Going through the aforementioned podcast with Galyonkin and a bunch of really interesting tidbits came up already.
EGS will not focus on discovery like Valve. Instead, they will have a curated front page like the App Store. The primary way of "discovering" games will be developers giving out keys to streamers through EGS. Streamers of course are inventivized to "sell" games because they can get a cut of the sale.
You will also eventually be able to follow games and get notifications about big updates and such, which may help get visibility to your game.
Cloud saves coming around February.
By the end of 2019, EGS will open to self-publishing.
EGS will give developers as much info on players as is legally possible. He mentioned something about being able to see what other games consumers are playing. I'm not sure this would be allowed by default under GDPR however.
This data will not be publicly available. There will be an API that can be scraped to facilitate a potential "Epic Spy" but they will not offer that service themselves.
The launch build of games are tested for playability.
A little hazy on this part, but, from what I understood, EGS is currently also doing off-site marketing for the games that are on their store. I don't recall if that's just for exclusives. Don't believe they said anything about that once the store goes open for self publishing.
No massive seasonal sale events like on Steam. This is said to kill sales for games that don't do a discount in that period as well as for new games. Instead, games on sale will be featured alongside the regular stuff.
Another interesting thing from the podcast is that they had the dev from Hello Neighbor on, who basically said that Steam made up the smallest share of the sales (of the first Hello Neighbor game anyway). Most were from direct sales on their website. And when they gave out Steam keys, they got bombarded with questions on what to do with them. So there are a multitude of considerations intersecting here when making a choice on where to put your game, including whether your game has historically done well on the Steam storefront at all.
Listening to the 2nd half of the podcast. There's a lot to unpack there.
About interacting with influencers, sending keys, referral cuts.
Currently 5% cut for influencers by default (paid for by Epic), can change this as high as 100%. You can set it at 0% as well, but at the moment 5% will in any case be covered by Epic.
After a while, Galyonkin expects market standards to develop, e.g. for indies a 20% cut but for larger publisher backed games 5%. I thought this was kinda odd for him to say since indies need the larger share and it'd make more sense for 5% for indies at most. I guess this isn't supposed to be the lion's share of sales, but still. If a streamer manages to refer a 100 sales, great, but the dev loses 32% of the sale right there (12% + 20%), that's quite much. If this becomes popular and will be implemented on Steam, that's half of your revenue just outright gone. 55% even for Unreal Engine games.
Developer can automatically give out keys to groups of influencers. It isn't really clear if this was referring to specific sub-groups of influencers or broader groups like podcasters, youtubers, twitch, bloggers, press, etc.
There are different filters for influencers and press. The press won't get a commercial link. Influencers get a filter that indicates whether they are "verified" or not.
Unverified influences are all who applied to this program and went through a rudimentary check. They check that this person is indeed who they are presenting themselves as and whether they have a channel.
After a certain amount of referred sales, verified influencers are checked a second time. To check that everything is normal in terms of their content and other issues.
Together with the copy of the game that devs send to influencers they can include a short text what kind of game it is, links to guides, asset packs.
This was an interesting point: Epic doesn't want to give devs the ability to contact individual influencers, because influencers don't like it when they're bombarded constantly with personal emails. All they want from developers is that they're given the game and they'll play it. If devs want to contact them personally, they'll have to do that through other channels.
They also plan to implement something like subscriptions to influencers.
Final info dump from ep. 234 of the podcast with Galyonkin. I started writing in a more abbreviated way eventually. Hopefully it's still understandable. Inaccuracy/misinterpretation is possible -- apologies in advance if so. Where the answer was vague, I usually tried to indicate it as such.
Developer created promo codes for discounts/bonuses will eventually be possible.
Their in-app purchase policy is not yet fully finalized. Epic will most likely also take a cut. Galyonkin was not able to give a final answer on that.
Discovery will mainly take place outside of the store. Galyonkin draws parallels to a book store or theater, where you usually know what you're going to buy/attend before going there rather than look through what's available. Primarily new/featured releases are shown on the storefront.
There will be a news feed where you can follow games, developers, influencers. This sounds like it will be their second big pillar for discovery.
He said that _currently_ you won't be able to append your own launcher that will be launched from the EGS app, but this may change in the future. Given how Ubisoft handles its games on Steam and that The Division 2 is launching on EGS, I assume they've already made a change on this stance since this podcast's release.
It will be possible to generate keys like on Steam. They will not charge the 12% for those keys. Doesn't recommend it since other marketplaces typically charge a higher cut.
Games sold also on other storefronts probably will not be allowed to have a lower base price there. Differing sales of course are fine.
On exclusives. They pay for timed exclusives on PC. Mainly to finish financing ports or to assuage fears of the game not doing well on this new platform. Works like a minimal guarantee of sales and get money in advance.
It's not planned that the 12% cut will get higher. It might get lower, however, if they will be able to cut a better deal over time with payment processing companies -- but this won't happen any time soon.
Achievements will be there by the end of 2019. Reviews will also come eventually. No forums, no guides, no paid mods. Developer/publisher pages will also be implemented.
It will eventually be possible to launch non-Epic games through the launcher. You can pull in friends lists from Steam Galyonkin said. Importing games directly from other platforms, like GOG does, will not be done. He doesn't see the advantage of it.
Social features will be introduced, but it'll be somewhat different from Steam's. Couldn't give details yet.
Customer reviews are opt-in. Will have mechanisms to prevent review bombs. Expects that without review bombing, all developers will want to put reviews on their page. I don't think that's the case, since many of dev's complaints about reviews that I've read are about people not understanding games, using reviews as a faster support ticket, inappropriate content, and so forth. Review bombs are an issue, but not for the vast majority of games. These other issues are more commonplace.
Download speed limits will be possible.
The influencer/creator program will be their approach to Steam's curators.
Responding to complaints about EGS being focused on developers to the detriment of consumers (e.g. no forums, achievements, other consumer-facing features): initial focus was indeed on developers, the consumer focused featured are being worked on, they will have free games every two weeks for the entirety of 2019 (28 games total). Features for consumers will be introduced gradually. Concedes that even stuff on the backend for developers isn't fully finalized yet either.
Wants to have more social media integration. Currently already possible to connect Facebook, Vk, Steam, Twitch, PS, Switch, Xbox, and Google accounts.
Suggested regional prices are indicated for developers. Limited support currently. Shown as a %age discount rather than the adjusted number in the local currency, so developers have a better gauge on how much cheaper their game is sold for in lower income regions.
It will be possible to follow unreleased games.
"Cards" not planned. Considers it to have an undesirable effect on purchasing decisions, e.g. buying games you don't really want for the cards. Other collectibles, skins, or stuff like that will be possible. Not necessarily tradeable.
They're happy with the look of the store as it is now with its big tiles. Eventually things like categories will be introduced but in broad strokes this is how it'll look.
News feed will contain friends' activities. Not yet sure what activities exactly will shown there.
How they got Journey. They cut a deal with Sony. Paid for it by the sound of it. RIP dreams of a Steam version, I guess. Fair game since it seems to have been organized/funded by Epic though.
User profiles are planned for the beginning of "next year" he says, but I'm unsure whether he meant early 2019 or 2020.
Discusses different ways to address reviews and review bombing. A pop-up asking a player to review a game after closing it -- from what I understood the idea is that only a certain subset of players will then get to review it, it isn't something everyone can do at any time. Another option he mentioned was only allowing/showing reviews of people who have recently played the game. Instead of like/dislike system a numeral system, which is monitored and an algorithm removes the extremes -- this is a reference to a similar system implemented on some other website/service that I'm not familiar with. They're still figuring out how to best approach it. Galyonkin personally likes the post game pop-up idea.
To be clear: those are two different options they've thought of. Either or. In any case, it's still all a work in progress. Galyonkin was just airing different approaches they've considered. If you read on, he says that devs will have no moderation powers over reviews.
Developers will not be able to directly moderate reviews. They can flag them for review by Epic.
No plans for blockchain tech!
Currently, all regions get the same build of the game. So if you purchase a game in Russia, for example, it won't be that it only has Russian language in-game (as is apparently the case for some Ubisoft games). If this is requested by developers, it can be changed. (This response came up a lot by the way -- basically, if devs want a feature, it seems Epic is willing to do their best to implement it for them by launch)
No plans to get into the hardware business.
(In response to a question about this) Galyonkin is considering login using Steam account. Says why not. Will discuss it internally.
About price errors: if a user buys a game on the cheap through a price error and it's Epic's fault, they won't revoke the purchase. If it's a devs fault, it's up to them.
Aaaaand that's it. I don't think I'll do the same for the other podcast episodes. This took quite some time :')