixth yacht? Or are you trying to make an argument for trickle-down economics here?
Maybe I should explain my use of the term “mark”. Because the Epic store has had these pro-developer policies for a while, and has been my go to for purchasing smaller games.
But in my experience the store has been constantly called anti-consumer, by people clearly upset Steam has competition. Hence the use of “mark” a pro wrestling term for over enthusiastic fans.
Epic fans can’t seem to grasp that no one likes exclusivity deals for non first party games, and honestly thanks to MS and Sony even that paradigm is changing, trying to force them to use a sub par service and that people who like Steam also like GoG, green man games, humble bundle just fine and welcome actual competition without the exclusivity bullshit.
Hell even the recent case of Activision/MS the merger was even hinged as CoD potentially becomes a exclusive and calling that anti-consumer, for good reason, because exclusivity of third party titles is anti-consumer.
There we go with the exclusivity deals. That’s the maypole the G*mers dance around this time. Heaven forbid you guys have to wait for 6 months for a random indy game you’ve never heard of. It’s a bloody online storefront, you can use both on the same PC. But marks like you love to bring in the tribalism.
The fact you would even consider comparing this the Microsoft merger is insanity. Two completely different situations.
As for exclusivity of third party titles. I wouldn’t call my local record store anti-consumer because it’s 8-track selection was lacking, or my local 2nd hand game store because it doesn’t carry n-gage titles.
This isn’t like when your parents bought you the wrong console, you have the choice to use both.which is a lot more then what we had previously.
Pro-publisher and pro-developer do not equal pro-consumer. In fact, Epic has never minced words that consumers are not their primary goal. "Developers will decide the game store wars, not consumers", remember? Tim Sweeney aaid that to justify not improving his store. I don't know about you, but in my view if Epic does not value my experience as a customer then I simply won't value them as a company. Is that not fair?
If you’re running a platform based on selling games, you need games to sell. So of course developers are the target, that’s been true since the first consoles were released. It’s why Nintendo lost ground with the N64, why the PSP failed, why the Dreamcast failed.
That's not what Tim Sweeney was saying, he was saying they didn't need to improve EGS to woo customers because developers would leave Steam for Epic to get the smaller cut anyway. No gaming platform thinks catering publishers and developers should actually outweigh the needs of their customers, or if they did they certainly would never say it out loud lol.
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.
So is it just me or does every game that becomes a epic exclusive never do as well as they should. i think most game developers realize this, which is why epic is desperate to get developers on their failing launcher. maybe they should try offering all the things steam does. regardless i cant switch because i own too many games on steam, im locked in.
It’s because PC gamers overwhelmingly will just ignore the game until it comes to steam, but by the time it comes to steam it’s been 6 months - 1 year and all the hype around the game has died.
People have been voting with their wallets and not rewarding anti-competitive behavior for once
EGS is a platform, Steam is a platform. They are both stores and their own ecosystems.
They are paying for forced exclusives to their platform. I’m not going to use a different platform even on my same device because it’s anti-competitive for pc gaming.
You aren’t going to promote competition because it’s anti competitive
If a game was offered on both platforms do you think people are more likely to get it on Epic than Steam? If not then they have to be exclusive to their store
That’s not my problem. That’s still being anti-competitive. If one platform is significantly better (eg steam) then the competition needs to offer a reason to buy from them. The problem is that EGS has decided that the only way to give users a reason to use their store has been to make sure the game isn’t available anywhere else.
The users are able to make the choice to not support poor business tactics and they have. People do not buy from EGS, due to a plethora of reasons, one of which is likely that they are extremely anti-competitive and buy out games.
You aren’t going to promote competition because it’s anti competitive
A store doesn’t have the right to my business just because it exists. If I started a PC game store and charged twice as much as Steam or Epic would you purchase from me just to support competition?
A business needs to give me a reason to purchase from them. If the best reason to purchase from Epic is to give them a participation award then no thank you.
it’s not. choosing to buy on steam because it’s a better experience to you than egs is exactly the result we want from competition. they competed for your favor, steam won, and egs lost. personally, sometimes i buy on gog because i like its features better, especially the offline installer and lack of drm, but even if steam won all rounds that would still be competition, they’re just good at it.
anti-competitive measures are the ones that try to abuse an existing market position to take that choice away from you and force you to go one way or another. if you really wanted a grasp on valve, you could argue for example that the steamdeck is anti-competitive on the market of game stores, because it makes using competing game stores inconvenient (even though you absolutely can do it, i have played uplay games on my steamdeck, and could probably easily install egs as well, i just don’t have any reason to try). exclusivity is also a very clear-cut anti-competitive measure, because it just cleanly takes choice away from the end user and forces them to go with a specific launcher, or worse, specific hardware in some cases. but just being better than everyone, or as a consumer choosing to go with the best option is not anti-competitive, it’s just winning the competition
thats what i was hinting at. and im not totally happy about epic ruining launches over trying to be a replacement for a, in my opinion, much better system which offers much more ever if they developers don’t use all the features. i do wish steam would add a lower tier which takes less of the profit from indie developers that hardly use any of these features.
Its is buying a new platform, rather than have my games in 1 platform, they would be in 2. also steam offers much more (at a greater cost to developers) then epic. i also only use linux, which is a not hard at all with steam.
i hope you realize the only reason you can actually game on linux is because valve decided microsoft has to not have a monopoly, because they got spooked by the windows store. i tried gaming on linux in the pre-proton days, it was a hot mess, the advent of proton and dxvk was a massive jump in terms of compatibility. and nowadays valve is ensuring that people do in fact give a shit about proton with the steamdeck, its 1.5-2 million users give a pretty strong reason for devs to keep their games compatible, and anything that runs on a steamdeck runs on linux in general as well.
it doesn’t matter whether you run non-steam games through lutris or heroic, you’re still running on the translation layers built by valve to keep linux gaming viable
I buy from valve mostly for the Linux bit… they’ve played a major role in lifting the Linux desktop graphics drivers to the point where they’re actually not just usable but good.
I’ll avoid games on Steam as much as I can to foster competition
Cool. I’m going to open my own store that costs twice as much as Steam and has none of the features. I’ll let you know when it’s ready so you can purchase from me in order to “foster competition”.
the reason for that is because steam isn’t just a launcher. if you don’t use steam you might think so, because giving you a play button, managing downloads, and maybe tracking achievements is all other platforms do. steam, on the other hand, is an entire toolkit built to simplify everything in gaming – whether what you seek is community spaces, a workshop to easily install mods and other community content, one-click linux compatibility, in-home streaming, easy game invites and in-game chat with your friends, or a plethora of other features, buying on steam vs non-steam is usually a massive difference.
i bought gta v on disk back when it released, as opposed to my friends who only joined a few years later and had the bandwidth to just buy the steam version and download it, and whenever we played together they just had so much of an easier experience.
the reason steam’s user base is so loyal is because steam provides things that actually matter to them, and valve spent decades ensuring that they provide the best damn experience possible. epic games, on the other hand, had one surprise success with fortnite, and decided they want the game store market to turn it into a long-term revenue stream, but what they forgot to consider is to give people the same experience steam provides. egs has a fundamentally selfish design, it literally only caters to epic and only does the bare minimum for anyone else.
so if your proposition is that people should ditch that platform that goes out of its way to provide for them and instead be content with the bare minimum because the company behind that platform is evil because checks notes it’s too popular and makes it hard for other corporations to act as middlemen and collect the game store tax themselves instead, i don’t think you’ll be able to convince too many people.
I had a few games on Impulse but my account vanished when it got sold to Gamestop so I can understand people being worried about buying games on other platforms. One reason I like GoG due to offline installers
The problem is that none of these other launchers offer features like Steam Input, Proton, or the Workshop. Steam competes by making their platform the most attractive to customers. EGS competes by making their platform the most attractive to publishers. At the end of the day though, the publishers have to go where the customers are.
It spent it’s early access there but it was definitely talked about at least in the places I lurked. It’s Supergiant games tho, they do nothing but bangers.
Kingdom Hearts was a double whammy of poor decision making on Squeenix’s part. Not only did they launch on EGS, where most PC players aren’t going to care about it, they launched it at an absurd price. They were selling the HD collection for $50 when you could walk over to GameStop or Target and get the PS4 version for $20.
I 100000% believe your comment on the pre-existing library is why they give free games away weekly. They want you to build a library that you then won’t want to move from which is exactly why I too don’t like being forced to buy things on another game store. I don’t like exclusives no matter where they are, it’s anticompetitive bullshit.
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.
“Let us offer you 100% of the money from a marketplace 0.0001% as large! Did we mention you get all the money that neither of us are making? We will throw in all the good will with gamers we’ve earned too.”
If the game is in demand, people will go there if it’s the only option. It’s not a great option for some obscure indie game, but it is for mid-budget projects that have already gotten interest.
I feel like zero fees vs 30% fees is a pretty big difference. But you have to be able to sell at least enough to make up for the difference either way. It also very well could just attract devs who think they’re going to sell more than they will.
Well 0% fee for a store that has zero added features vs 30% for a launcher with cloud saves, overlay, online couch play, tradeable in-game items, gifting, community, profiles, wishlist, notifications, etc.
Someone has to pay for the server time and storage.
Call me old fashioned, but I don’t play a game for the trading cards. I also don’t hang out there, I have used Discord for years. Overlay is less important now that I have 2 monitors. I just want a game on my computer that updates itself so it’s ready when I want to play it, and then gets out of the way.
Gifting and a better cart experience I definitely agree with, those are so much better. But not 30 percent better.
As far as the user base, it may be changing. There are 132 million active steam users vs 230 million epic pc users. Though I imagine the number that actually buys software is strongly in Steams favor, as they are going to be older and more used to spending where I suspect you see a lot of F2P players in epic. Does that demographic start changing as they age out of fortnight? Hard to say. Don’t have any stats on that though, just guessing.
Steam Workshop, communities, screenshot and video sharing, pretty solid game searching, game awards, reviews, streaming, guides, achievements - just what I remembered.
Yes, there are people who so not use any of those features. Yes, there are people like you who don’t care about trading / cards / anything but the game and updates.
So when you start comparing just that a launcher can launch a game and keep it up to dáte - these two launchers are identical. When you add the store to it, then it’s in Epics favor. But as soon as you start comparing them as a whole, it’s clear Steam has a lead.
Why did people ditch IRC in favor of Skype? They both had chat. TeamSpeak in favor of Discord? They both had voice calling.
It’s about the UX as a whole. Some people might not use Steam Workshop ever, but then one day it comes on handy.
Also, fuck Epic exclusivity deals. They are as anti consumer as it can be, without really giving anything in return. They literally P2W’d the game market. Or at least tried to. Last straw, Epic is partially owned by Tencent, a Chinese money hungry game company that’s not ashamed to put P2W features in games.
I don’t really give a crap what you think of linux users. But it’s not true that “no percent” uses it. Seems a little ironic that you say “nobody uses it” on one hand and also complain about the number of people who talk about it…
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?
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.
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
Elite Dangerous was their free game for the month awhile back. I made extra accounts and snagged free copies for people that wanted to try it, because I adore that game and love having people to fly with.
You know, oddly enough, no one wants it, even for free, expressly because they don’t want to deal with the dog’s anus EGS launcher.
This is said a lot but… Is it really? And if so why should I, the customer, care?
I can’t think of any other good or service in my life that I would go out of my way to buy from an alternative store so that the manufacturer makes more money. I don’t choose between Aldi and Whole Foods based on whether the manufacturer of my chicken bullion cubes makes more margin with one or the other. It’s just fuckin weird.
My biggest complaint about E:D is that star citizen’s flight mechanics and ship design ruined the game for me. Star Citizen has a wider variety of ship designs than E:D. Additionally, the ships I’ve tried in SC are incredibly responsive, to the point where even the nimblest E:D ship feels like a whale. However, that’s about all I can say for star citizen. I mean, it’s getting there, slowly but I swear to god the world is going to end before they finish the fucking game.
Meanwhile, E:D is very much a complete game in a massive galaxy. Sure, it may not have as much detail as CIG is trying to put into star citizen, sure it may not have the complexity of star citizen, but that doesn’t matter if you can’t finish your game. However, E:D’s ships suck.
Can we take star citizen’s good half and E:D’s good half and make one complete game please?
I claim every epic game through the website, but I actually haven’t bothered installing the epic launcher since I did a fresh install of my OS months back. I’ve got other non steam launchers like GOG installed. So yeah, I’ll take the free game, but I don’t feel like spending money on the epic store even if it were more heavily discounted.
I will never get this sentiment. It’s a fucking game launcher, it downloads the games quickly and launches them. I just don’t get this hate boner people have for it.
I played Red Dead 2 and Control through it and had absolutely zero problems. You all just want a steam monopoly for whatever gods forsaken reason.
Their checkout still doesn’t have a cart, it takes forever to load, the UI is terribly clunky, the library sorting is terrible (how do you fuck this up), it’s resource heavy, and I’d be willing to overlook all that oof they had an in game overlay with web browser.
Aside from the terrible experience, they have profit seeking investors, one of which is Tencent. We all have seen were it goes when profits are priority over consumers.
Not a hate boner. Just genuine dislike of the platform as it stands right now.
I bought Tetris Effect on it back when that game seemed to take every single exclusive offer before finally landing on steam (PS4, then Epic then Gamepass/Xbox THEN Steam) man that’s annoying. Prior I picked up Rebel Galaxy Outlaw on the cheap cheap thanks to a coupon but later got a Steam copy through a bundle.
I don’t remember when they added the cart but it’s there. I can see it right now. It works. At least when adding 2 free games at once.
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.
i doubt it’s a hate boner tbh, it just needs to be communicated that way if he wants the slightest chance of success here. their real game is that they saw the 30% cut steam makes from most games and decided it’s free real estate, that it is the way they’ll keep themselves rich after fortnite’s hype cycle runs out. the problem is, they haven’t put in the decade of work to everything gamers want that would justify that cut – it’s actually exceedingly hard to beat steam in their own game, so instead epic tries to breed hatred for steam to take their cut through duplicitous marketing as opposed to genuinely just outcompeting them.
i’m not defending tim sweeney here (in fact i’m calling him a lying fuck), but i think he’s just a lying fuck, not a hater. the hate is just a marketing strategy. but who knows, maybe he got in his own head and started actually hating valve after he couldn’t beat them this way
This is a fair point, Valve has earned that 30% cut imo, the amount of stuff they offer to devs is pretty impressive, meanwhile Epic is still playing catch-up. I guess they’re still trying to establish a good user base that they can point to as consistent income outside of Fortnite, and this is an option they’re going for.
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.
Add comment