News Epic Games Store

Ascheroth

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This once again confirms my suspicions that exclusivity is Epic's long term goal to "beat" Steam. I can only hope that EGS doesn't become successful in the next few years, or it's very likely that Paradox (and who knows what other publishers) accept Epic's bribe money after all.
I wouldn't be worried. By all metrics we have, the wider PC market has already rejected their approach.
 

Ge0force

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love how in reality this resulted only in Surviving the Aftermath Early Access egsclusivity :face-with-tears-of-joy:
For now. It's very likely that Paradox rejected the deal because sales weren't too hot on EGS. If that ever changes, I can see several publishers jump in, especially the ones that are buddies with Epic already like Deep Silver and Saber.
I wouldn't be worried. By all metrics we have, the wider PC market has already rejected their approach.
Again, for now. We don't know if Epic's free games strategy actually works long term or not. Based on comments on Reddit, social media and forums, most pc gamers are rejecting Epic because they want their games on Steam and not because they dislike Epic's strategy.
 
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TioChuck

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I would not worry about Epic, even if they moneyhat all the big games for the next 10 years, they already failed with EGS, they could not break trough during the pandemic or free big games like GTAV, or with Borderlands 3 exclusivity or with highly popular meme games like the goose game or bugsnax, EGS already peaked, it is what it is, its all downhill once the free games and/or exclusivity stops.

But lets be real here for a sec, the store is not Sweeney's master plan, was just a means to an end, its was just to use as an example to bitch about app stores on court.

Sweeney wants to be the overlord of the "metaverse", and don't want to share the profits with no one.
 

gabbo

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OK the response is 2 years old now but you would think they would have made some changes by now.
I didn't realize it still applied or that it was almost solely from epics end. I would have thought they'd have some kind of dev facing UI. It's almost like a 3d game engine isn't meant for backend UI/UX use. Huh, who'd have thought. It would be cool if the dev tools re all done in First person as a UE map though.

YES. Please let this explode in popularity
 

gabbo

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i would unironically actually play it (i'd probably still hate it ... and i don't really play multiplayer in general ... but i would absolutely play this one)
I hate multiplayer with people I dont know, unless it's straight DM, but i;d try this out just to spite Epic.

iirc i even remember bunch of devs praising it as they didnt have to really setup things themselves so "qin"
Yes, leave your game's store page in the hands of the store. What could possibly go wrong?
 

SteveWinwood

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Jan 28, 2019
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I wouldn't be so sure about the first point. Epic is in this for the long haul for better or worse.

The second point is absolutely correct though.
I thought we saw their "winding down" strategy if things got bad enough from the court case, and things were already going worse than their worst case scenario, and they were doing even less than the winding down plan called for... How many games have been announced as exclusive this year?

But I also have a bad memory so I could just be making that up.
 
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Arc

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I thought we saw their "winding down" strategy if things got bad enough from the court case, and things were already going worse than their worst case scenario, and they were doing even less than the winding down plan called for... How many games have been announced as exclusive this year?

But I also have a bad memory so I could just be making that up.
That document discussing the aggressive and winding down models is nearly two years old and probably isn't representative of where Epic's plans are today. Back in February, Epic said they would have more exclusives in the next two years than the past two years combined. I don't think that's come to fruition yet, but they might be referring to their first party games. One of the executives testified during the Apple trial they have 14 first party published games in development right now.

I'm fine with first party exclusives since Epic is taking on all risk and creating something that wouldn't have existed in the first place. The only downside is they will be lifetime exclusives on EGS, but at that point I'll either rent it on console or pirate it.
 

Alexandros

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Nov 4, 2018
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Epic lost in the short term and it will lose in the long term. I proclaimed my faith in the PC community right from the start and it did pull through. The more likely long-term scenario isn't that Epic somehow succeeds with its bullshit, it's that another game turns up and steals Fortnite's lunch and then Timmy kills all investment in EGS. Or that Epic does an IPO and the board kills all investment in EGS once they have to answer to shareholders.
 

beep boop

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I think it’s more likely it’ll indefinitely pursue a loss leader strategy and manage to prop it up via investment rounds, as it goes in contemporary tech and the inviable businesses artificially kept alive via big donors.
 

Arc

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Apparently EGS is at 15% market share? Of course Tim said the same thing back in June 2020 so who knows at this point.

Also the more I think about FF7 Remake, the more I dislike it. I enjoyed the nostalgic callbacks and liked the combat system, but couldn't stand everything else. I get that it's trying to be a pseudo sequel which is an interesting premise, but the fact SE will drag their feet for a decade finishing it made me no longer care.
 
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How does he calculate that 15% ? (Can we actually get that number when in practice you can use any of those "stores" if you want to?).
 

TioChuck

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I really want to know how this market share calculation goes, because all the launchers work in parallel,he's saying that Steam reach 80% of all PC players and EGS 15%? Because this seems reasanable, but going by some indie devs numbers out there, EGS numbers are probably 95% Fortnite players and nothing else.
 

Mor

Me llamo Willy y no hice la mili, pero vendo Chili
Sep 7, 2018
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Apparently EGS is at 15% market share? Of course Tim said the same thing back in June 2020 so who knows at this point.

Also the more I think about FF7 Remake, the more I dislike it. I enjoyed the nostalgic callbacks and liked the combat system, but couldn't stand everything else. I get that it's trying to be a pseudo sequel which is an interesting premise, but the fact SE will drag their feet for a decade finishing it made me no longer care.
Highly doubt their MAU sinks and all the sudden it gains market share.
 

prudis

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How does he calculate that 15% ? (Can we actually get that number when in practice you can use any of those "stores" if you want to?).
iirc he always uses the same market analysis firm ... the one he occassionally blaims at being super undreliable but more often than not uses its numbers
... cant remember the name now though :-/
 

ExistentialThought

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iirc he always uses the same market analysis firm ... the one he occassionally blaims at being super undreliable but more often than not uses its numbers
... cant remember the name now though :-/
I pretty sure that was SuperData Research, which was just shut down this year.

Their data on Steam and Steam sales were all over the place since they had even less insight than SteamSpy.
 

thekeats1999

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I may be being dense here. But how do they even calculate market share. I mean I have an account for all of the different stores. With the exception of EGS I have made purchases on all of them. So I have accounted for each companies market share.

Doesn't that make market share kind of redundant?

As I said I maybe being dense.
 
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Copons

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I may be being dense here. But how do they even calculate market share. I mean I have an account for all of the different stores. With the exception of EGS I have made purchases on all of them. So I have accounted for each companies market share.

Doesn't that make market share kind of redundant?

As I said I maybe being dense.
I'm not a trustable source by any means so don't quote me on this :D, but I think it refers to the share of units sold in the market of reference.

E.g. of every 100 PC games sold, 15 are activated on EGS.

I have no idea how they might come up with such a number, and to even trust it, for that matter.
 

thekeats1999

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I'm not a trustable source by any means so don't quote me on this :D, but I think it refers to the share of units sold in the market of reference.

E.g. of every 100 PC games sold, 15 are activated on EGS.

I have no idea how they might come up with such a number, and to even trust it, for that matter.
Ok. That makes more sense. Still think it is something of a dodgy number and doesn't seem to take into account double dipping, bundles and so on.
 
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Copons

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This sounds very unlikely to me :unsure:
It does to me too, but I'm not a numbers person, and can't have an educated opinion on it.

Ok. That makes more sense. Still think it is something of a dodgy number and doesn't seem to take into account double dipping, bundles and so on.
Well double dipping would be counted as 2 separate copies, so that doesn't bother me that much.

It's more the fact that (AFAIK) not a single store releases sales stats.
Are you going to trust SteamSpy or derive the sales from concurrent players? How would you do it for the thousands of games released every day? What about bundles, and GOG, and Itch.io, and all third party sellers?
I have no idea.
I'd expect that for planning a multi-year, multi-billion dollars investment, Epic would have some reasonably sound numbers tho. :D

(Or, it's just hubris and unlimited amount of cash!)
 

Copons

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Actually, it was already discussed 14 months ago
Ah, so it's by revenue — which makes perfect sense in a market with F2P, microtransactions, etc.

Well then... that 15% figure is basically about Fortnite. :D
Which is hella impressive in its own right, but it doesn't give any good clues about the whole "platform war".
 

Digoman

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Wait, so that means that one copy of AC:Valhalla bought from EGS counts in favor of Epic's marketshare, but one from Uplay it doesn't count against it? That's... some logic.

I'm more curious about the key sellers. They have Greenman on those charts, but if EGS is 15% and Steam is 80%, does that means all of stores selling Steam keys (plus GOG, itch.io, etc) only account for 5%? I thought it would more than that.

Not that discussing PC gaming revenue while leaving out "details" like Riot and Blizzard makes a lot of sense in the first place :p
 

gabbo

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Wait, so that means that one copy of AC:Valhalla bought from EGS counts in favor of Epic's marketshare, but one from Uplay it doesn't count against it? That's... some logic.

I'm more curious about the key sellers. They have Greenman on those charts, but if EGS is 15% and Steam is 80%, does that means all of stores selling Steam keys (plus GOG, itch.io, etc) only account for 5%? I thought it would more than that.

Not that discussing PC gaming revenue while leaving out "details" like Riot and Blizzard makes a lot of sense in the first place :p
I mean, they are literally making up the math to make EGS marketshare look as good as possible, so yeah, what you mentioned about uplay is basically true.
From other sources prior to EGS being a thing, Steam's dominance was pretty massive and every other store made uo a sliver of actual purchases and i think gog came closest to making any kind of impression at like 7-10 % of the market. This was years ago on GAF though, so dont hold me to it
 

Digoman

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I mean, they are literally making up the math to make EGS marketshare look as good as possible, so yeah, what you mentioned about uplay is basically true.
From other sources prior to EGS being a thing, Steam's dominance was pretty massive and every other store made uo a sliver of actual purchases and i think gog came closest to making any kind of impression at like 7-10 % of the market. This was years ago on GAF though, so dont hold me to it
Yeah, gog is probably pretty small. My curiosity was more in terms of the "legit key sellers" that from the discussions about what Valve's actual cut is (with the free generation of keys) appeared to be at least a little more significant.

My first thought was that the EGS numbers were just putting everything as Steam revenue to make look more of a big bad monopoly (along with not looking at things like League of Legends) but then I saw "greenman" on the charts... so who knows.

But was more of a curiosity, because as you said they making the math as they go along.
 

Ge0force

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It's funny how EGS has been nothing but irrelevant in the past few months. No coupons, no big exclusives, no remarkable giveaways, no interesting new features...

I wonder what Epic's next step will be. Are they still convinced their current strategy will be effective in the long run? Or are they expecting to gain customer loyalty with permanent exclusive games they are publishing? Rumor says they already have signed for 14 games, but that's still peanuts compared to the amount of great games that Steam gets each month...
 

Mor

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It's funny how EGS has been nothing but irrelevant in the past few months. No coupons, no big exclusives, no remarkable giveaways, no interesting new features...

I wonder what Epic's next step will be. Are they still convinced their current strategy will be effective in the long run? Or are they expecting to gain customer loyalty with permanent exclusive games they are publishing? Rumor says they already have signed for 14 games, but that's still peanuts compared to the amount of great games that Steam gets each month...
for the time being today they will get Saints Row 5/Reboot/Whateverthisisxd and soon Sonic Colors remaster, doesn't this sound exciting?

But for real, their next step is opening the store a la steam and let everything in (yes, everything, at some point they will stop curation) and that's it, it's the only way you can compete for real, exclusives do not work as we have seen already for two years.

As for their publishing branch, I still think those will come out of EGS at some point, not a 12 months thing but a "in the future" thing, just a guess.
 

Digoman

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It's funny how EGS has been nothing but irrelevant in the past few months. No coupons, no big exclusives, no remarkable giveaways, no interesting new features...

I wonder what Epic's next step will be. Are they still convinced their current strategy will be effective in the long run? Or are they expecting to gain customer loyalty with permanent exclusive games they are publishing? Rumor says they already have signed for 14 games, but that's still peanuts compared to the amount of great games that Steam gets each month...
Well, Epic did have it's famous coupons this year on their "Mega" sale but that appears to have generated a lot less talk this time. And the big giveaway was supposed NBA 2K21, but you know.... little detail about the game being shit and completely US-centric.

So yeah, they appear to be doing the same things, but generating a lot less impact than before. The next logical step would be what Mor said and open up and maybe try to actually provide a good experience, but I don't know....that you require some really big egos do admit their genius strategy didn't work.

It still baffles me that they spent all this fucking money and barely improved their service in two years. The trolls like to say "but Amazon... but Netflix", but those companies made damn well sure the customer was happy when using them.

But then again, Microsoft is doing the exact thing with PC Gamepass so what do I know? :p
 
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Wok

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But then again, Microsoft is doing the exact thing with PC Gamepass so what do I know? :p
I agree with what you wrote except for this part.

Contrary to Epic, Microsoft must have improved their Windows Store: I used to have many issues with their offer during previous years, and none this year.
 
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Digoman

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I agree with what you wrote except for this part.

Contrary to Epic, Microsoft must have improved their Windows Store: I used to have many issues with their offer during previous years, and none this year.
I think it's fair to say it's better now, but given the recent topics on Era and my recent "scare" with Psychonauts 2 (game refused to start a third time, after a reboot Xbox App said "Pre install" again but it did correct itself) still far less than ideal. It also still makes some things impossible like switch the game do DX11 with command options.

But in the end, I think it's just ... "messy". Hidden folders, Both Xbox app and Windows managing updates and so on, not to mention the general perception (fair or not) that's it's buggy. A simple, clean download/run interface in normal game folders would probably help a lot. Especially over here where the shitty regional price for games makes Gamepass very tempting.
 
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Ge0force

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As for their publishing branch, I still think those will come out of EGS at some point, not a 12 months thing but a "in the future" thing, just a guess.
I doubt this. Epic spent half a billion dollars in an effort to push Steam out of business. It's very unlikely that they'll publish their games on Steam, especially when they are doing well on EGS. And games like Alan Wake 2 will do well on EGS.
 

gabbo

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I doubt this. Epic spent half a billion dollars in an effort to push Steam out of business. It's very unlikely that they'll publish their games on Steam, especially when they are doing well on EGS. And games like Alan Wake 2 will do well on EGS.
Assuming any of those games theyre putting up full dev costs for ever release elsewhere (and if devs still own the rights, it's possible), I think we've seen enough evidence that such games will do okay to good on EGS and sell like crazy as soon as they come out elsewhere. People will sit out any exclusion period if there's a glimmer of truth to releasing elsewhere (steam, mainly). Just like this place and Bloodborne on pc.

People dont go where the games are, they go where the customer experience favurs them and even fully exclusive games doesnt change the fact that EGS is not customer focused and the experience not as good
 
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