News Epic Games Store

The article makes some good points, especially about Apple's abusive position (and how they skim profit not just from the hardware, but also the services and app store built in), but the "Valve too" assertion is lazy and poorly-put, as is the argument that the reason Epic is doing 88/12 is to change the industry.

We should also be mindful that the 70/30 split is an industry standard, for better or worse, and that some storefronts can better justify it than others. It's not a clear cut 30% is good or bad, and Fahey does address this to a degree, saying that the 30% and 12% cut arguments are more than likely pulled from thin air. I'm inclined to agree to some extent.

Apple, having a monopoly on the iOS platform, charging a 30% cut when they own and profit from the hardware and baked-in services that put them at a distinct advantage compared to other service providers, is patently ludicrous. They absolutely should not be charging 30% because that 30% cut is not really benefitting the customer or third party developers.

Google, tying critical Android functionality to their proprietary services, commands a huge amount of leverage to pressure manufacturers to pre-load the Play Store onto devices, giving Google an unfair advantage similar to how Microsoft pushed Internet Explorer back in the day. In those cases, the 30% cut again feels unfair as neither customers nor developers are really seeing any benefit. An app launched through the Amazon Store, or F-Droid, is functionally identical to one launched through Google Play. The only reason Google commands a 30% cut there is because they're the biggest fish in the pond.

PlayStation Store, Xbox Marketplace and Nintendo eShop are different from mobile, as the digital stores present a better deal for developers, publishers and the platform holder. Their ~30% cut is definitely more than they'd get from a retail copy sold, but so is the ~70% developers/publishers get, as the overheads of physical copy sales really eats into the margins. We're also potentially seeing a "digital only" console from both Sony and Microsoft that is priced competitively, with that 30% cut helping to subsidise that hardware.

The PC platform is, again, different. Valve doesn't leverage any sort of consumer lock-in to get people to use Steam. People use Steam because, well, they want to use Steam. Because it's good. When I build or buy a new PC, I am in no way coerced to use Steam. Valve doesn't pay anyone to pre-install it (as far as I'm aware), and try as hard as they might, when I start a fresh install of Windows for the first time I don't download apps from their built-in store or browse the web on Edge; I just open it to download Firefox and Steam then forget most of the built-in Microsoft junk ever existed. And Valve's 30% cut gives value to customers and developers, whether they realise it or not. It allows developers to generate keys for free, which they can then sell via third parties or their own ecommerce platform, with Valve taking 0%.

The 30% cut funds functionality which, either at the time or still today, no one else wanted to develop. Big Picture (admittedly now surpassed by third party apps); friends lists, groups and chat (admittedly now surpassed by Discord); retail top-up cards (something no one else but Origin really does) and "exotic" and costly payment methods that Valve eats the cost on (and which Epic will ding the customer for); remote play (something that has some third party competition on, but nothing that is quite as comprehensive as Valve's offering, since the only excellent alternative requires a Nvidia GPU); Steam Workshop (admittedly now matched by EGS's modding support, assuming the community embrace it); and countless improvements and tweaks to the service to aid in discovering and selling games.

On alternative platforms, you are literally on your own to promote your game, whereas Valve has taken its responsibility as the biggest place to buy and sell and worked tirelessly to improve store functionality, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. None of the aforementioned platform holders do half of what Valve tries to do to increase commerce on their store platforms. Steam lets me find amazing games, and it lets good developers sell their amazing games to the right audience, and that process is changing and improving all the time.

Steam has expanded the PC gaming audience from a "dying" platform rife with piracy 10-15 years ago, to a place that people buy and sell games like they never have before. Valve aren't heroes, and they do lots of shitty things (as all companies do), but their contribution to the sustainability of the PC as a platform, and not just in a historical sense but a perpetual and ongoing sense, is immeasurable. But the way some people talk, it's as if we should go back to the days before Steam proved games on PC could sell. The days before indies could find their customers with ease. The days when Japanese developers looked at the PC as a tool, and rolled their eyes at people wanting them to port games to PC because they knew it was just going to be pirated.

And in the end, Epic are no heroes as some want to paint them. They want to be a gatekeeper too, just in a different way. They feel they can take a hit on an 88/12 split if it means they can leverage their influence over developers to use Unreal Engine and other Epic middleware. It may not be super profitable on PC, but if developers naturally gravitate to EGS on PC, they'll be more inclined to use Unreal Engine and other Epic middleware on that platform (due to it all rolling into the 12% PC store cut), opening the door to Epic taking a slice of every sale on the consoles in the future. For the next big indie hit, that could be a good little earner for Epic. And that's even if Epic allows the next big indie hit onto their store - they may just decide it's a "crappy game" and strangle it out of existence before it even has a chance to shine.

And I'm sure if Epic gets their way, a few years later we'll see the same developers who whinged about Valve now crying about Epic holding too much sway over how they make and sell their games, and how EGS has bullied them into giving Epic a cut on sales for all future platforms in perpetuity.

Edit: Wow, that became a rant. Something about that article rubbed me the wrong way, I guess. 🤣
 
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Considering there's lots of competition on PC, and no one's really budging on 30% when customers see the value of what that 30% is paying for, I think Sweeney is talking through his ass there.

But I do agree with him that Apple's vice-like grip on the iOS app ecosystem is wrong and they need to be forced to open the platform up.
 
Considering there's lots of competition on PC, and no one's really budging on 30% when customers see the value of what that 30% is paying for, I think Sweeney is talking through his ass there.

But I do agree with him that Apple's vice-like grip on the iOS app ecosystem is wrong and they need to be forced to open the platform up.

Absolutely. The same is true for all walled gardens.
 
The problem is the same old thing with Sweeney. He is saying something true about others, but then that also makes him a hypocrite when it comes to his own practices.
He's also tries his hardest to generalize those problems. If his issue is with how Apple operates their iOS environment, great. I generally agree, it's one of Apple's worst traits as a company. But that same situation does't apply beyond Apple really, where the is no benefit from devs giving up that cut.
Steam isn't on a closed platform controlled by Valve, it provides a feature rich client that isn't even mandatory and is one that brings with it several useful features sets that devs merely plug into (this simplifies things, but it's a lot easier to code to an API than build everything form scratch). That on top of all the other store-related things Valve takes a bath on like steam wallet cards various payment methods.

If he wants to go after all closed garden's im sure Richard Stalman and the GNU foundation would love to have him
 
Shitpost articles get higher engagement and views, no surprise. Or maybe he's just really that out of touch. Neither paints a flattering picture of his professionalism.

Indeed. In either case this article is yet more evidence of the industry's utter contempt for its audience. Anything other than buying and shutting up is apparently unacceptable.
 
Total Warhammer 3 could become EGS exclusive?

A long planned for goal and major feature for Access we’re working on is the ability for you to link your different store accounts through it, so TW games and DLC you buy in one store will transfer to the others. This means that, for example, you can buy a game in one place, and then take advantage of a DLC sale in another. Plus, play multiplayer with people on different platforms. We’re working on it with our retail partners at the moment and we’ll let you know when we’ve more to share.


[HIDEPOSTS]Also I guess you could get free Troy on Steam if you claim it on EGS after exclusivity is over?[/HIDEPOSTS]
 
Total Warhammer 3 could become EGS exclusive?




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Didn’t CA say they were planning on releasing their future titles on both EGS and Steam with no exclusivity and that Troy was a one time thing?
 
i am pretty sure that they took Troy as a experiment even from the releasing side and that WH3 should be save from exclusivity deals .

The said it was experiment and there was no decisions regarding future games (yet) or something like that.
 
How do you get "we're going to let you buy a game once and play it on every client" as "is game x going EGS exclusive"? I honestly think people speculating over unannounced games being EGS exclusive is exactly what Epic wants. They want people to think it could be any game, and normalise that kind of behaviour and numb the negative reactions in the process.

It's best to just wait until a game is announced as EGS exclusive before even discussing it in that context. Epic doesn't even cross my mind when I'm excited for a game, at least until they snap it up. I was worried about Shenmue III before Ys Net and Deep Silver revealed they had fucked their fans over, and it wound me up a treat when they finally dropped the bad news. It's just not good for you.

And frankly, what they're saying about buying a game once is actually the way it should be. If Epic are going to go insane with coupons again, and I can buy a game there and see it activate on Steam, that's an overall excellent thing for PC gamers. Also vice versa - it'd be great if my Steam library was "backed up" in another library (as I've done with redeeming my Steam library on GOG), and that should the service ever cease, at least I haven't lost my games.

Sega is obviously looking at going multi-store, and why wouldn't they? They've been putting their games on Window Store for Game Pass, and I don't see why they wouldn't just release their game on any store that lets them at this point. Troy's exclusivity is, so far, a one-off. And it probably has more to do with interest in the game being behind other Total War games at this point than anything else. I mean, I don't play the TW games, but I know of them. I know when a new one is announced. I didn't even know Troy was a thing.

Epic paid them to release it for free, which is probably a pretty good way of generating interest in the game.
 
Indeed. In either case this article is yet more evidence of the industry's utter contempt for its audience. Anything other than buying and shutting up is apparently unacceptable.
Well said. Though fortunately that is not the whole industry. Quiet people do great work with the consumer in mind.

I just wish more were at Microsoft. This company worries me more and more and the discourse surrounding then is so filled with fans (or astrotufers, hard to tell the difference) that I am genuinely concerned for the future of the PC from an OS and distribution model standpoint.

GamePass is nice but it made both subscriptions normal and completely shoved UWP into people's face and nobody says a thing. I worry.
 
How do you get "we're going to let you buy a game once and play it on every client" as "is game x going EGS exclusive"?

Because WH1,2&3 share content, without this it would've been "impossible". But getting Troy free on Steam after a year is far more interesting part.
 
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Well said. Though fortunately that is not the whole industry. Quiet people do great work with the consumer in mind.

I just wish more were at Microsoft. This company worries me more and more and the discourse surrounding then is so filled with fans (or astrotufers, hard to tell the difference) that I am genuinely concerned for the future of the PC from an OS and distribution model standpoint.

GamePass is nice but it made both subscriptions normal and completely shoved UWP into people's face and nobody says a thing. I worry.
GamePass isn't the first time this model has existed on PC. Hell Gamefly was a much better implementation form a usability standpoint, but it didn't have Microsoft behind it, and in time folded. So long as Microsoft don't circle the proverbial wagons again and leave other stores, let them try their own thing.
It's part of the PC being an open platform - different models will bubble up but not every one of them will flourish. That's the problem with EGS (besides how skeletal the store/client are) - it's model exists at the expense of all other stores.
 
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GamePass isn't the first time this model has existed on PC. Hell Gamefly was a much better implementation form a usability standpoint, but it didn't have Microsoft behind it, and in time folded. So long as Microsoft don't circle the proverbial wagons again and leave other stores, let them try their own thing.
It's part of the PC being an open platform - different models will bubble up but not every one of them will flourish. That's the problem with EGS (besides how skeletal the store/client are) - it's model exists at the expense of all other stores.
I agree. The problem is that gamepass is being used as an excuse to MS raising the prices on FS2020 and terrible regional pricing, citing it as an alternative... Which it should not be.

It is a different model entirely which should not be treated as a backup when the others fail to function. The discourse around it has stopped treating it as such, which worries me.
 
I have just finished the first episode of the sitcom. It was roughly 40 minutes long. It is a mash-up of genres, like Pony Island or The Hex. It takes place in a game studio who has to deal with fans who want to cancel the game for featuring a tiger shark instead of a white shark. The situations are very absurd. It is not as clever and interesting as Pony Island or The Hex though.

I have then tried to launch Sludge Life... and the game won't start at all. :boomer: :wtf:
 
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What a fucking moron
 
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I'm sure this won't amount to anything. Not only for Epic, but basically any non-Chinese based company owned or operating under Tencent directly. So like, Riot will be fine, Funcom will be fine, any other industry tencent dabbles in. Trump and his economic team has little actual business acumen to make this effective. This is more about racism and general attacks on China than anything else
 
I'm sure this won't amount to anything. Not only for Epic, but basically any non-Chinese based company owned or operating under Tencent directly. So like, Riot will be fine, Funcom will be fine, any other industry tencent dabbles in. Trump and his economic team has little actual business acumen to make this effective. This is more about racism and general attacks on China than anything else
This is how I feel about it. I actually wish legislators went after Tencent because it is a very scary company, doing morally questionable things, and has its sights on being a monopoly in digital entertainment and social media.

But all Trump is doing is banging the racist anti-China drum, and he's never going to get congress or other nations to go along with this so long as that's what it's about.
 
I'm sure this won't amount to anything. Not only for Epic, but basically any non-Chinese based company owned or operating under Tencent directly. So like, Riot will be fine, Funcom will be fine, any other industry tencent dabbles in. Trump and his economic team has little actual business acumen to make this effective. This is more about racism and general attacks on China than anything else

Nothing about racism, everything about hegemony.
 
Pretty sure Gearbox could but just don't really think about egs anymore.

Well Godfall is published by Gearbox and is EGSxclusive, so they do care about EGS somewhat, but I guess they care more about the moneybag from the exclusive deal than the Epic Store itself. :P

But yeah, Im unsure if EGS backend supports free weekend, it does support closed and open betas, so they might work differently.
 
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I bet Gearbox would have to program it.
I guess that'd too much work for them, and a risky one. What if they accidentally allow people to claim the full game instead of just for the weekend? What if it revokes everyone license instead after the event ends? These can totally happen with EGS.
 
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I guess that'd too much work for them, and a risky one. What if they accidentally allow people to claim the full game instead of just for the weekend? What if it revokes everyone license instead after the event ends? These can totally happen with EGS.
I mean think about it. A guy tried to give a free weekend on EGS and Trump bans Tencent :sweeneyfence:
 
No offense but if any y'all wanna gaslight Tim, best to take screenshot of his tweet and put the link to that tweet in CODE
 
I am sure the companies under Tencent's tutelage will adhere to the law TO THE LETTER.
Meaning: you won't make transactions with Tencent, just the American sub-company.