News Epic Games Store

[Alextended]

Discount culture. Are you listening to yourself? Discounts on Steam were always opt-in unlike the one EGS sale so far. Steam didn't force it on anyone and plenty devs praise the influx of revenue big events like the Steam sales bring (more than any dev deciding to discount their game at a random time on their own without the added PR from tons of other discounts at once) when that has otherwise ground to a halt given the game's age and/or competition as despite being immortal cloud data they have an expiration date in terms of market interest. If someone brought an issue it wasn't Steam, it was the whole of the industry thinking it's a good thing to do together. Physical games were always discounted after a time, it was fine then but not in the digital space? And how does EGS address discount culture by making high caliber indie games like Subnautica completely free and then doing discounts of their own that aren't even opt-in and lead to that clusterfuck that became of it? Sure, they benefit the dev of that one game short term if they're paid by Epic by download, or if during their own sale they give the same profit per copy to the dev, but this won't apply to everyone in the industry, it will likely not even apply to the same teams for their next games coming along after Epic thinks it has bought enough users from Kickstarter and other projects out to not need to keep leaking money to gain their foothold. They're pretending they fight against a problem (discounts aren't a problem, they open up sales to an audience that otherwise wouldn't buy them and generally boost profits, not because these people can afford the games but know they'll be discounted, but because they can't, if developers don't want those purchases they're free to never discount their shit) by taking it a step further? It's clear people simply attack Steam for everything it does and everything it doesn't do without considering the alternative they promote is actually worse in every aspect except the fee, a fee that on its own clearly isn't enough for devs to prefer EGS otherwise there would be no need for exclusivity deals like they're doing. Like Bethesda defaulted to Steam after their failures, devs would default to EGS and Steam would be left in the dust not by contracts but by preference. A preference we're being told we're wrong to have because it's not for EGS. Cue getting a single sentence quoted and responded to with essentially off topic rants obfuscating the topic/issue further as the rest of it goes untouched, as usual...

 

[RionaaM]

I'll keep protesting Epic's awful practices in three ways: not buying on EGS, ignoring temporary EGS exclusive games forever, and complaining on the internet. I don't care if they are effective or not, it's what I choose to do. If that makes me a Steam fanboy or an impotent rage fester, I couldn't give any less of a fuck.

 

[Nyarlathotep]

Android phones have a slick Google provided store built directly into the phone, yet piracy is rampant on Android. Steam didn't magically cure piracy. Piracy of Steam games is rampant. Valve accidentally created a whole suite of problems on their own, including the rampant devaluation of games through discount culture. This hit indies especially hard. Valve didn't usher in a magical era of peaches and sunshine. They did a lot of good work, but their system had unforseen consequences, if you will.

Probably just a coincidence that at the start of the 360 gen a number of publishers had abandoned the PC for single player titles entirely - which is why a number of western developed midtier titles like Wet just don't exist on PC - and the titles that did get released were routinely months later so as not to effect console sales through pc piracy, but by the end of the 360 gen PC releases of everything were the de facto standard, and day and date, to the extent that today a PC version of a game is more likely than an Xbox One version.
Or that the only part of THQ that survived its parent company crash was the PC division in THQ Nordic.
Or that the PC market is so successful that publishers are not only not abandoning it en masse for piracy free console sales, they're making their own storefronts to cash in on its success.

And if you really need to point fingers at 'devaluing' game prices, take a good look at Humble, not Steam.

 

[gabbo]

Probably just a coincidence that at the start of the 360 gen a number of publishers had abandoned the PC for single player titles entirely - which is why a number of western developed midtier titles like Wet just don't exist on PC - and the titles that did get released were routinely months later so as not to effect console sales through pc piracy, but by the end of the 360 gen PC releases of everything were the de facto standard, and day and date, to the extent that today a PC version of a game is more likely than an Xbox One version.
Or that the only part of THQ that survived its parent company crash was the PC division in THQ Nordic.
Or that the PC market is so successful that publishers are not only not abandoning it en masse for piracy free console sales, they're making their own storefronts to cash in on its success.

And if you really need to point fingers at 'devaluing' game prices, take a good look at Humble, not Steam.

If anything PC gamers have shown how much value the platform's games have with one store that was originally, and still is to a large degree; based around the idea of older pc titles re-released/patched for modern machines drm free as it's selling point.

 

[Aelphaeis Mangarae]

It's really not. Crytek had sales expectations which were 4-5 times what Crysis 1 sold.

Crysis budget unveiled

Firstly, the assertion was that Crysis 1 outsold Crysis 2. Which is untrue. Also, you're misunderstanding the point. Crysis 1 was profitable, but it sold way less than contemporaries. It took three years to sell 3 million copies. When you're spending big money on games, you need to make a lot of profit otherwise a single flop can kill you. The basic problem is that game budgets were destined to increase rapidly. Dead Space followed a similar trajectory. Dead Space 2 needed to sell a lot more copies than Dead Space 1 because it cost a lot more to make, and it cost more to make because production values, content, scope, complexity etc were all increasingly rapidly. (This is why we got Dead Space 3. Because Dead Space wasn't financially viable in its current form. Some of Dead Space 3's changes were in response to customer feedback about how they weren't willing to buy Dead Space because it looked too scary and maybe they'd buy it if it had co-op to make the scary stuff more manageable. Interestingly, this is also why the nanosuit was changed in Crysis 2. Customer feedback for Crysis 1 was that the nanosuit was too confusing and complicated for many players.)

Why do you think the AAA PC exclusive basically disappeared? Because they were no longer financially viable due to a combination of massive budget increases vs a market that wasn't expanding fast enough, plus piracy, plus a bunch of other factors. Look at something like Far Cry. The only Far Cry game to sell more than a million copies on Steam was Far Cry 3, IIRC. Imagine if Far Cry 5 had been a PC exclusive. It sold really decently on PC, but selling under a million copies would have been an absolute disaster considering the game's budget.

There was no viable way to keep making games like Crysis as PC exclusives. The market for AAA PC exclusive games was not keeping pace with rising budgets. It's as simple as that. Crytek had no choice but to go multiplatform. That is the situation in a nutshell. Every other AAA developer faced the same choice and the ones that made the same call didn't go bankrupt. Steam didn't solve this problem. They significantly helped PC developers connect with the PC audience and made selling the games easy, thus curbing piracy, but they didn't solve the problem of skyrocketing budgets vs what people could reasonably expect to sell on Steam.

Again, sorry to be blunt but: Pirates don't give a crap about indie games.

Piracy is a huge issue for indies.

Discount culture. Are you listening to yourself?

Steam's business model eventually let to an aggressive devaluation of games. Digital distribution in general had this impact due to discounting that retail couldn't match, but Steam spearheaded it and created the current system where a lot of people will refuse to buy games full price because the perceived value of games has been significantly eroded due to frequent deep discounts. This is one of several reasons why Steam has become a troublesome storefront for indies. The perception of worth has been eroded. "I wouldn't pay more than 5 dollars for this," and stuff like that. When everyone is aggressively devaluing their games, including the major AAA publishers having 50% off sales mere weeks after release, it is extremely difficult for a lot of developers to sell their game at a reasonable price that will turn a profit.
Nintendo have actively resisted this culture by refusing to deeply discount their games and launching all their games at high prices. People are conditioned to pay the asking price instead of waiting for it to be 10 dollars because they know it will never be ten dollars. But this isn't possible on Steam because people will ignore you until you drop the price.

Just as I was writing this, this bit of satire popped up on Twitter.

I'm curious about Epic's seeming about-face on the subject of discounts. Epic make a lot of fancy promises about how they're going to "disrupt" the industry with their 12% cut, but exact specifics of how this is going to work long-term are concerning unclear at times.

 

[MonthOLDpickle]

Well epic isn't doing any favors. At least Valve has tried some steps in stopping the "huge discounts" It was funny watching people say end of pc gaming when valve announced it.

 

[Alextended]

Retail discounts physical copies more than/sooner than Steam, plenty of people make it a point to only buy physical because it's cheaper to them closer to launch, with the likes of Amazon often right at launch, so, they can match it contrary to your claims, physical is going away because digital is more lucrative to publishers with less middlemen involved and more convenient for a large part of the userbase, not because they can't match the sales. Indies blaming piracy now is no different to big publishers like Epic blaming piracy in the past (and Steam proving them wrong about this market's profitability and pretty much all of them having returned to PC by now which, guess what, is more competition for indies too), nothing tangible backs it up, torrent download numbers or whatever else similar "proof" is often cited doesn't actually mean much. Not every indie is owed success by the nefarious gamer who should be able to buy every game and keep everybody else happy by his own pocket. There's always competition, money is limited, people will always choose something over something else. I don't owe this game which may be good but selling less my money any more than I owe it to this other game that is already successful and doesn't need my money if that's the game I want to play too, equal distribution isn't up to me going against my desires to ensure it, it's for them to figure out how to appeal to more people more than the other guys. If the only way they can do that is via a sale that's up to them, not Steam leading the industry astray as you keep claiming. Nintendo is part of the industry, their strategy could work exactly because they're part of a minority using it, if everyone was using the same strategy it clearly could lead to even more people not selling their games at all since the few people that do sell their games would gain a bigger portion of the limited pool of money used for gaming. Not every game is a Super Mario or a Zelda for people to be able to consider it just as a premium and must have purchase at full price either. It's not Steam making them worth less, it's their lesser appeal to gamers willing to pay those amounts that makes them worth less. Maybe we can blame Nintendo for making great games showing the kind of quality you can expect out of 50-60 bucks is higher than the average game's. Publishers sure blamed that when they claimed 3rd party games don't sell on Nintendo systems in the past, lol. If they can do that we can too, let's pressure Nintendo into doing sales so gamers have more money left for others, rather than blame Steam for the advent of the concept of a sale (gosh, what pioneers), lol.

I love the last line of my last post.

 

[MonthOLDpickle]

Not to mention people that pirate can't be even considered lost sales anywho.

 

[Aelphaeis Mangarae]

Indies blaming piracy now is no different to big publishers like Epic blaming piracy in the past (and Steam proving them wrong about this market's profitability and pretty much all of them having returned to PC by now)

Big publishers didn't leave PC, though. Especially Epic. There's a weird conflation of Microsoft forcing stuff like Gears of War to be Xbox exclusive with Epic's remarks about piracy. Epic continued to release PC games but they transitioned to multiplatform development like all of their peers. Epic and Crytek and Ubisoft and all the other companies were 100% correct about the problem of piracy on PC. Those publishers continued to release games on PC. It's not like there was some kind of PC exodus from AAA publishers. (As for the AA publishers and developers, those were too busy going bankrupt.) Steam helped solve some of the piracy issues by battling the convenience of piracy with a convenient storefront that "just worked". But the piracy problem never went away, which is why publishers now turn to solutions such as Denuvo, and we are on the brink of pervasive always-online DRM. (We're also going to see traditional CD keys go bye-bye very soon, gutting the grey market and placing pricing control in the hands of publishers.)

You say publishers have returned to PC. Where are all the PC exclusive AAA games? Publishers/developers went multiplatform in the late 2000s and they haven't looked back. You still have weird extensively delayed PC versions such as Activision's Crash Bandicoot and Spyro and Crash Team Racing. Most publishers seek to release on every platform they can because they need every dollar they can get. Exclusivity to a single platform in the current industry generally makes no sense unless someone is paying you to do it. Ubisoft are never going to make a PC exclusive Far Cry game. They're going to make multiplatform Far Cry games just like they've been doing since 2008. AAA budgets killed the PC exclusive.

 

[Knurek]

Big publishers didn't leave PC, though. Especially Epic.

That's some weird revisionist bullshit.
Epic during the PS360 era released Gears series (only the 1st of which got a (botched) PC port), Shadow Complex (which didn't get a PC port for the original version), Infinity Blade series (no PC ports) and, uhh, Unreal Tournament 3 which did have a PC version (but, as per usual, was more of a UE3 showcase than an actual game).
How is that not leaving PC?

 

[NarohDethan]

I dont buy the argument that people must see a discount in order to sell on Steam. If that were true, Steam would be a wasteland most of the time, which clearly it isnt

 

[Lain]

Epic left PC for the console pastures. Claiming otherwise is... weird. They blamed piracy for moving from PC to consoles, while the real supporter of PC gaming trucked along and ended up saving the business, showing that a market was there, there was good business if the service was good as well as the prices and hey, look, that supporter brought back even Japanese developers to PC.

 

[Aelphaeis Mangarae]

That's some weird revisionist bullshit. Epic during the PS360 era released Gears series (only the 1st of which got a (botched) PC port)

You can blame Microsoft for that. This doesn't even need to be said.

Shadow Complex (which didn't get a PC port for the original version)

You can also blame Microsoft for that. Who do you think published Shadow Complex? (Also, Shadow Complex was originally developed by Chair, not by Epic.) Epic published Shadow Complex Remastered themselves, which is why it released on PC/Xbox/PS4/Mac. During the 2000s, Microsoft were also extremely difficult to work with when it came to XBLA releases. For example, they refused to allow Machinarium to be released on XBLA because it had already appeared on other platforms first. In fact, MS's general policy allowed them the right to refuse to allow the release of any game that had appeared on platforms such as Steam. I think a lot of folks forget how draconian Sony and Microsoft used to be. Sony used to ban companies from releasing remasters, which torpedoed Free Radical's plans to re-release TimeSplitters on PSP, then PS3, then Vita. If they wanted to release on PSP, they had to add PSP exclusive content. If they wanted to release on Vita, they had to implement the rear touchscreen into gameplay somehow.

Infinity Blade series (no PC ports)

They were mobile games. Again, these were developed by Chair, too.

Epic co-developed Bulletstorm with People Can Fly, the team behind Gears 1 for PC. Bulletstorm was on PC.
Around 2012, Epic decided to quit AAA game development believing that F2P is the future of gaming. This resulted in the creation of Fortnite, which has remained their primary focus for the past several years. Fortnite is on PC. Paragon, now cancelled, was on PC. Unreal Tournament, which is in limbo, was on PC.

Epic never left PC. They kept releasing their stuff on PC, but as part of a wider industry trend, they migrated to multiplatform development. All their peers did, which is why PC exclusive AAA game development is dead.

 

[Swenhir]

I just want to point out that, for a platform ridden with piracy and where it's impossible to sell anyone anything, PC is sure as hell doing well.

Wait, where are all these indies coming from? All these kickstarters? They're all heading to consoles, the Switch is booming but where did they all first appear and blossom?

Filthy pirates.

 

[Aelphaeis Mangarae]

I just want to point out that, for a platform ridden with piracy and where it's impossible to sell anyone anything, PC is sure as hell doing well.

Indies are overall not doing well on PC. Some are doing fine. An increasing number aren't. The problem is gradually worsening. You think it's some coincidence that developers are growing more and more disillusioned with Steam as a platform and Valve as a company? You think it's a coincidence so many developers are accepting Epic's deals? Pretending that everything is fine is an extremely unwise approach. There is a middle ground between the sky falling in and everything being totally fine. Steam has a problem. The cracks have been showing for a long time. Now Epic's "solution" to that problem isn't really a solution so much as extreme curation paired with generous cash payouts akin to a wealthy patron giving you money to make paintings for him. But the indie market has a problem where all the money is increasingly consolidated in a shrinking pool of games. Where game quality has no bearing on sales because you can be buried on Steam within hours with no recourse. We now have situations where games sometimes make way more money on the Nintendo Switch than on PC, despite the Switch having a tiny userbase compared to Steam. Steam has a problem with connecting games with the people who want to play them. The big AAA companies sidestep this with huge marketing campaigns. But indie developers can't afford huge marketing campaigns.

The biggest problem with the indie scene is that developers make quality games, but are unable to reach the audience that would like to play them if they knew they existed. Discovery is a nightmare. And people feel that not only isnt' Steam doing enough to fix this, but also that they're making the situation worse and putting smaller games at a repeated disadvantage. Usually Valve do this by accident. Valve aren't malicious. But they can be quite naive.

Wait, where are all these indies coming from? All these kickstarters? They're all heading to consoles, the Switch is booming but where did they all first appear and blossom?

A combination of Steam and XBLA. I think the role MS played in the (paid) indie scene is sometimes overstated by console gamers and sometimes understated by PC gamers. And Kickstarter is in trouble due to the erosion of consumer confidence in the business model, and also the deceptive nature of Kickstarter where people were led to believe that Kickstar = Game's Budget.

 

[Swenhir]

-snip-

I am now certain you aren't living in the same reality as us. That, or you are astroturfing. Anyway, I wasn't really talking to you so good day .

 

[MonthOLDpickle]

I mean, if its not the giant indie bubble that is about to burst - its def piracy.

 

[Aelphaeis Mangarae]

I am now certain you aren't living in the same reality as us.

That's because you're kinda living in a fantasy where everything is totally fine. With all due respect, until people acknowledge the problems, their causes, and Valve's role, they'll always be blindsided by stuff like Epic exclusivity deals. WHY WOULD THEY DO THIS TO US? As though the reason isn't blinding obvious. And no, it' s not "evil publisher is greedy". Like I said earlier, PC gamers that were completely in denial about the dual problems of piracy and rising game budgets were blindsided by the complete collapse of the PC exclusive AAA market. Being in denial is not a good thing. That just breeds blind, unproductive anger. A lot of people don't remember that before STALKER 2 was cancelled in 2011, GSC were implementing always-online DRM for the game. That's how much of a problem piracy was for them. Some people have this problem where they take it super personally when a company says that piracy is a problem.

I mean, if its not the giant indie bubble that is about to burst - its def piracy.

Piracy is an overarching problem that has always existed and will always exist, with most companies seeking to mitigate it at best. At least until the powers that be force the glorious latency-ridden streaming future upon us on the grounds that it's more "convenient". The games industry is in a crisis. A trifecta of development cost, discovery problems, and piracy. Trying to pin everything on one of these misses the entire point. We are about to see a huge shift in how games are sold on PC. Ubisoft is about to spearhead two things. One, no more traditional keys. Two, always online DRM for everything. They dabbled with always online DRM back in the AC2 days. But the market wasn't ready for it. They are going to release GR: Breakpoint as an always online game. They are very likely going to release Watch Dogs 3 as an always online game. I have a very strong suspicion that Activision's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is going to be always-online even in singleplayer. The talk about how progression will carry over between MP and campaign is a giant red flag.

I generally don't approve of always online DRM. I think it has deeply negative implications for preservation. But I'm not going to pretend that it's not about to happen in full force. A lot of PC gamers are in denial about stuff they don't like. They block out things they don't want to hear. They think they can stop these things with boycotts. With outrage campaigns. But it won't work. You win some, you lose some. And this is the part where we lose badly, I'm sorry to say.

The indie boom on PC largely hinged upon Steam as a platform to discover exciting new games that you wanted to play. Over the past 3 years, this model has broken down. Games are failing in increasing numbers not because they're bad games, but because they're unable to bridge the gap between product and audience. The people that would buy the game don't know it exists. And the additional problem is that erosion of perceived value means that a lot of the people who might buy the game wait for a sale. We are seeing a clear shift towards a new and somewhat cynical model where companies like Microsoft and Epic keep the indie development community afloat by giving them money in exchange for timed exclusivity. Valve don't play that game, and this is going to leave them at a massive disadvantage. MS are playing way nicer by putting their stuff on Steam, instead aiming at luring people into subscription services. But Epic are aggressively targeting vulnerable indie developers with extremely appealing offers. Here is free money so that even if your game fails (and/or it gets pirated to kingdom come) you don't lose your home. Wow, what a deal.

 

[PossiblyPudding]

In a time where everyone can develop a game and some will put any old MS Paint or asset flip game up on whatever storefront they can while swearing up and down that it's their magnum opus and that anyone who doesn't agree is clearly wrong of course you're going to have a random dev that has an ax to grind. Steam has it's share of problems, no doubt, but to imply they're trying to keep poor indie devs down is pretty disingenuous.

And the quality argument brings up the question of, quality to who exactly? Sure, I've been bummed that some games haven't sold as well as I would have personally hoped, but I am also fully aware that several of those don't speak to everyone and expecting them to sell gangbusters is pretty far-fetched. It's not terribly surprising that indies do well on Switch either. When most people pick up a Nintendo console for first party titles and they usually release at a slow trickle throughout the year what's left? How are those third party AAA games doing on Switch by the way? Most indies translate well to pick up and play so for anyone that commutes or travels often it's a perfect fit.

Consumers only have so much money to go around. It's the unfortunate reality of capitalism. There's far too many games (or insert media of choice) for one person to be able to play, let alone afford. So of course games will fall through the cracks. Good ones even.

 

[sk2k]

In a time where everyone can develop a game and some will put any old MS Paint or asset flip game up on whatever storefront they can while swearing up and down that it's their magnum opus and that anyone who doesn't agree is clearly wrong of course you're going to have a random dev that has an ax to grind. Steam has it's share of problems, no doubt, but to imply they're trying to keep poor indie devs down is pretty disingenuous.

And the quality argument brings up the question of, quality to who exactly? Sure, I've been bummed that some games haven't sold as well as I would have personally hoped, but I am also fully aware that several of those don't speak to everyone and expecting them to sell gangbusters is pretty far-fetched. It's not terribly surprising that indies do well on Switch either. When most people pick up a Nintendo console for first party titles and they usually release at a slow trickle throughout the year what's left? How are those third party AAA games doing on Switch by the way? Most indies translate well to pick up and play so for anyone that commutes or travels often it's a perfect fit.

Consumers only have so much money to go around. It's the unfortunate reality of capitalism. There's far too many games (or insert media of choice) for one person to be able to play, let alone afford. So of course games will fall through the cracks. Good ones even.

My English is limited so thank you for this post.

 

[prudis]

Valve accidentally created a whole suite of problems on their own, including the rampant devaluation of games through discount culture. This hit indies especially hard. Valve didn't usher in a magical era of peaches and sunshine. They did a lot of good work, but their system had unforseen consequences, if you will.

shure and thats why our new lord and saviour , who said that there want ever be sale on his store (because you know volvo is evil who devalues games) , suddenly did a sale that put preorders of some 60$ titles below 10$ in some regions .......... definitely not devalueing , valve evil, epic saint ... preach it

 

[Alexandros]

Firstly, the assertion was that Crysis 1 outsold Crysis 2. Which is untrue.

You have provided zero evidence to support that claim though.

Crysis 1 was profitable, but it sold way less than contemporaries.

As did Crysis 2 and Crysis 3. Is this also untrue?

Why do you think the AAA PC exclusive basically disappeared?

For the same reason that the (non first-party) AAA console exclusive disappeared.

Piracy is a huge issue for indies

I'm sure indies think that piracy is a huge issue for them. However, it is not. Market overaturation is a way bigger issue for them than piracy. Indies just refuse to face reality.

 

[Aelphaeis Mangarae]

You have provided zero evidence to support that claim though.

I cited the fact that Crysis 2 shipped 3 million copies by July 2011 while Crysis 1 took three years to manage 3 million. How is 3 million in 3 years better than 3 million in 3-4 months? If Crysis 2 had taken three years to ship 3 million copies, it wouldn't have ever gotten a sequel greenlit.

As did Crysis 2 and Crysis 3. Is this also untrue?

Crysis 2 shipped 3 million in a few months which was kinda decent for 2011. A good point of reference is that Kaos Studio's Homefront 1 managed 2.6 million during the same period. Homefront was in fact so successful that Crytek began production on Homefront 2 in 2012. That went kinda pear shaped due to Crytek running out of money in 2014, though. There's an interestingly common misconception that Homefront 1 was some kind of failure. It was a big success for THQ, and their failure lay in that crappy Wii U tablet thing. That's what killed them.

Crysis 3 sold really badly, which is why EA put the series on ice.

I'm sure indies think that piracy is a huge issue for them. However, it is not. Market overaturation is a way bigger issue for them than piracy. Indies just refuse to face reality.

There's some irony in how Valve become some kind of expert on how to solve piracy based on a glib stance of "piracy is a service problem" when they themselves almost completely abandoned piracy-prone singleplayer games in favor of multiplayer games where piracy is a marginal concern. It's like saying, "Zombies are a service problem", when you've gone and built your house 30 feet off the ground on electrified stilts.

It's perhaps even more ironic that companies like Crytek were mocked for saying F2P (perhaps prematurely) was the future when Valve turned many of their games into F2P titles with great success.

 

[Rosenkrantz]

I don't how can anyone defend Epic's stance on PC gaming and whitewash them as some sort of benevolent force which silently supported PC gaming while evil Microsoft was actively killing it and evil Valve was building its stronghold of tyranny, decadence and oppression of publishers and indie devs. Seriously, less than a decade ago Epic's upper management (to his credit, not Sweeney himself) didn't have any problems to say shit like "Yo, PC gaming is dead and shit, maybe soccer moms at Facebook are going to revive it in some form, but we ain't touching this cadaver with a ten foot pole".

 

[Aelphaeis Mangarae]

Seriously, less than a decade ago Epic's upper management (to his credit, not Sweeney himself) didn't have any problems to say shit like "Yo, PC gaming is dead and shit, maybe soccer moms at Facebook are going to revive it in some form, but we ain't touching this cadaver with a ten foot pole".

Are you quoting an actual executive? I can't find any such quote from anyone at Epic. Epic never stopped releasing games on PC, which is weird considering how in some people's imagination they "abandoned" PC. They've spent the last 8 years working on Fortnite which was always a multiplatform/PC title. Before that they released Unreal Tournament 3 on PC and consoles. Plus projects such as Paragon were on PC. The only games Epic released that weren't for PC were ones published by Microsoft, where MS was very obviously had no interest in allowing them to be on PC, and games for mobile that they didn't make themselves.

It's theoretically possible that Epic were somehow responsible for Gears not being on PC, but it's weird that the company who puts everything else multiplatform on PC both before, after, and during Gears would do that.

 

[prudis]

took 2s of google search

"There's certainly a light for PC gaming,"he said. According to Capps, publishers are starting to "think their money's going to be shifting back to PC" due to people wanting to spend less time playing games due to the amount of media competing for their attention.

He concludes, "So maybe Facebook will save PC gaming - but it's not going to look like Gears Of War."

PC piracy drove us to consoles, says Epic Games

the one true saviours to save us from the monstrous volvo , Preach the gospel of Timmy the Generous and Sergey the Spy

 

[Milena]

It's like, the first thing that Google finds when actually searching for it...

Epic Blames Pirates For Console-First Development

edit: beaten

 

[Rosenkrantz]

Are you quoting an actual executive? I can't find any such quote from anyone at Epic

I'm paraphrasing the real quote of Epic's executive.

Thanks for backing me up guys

 

[C-Dub]

So not only did Epic get it wrong about PC never being a Gears of War platform, they also incorrectly predicted Facebook would be the big kahuna?

Now in 2019 they are trying to destroy a market they said was impossible to build, and their flagship AAA IP of the last decade is not available on their own platform!

Okay.

 

[Alextended]

You reply to posts by latching onto a single line and going on a rant that adds nothing new to the conversation and has preemptively been replied to in the posts you snipped in order to quote partially. This is no way to have a discussion, I don't want to repeat the same points over and over just because you refuse to acknowledge them and go on tangents that have very little basis on reality as someone pointed out. You concede to refuted points occasionally when you don't just deflect the conversation and only after several obfuscating posts challenging them in the most mundane ways like how hard it is to find online, yet refuse to acknowledge the original arguments based on those points stand on nothing. I'm done, congrats, making people stop caring to repeat so one side is left works.

 

[Aelphaeis Mangarae]

took 2s of google search

Sorry, I'm a duckduckgo user, so the extremely mangled version of the quote wasn't returning anything. Thanks to sourcing it. Anyway, I don't see anything that contracts what I said. Epic Games released everything on PC except for Gears of War. They signed an exclusivity deal with MS. Beyond that point, Epic had no say in whether Gears came to PC or not. Now the CEO at that time talks about PC piracy as motivating Gears of War's 360 exclusivity, but the release platforms for Gears were controlled by Microsoft. Blaming Epic for no Gears on PC is just plain silly when the company demonstrated that they would release on PC if given the chance in all their other projects. Despite the harsh tone of the interview, nine months later, Epic Games released Bulletstorm for PC and consoles, published by EA. The project was a co-development between People Can Fly and Epic. In the same year, Epic began working on Fortnite, which they have worked on since. They also worked on projects like Unreal Tournament, again for PC. In 2012, Epic began their transition towards Games as a Service. They released Gears: Judgement for Microsoft, but their relationship with MS grew increasingly brittle due to misaligned business objectives. There's a pretty good writeup othat period here. The four lives of Epic Games | Their future is Epic: The evolution of a gaming giant Epic came to the conclusion that the entire AAA model was unsustainable and that's why they stopped making Gears of War games altogether.

I think people miss the wood for the trees. Epic didn't just decide that PC exclusive singleplayer story-driven FPS/TPS games were unviable. They decided that the entire genre of game and development model was unviable, and they abandoned it. During this same period, Valve management decided that games like Portal weren't worth the company's time because they cost a lot to make, didn't make a lot of money, and weren't a lucrative long term revenue stream. Of course Valve are recently pivoting towards making some presumably traditional SP experiences for their VR headset but Valve pivoted to F2P+MP, and despite this a lot of people try to apply their business lessons to the dying 10 hour long singleplayer FPS game that costs $60,

So not only did Epic get it wrong about PC never being a Gears of War platform, they also incorrectly predicted Facebook would be the big kahuna?

Firstly, Gears is only on PC again because MS changed their mind about PC releases. Regarding Facebook, the company they used as a model was wrong, but the gist of the prediction is accurate. When people were talking about Facebook during that period, they were talking about free to play games. Facebook = F2P Gaming.. Crytek and Epic both argued that Free to Play Games as a Service were a more financially viable model than the traditional AAA singleplayer experience. Valve stopped making traditional singleplayer games during this period and transitioned to F2P games as a service multiplayer titles. Epic found mega success with Fortnite: Battle Royale, an F2P title. This is arguably a fluke, granted. Some of the biggest games on the market in terms of revenue are also F2P mobile titles. PUGB Mobile is F2P and rakes in cash. That Korean FPS Crossfire is huge.

 

[Rosenkrantz]

At this point the conversation turned into pure sophistry, and you can't win an argument with a sophist.

 

[MonthOLDpickle]

I use duckduckgo and searching "epic blames piracy" gets me tons of returns on exactly what they said. I use DDG for my thesis and it works just as fine.

 

[Rosenkrantz]

I use duckduckgo and searching "epic blames piracy" gets me tons of returns on exactly what they said. I use DDG for my thesis and it works just as fine.

I think they were searching the quote I wrote, so it's not impossible they found nothing.

 

[MonthOLDpickle]

I think they were searching the quote I wrote, so it's not impossible they found nothing.

Ah yea. With DDG sometimes you have to narrow the input.

 

[Nyarlathotep]

Steam's business model eventually let to an aggressive devaluation of games. Digital distribution in general had this impact due to discounting that retail couldn't match, but Steam spearheaded it and created the current system where a lot of people will refuse to buy games full price because the perceived value of games has been significantly eroded due to frequent deep discounts.

Again, another obviously false claim to make. Retail can - and do - discount to whatever they want.
Unsold boxed products actually end up costing them money, because its space taken up by products that would actually sell, which is why you will find firesale pricing on bargain buckets of assorted crap thats just not selling at retail.

Digital distribution is in fact better for publishers - which includes indies who self publish - because they take a bigger cut of each copy sold than physical retail copies gives them, and they are offered long tail sales where they do not have to sell as much as they can in the first month, before their game gets firesaled to make room on shelves.
They can sell at whatever price they want for-fucking-ever and wait for only customers to who want to pay that to come to them if they want, at no additional cost in having to pay a retailer for secured space on their shelves.

 

[Aelphaeis Mangarae]

Again, another obviously false claim to make. Retail can - and do - discount to whatever they want.
Unsold boxed products actually end up costing them money, because its space taken up by products that would actually sell, which is why you will find firesale pricing on bargain buckets of assorted crap thats just not selling at retail.

Digital distribution is in fact better for publishers - which includes indies who self publish - because they take a bigger cut of each copy sold than physical retail copies gives them, and they are offered long tail sales where they do not have to sell as much as they can in the first month, before their game gets firesaled to make room on shelves.
They can sell at whatever price they want for-fucking-ever and wait for only customers to who want to pay that to come to them if they want, at no additional cost in having to pay a retailer for secured space on their shelves.

It has nothing to do with what retailers can do. Retailers were not doing it. We are talking about problems with consumer behavior, not with the business model itself. The recent phenomenon of releasing a game, having it sell millions of copies, but aggressively discounting it within weeks of release in an attempt to keep the money coming in is a product of digital distribution and the changing way in which people buy games as a result of that. With the older retail model, a game released and it remained at a certain price until it stopped selling. Now, the selling patterns are extremely erratic and heaps of people will wait for games, both successful and unsuccessful, to crash in price literally weeks after release because this keeps happening over and over. The market is flooded with very new AAA games that are being sold at massively reduced prices, and this creates a huge problem for the mid-tier developers because without this aggressive discounting, you'd be able to say something like, "My game isn't as good as Far Cry 5, but I'm selling it for $30 instead of $60," Except people will then say, "Why I buy your game for $30 instead of mega-blockbuster Far Cry 5 that is inexplicably half price shortly after release? Maybe if it was $5 I would buy it."

Competing with games that are literally free is even more difficult.

Ubisoft sabotaged themselves with Far Cry New Dawn. It turned out that selling a 20 hour long game for $40 works well in theory, but people get angry if the previous game, which is 50+ hours long, is sold for $20-30 on sale. New Dawn was accused of being a "ripoff" because it wasn't as long as FC5, yet FC5 on sale was cheaper. The problem of skyrocketing audience expectations of content and length from AAA games is a discussion in and of itself, though.

 

[Nyarlathotep]

It has nothing to do with what retailers can do. Retailers were not doing it. We are talking about problems with consumer behavior, not with the business model itself. The recent phenomenon of releasing a game, having it sell millions of copies, but aggressively discounting it within weeks of release in an attempt to keep the money coming in is a product of digital distribution and the changing way in which people buy games as a result of that. With the older retail model, a game released and it remained at a certain price until it stopped selling. Now, the selling patterns are extremely erratic and heaps of people will wait for games, both successful and unsuccessful, to crash in price literally weeks after release because this keeps happening over and over. The market is flooded with very new AAA games that are being sold at massively reduced prices, and this creates a huge problem for the mid-tier developers because without this aggressive discounting, you'd be able to say something like, "My game isn't as good as Far Cry 5, but I'm selling it for $30 instead of $60," Except people will then say, "Why I buy your game for $30 instead of mega-blockbuster Far Cry 5 that is inexplicably half price shortly after release? Maybe if it was $5 I would buy it."

You are so factually wrong I have to wonder if you were even alive and old enough to make your own purchases of products when retail was the predominant sales avenue for titles.

I bought Mirrors Edge on PS3 for £3 at my local Tesco a month after launch because it was a huige fucking bomb and they were desperate to get rid.
Meanwhile it was still £39.99 digitally for PC on Steam, because a month is way too short a time to be doing that level of deep discounting of a title, and hasn't gone through any of the various pricepoints where people who are not day one purchasers will bite; a 25-30% discount price point, a 50% pricepoint discount, a 75% discount.

It is the retail model where discounting is erratic, because if its not selling its not fucking selling, and the price will keep getting slashed until it is, and that slashing will start the minute that initial purchase order is obviously gathering dust and taking up room that things that do sell should be taking up.
Digital discounting is entirely predictable, and as that product can live at a pricepoint indefinitely and not be taking up room another product that is selling could be taking, will go down in stages, to hit the various price points a consumer might be willing to pay.

Like... I don't even know where the fuck you are inventing your counter points from? You're 100% factually incorrect on almost everything you're saying

 

[Aelphaeis Mangarae]

I bought Mirrors Edge on PS3 for £3 at my local Tesco a month after launch because it was a huige fucking bomb and they were desperate to get rid.

And? Games that don't sell get discounted because they don't sell. Wow, what a shock. Who saw that coming? We are talking about the problem of the entire games industry causing the perceived value of games to crash into the ground completely irrespective of how the games are selling.

With the old retail model, companies did not give highly successful games massive discounts weeks after release. Consumers were not trained to expect all games, successful or not, to crash in value within weeks. They expected games that were unsuccessful to slide in value because if a game isn't selling, you logically reduce the price to attract customers. There are still remnants of this ideology. On Steam you see people confused by discounts so short after release and they sometimes accuse the game of flopping. Time and time again it has to be explained to them that this is simply the way companies operate now. They control the pricing directly and they intentionally devalue their products with huge discounts very soon after release even if that product was successful. I suspect one reason Ubisoft do this is because they're interested in getting as many people to buy as possible for extra MT revenue.

Traditional retail discounts were not erratic. They were directly tied to how well the game was selling. Digital distribution threw this out the window in favor of stuff like flash sales and very predictable massive discounts fairly soon after release. What is the game's value? Who cares. Let's just drive this puppy into the ground ASAP. Retail has had to follow suit in their own fashion, but this pervasive devaluation of games regardless of how they sell is a product of digital distribution and its approach to sales. Publishers created this mess, and Nintendo are one of the only publishers refusing to take part, to their credit.

It's something that seemed like a good idea at the time, and it was necessary to combat digital piracy, but nobody really predicted the effect successful digital distribution platforms and the sales tactics they employed would have on audience behavior, on audience expectations. The games industry is in trouble. It's self created to some extent but it takes two to tango, as they say.

 

[TioChuck]

Man this guy must be pretty bored.

 

[Alexandros]

I cited the fact that Crysis 2 shipped 3 million copies by July 2011 while Crysis 1 took three years to manage 3 million. How is 3 million in 3 years better than 3 million in 3-4 months? If Crysis 2 had taken three years to ship 3 million copies, it wouldn't have ever gotten a sequel greenlit.

Crysis 2 shipped 3 million in a few months which was kinda decent for 2011. A good point of reference is that Kaos Studio's Homefront 1 managed 2.6 million during the same period. Homefront was in fact so successful that Crytek began production on Homefront 2 in 2012. That went kinda pear shaped due to Crytek running out of money in 2014, though. There's an interestingly common misconception that Homefront 1 was some kind of failure. It was a big success for THQ, and their failure lay in that crappy Wii U tablet thing. That's what killed them.

Crysis 3 sold really badly, which is why EA put the series on ice.

There's some irony in how Valve become some kind of expert on how to solve piracy based on a glib stance of "piracy is a service problem" when they themselves almost completely abandoned piracy-prone singleplayer games in favor of multiplayer games where piracy is a marginal concern. It's like saying, "Zombies are a service problem", when you've gone and built your house 30 feet off the ground on electrified stilts.

It's perhaps even more ironic that companies like Crytek were mocked for saying F2P (perhaps prematurely) was the future when Valve turned many of their games into F2P titles with great success.

Ok, let's go point by point.

Crysis sales

Let's start with the facts. Crysis 1 sold more than three million copies to customers. Crysis had Securom DRM with a unique key for each copy that activated online so EA knew exactly how many copies they sold to actual customers. So, Crysis 1 on PC, more than three million confirmed copies sold. This is an indisputable fact.

Crysis 2 sales

The only figure we ever got from EA on Crysis 2 sales was that the game shipped 3 million copies. That's three million shipped to retailers, not actual customers. Again: that number does not indicate actual sales. EA never again mentioned anything about Crysis 2 sales. At launch Crysis 2 was in 7th place of sales across North America while Dragon Age 2 was in 4th and Homefront, since you mentioned it, in 3rd.

NPD March 2011

NPD sales figures coverage: Wii - 290k Xbox 360 - 433k PS3 - 365K NDS - 460k 3DS - 398K PSP - 188K PS2 - Pokemon White Version (NDS) Nintendo - 1.3 Million Pokemon Black Version (NDS) Nintendo - 1.1 Million Homefront (360, PS3, PC) THQ Dragon Age II (360, PS3, PC) Electronic Arts Call of Duty...

vgsales.fandom.com

If you you want to interpret that fact as an indication that the game was a big success, no one can really stop you. However, there are zero actual facts to support your claim.

Crysis 2 budget and sales expectations

There is a direct quote by Crytek mentioning that games similar to Crysis sell 4-5 times more on consoles. It is also a fact, again directly confirmed by Crytek, that the budget for Crysis 2 was much bigger than the first game. These are the facts. I think that any reasonable person would deduce from those facts that wildy missed sales expectations + much bigger budget = not that much of a sales success. Again, feel free to interpret facts differently but you are pretty much alone here.

Valve and piracy

Valve proved that piracy was a service problem by investing serious amounts of money in a platform and various regions that were considered dead by publishers due to piracy and finding tremendous success, This is an indisputable fact. There are literally hundreds of singleplayer games that found huge success on Steam. You have no argument here.

 

[SRossi]

Man this guy must be pretty bored.

And clueless. And likes to smell his own rotten farts.

 

[Rosenkrantz]

With the old retail model, companies did not give highly successful games massive discounts weeks after release.

They don't give massive discounts to successful games on digital distribution platforms either, outside of grey market maximum you'll find 10-20% discount on sites like GMG and that goes out of their own pocket.

 

[Nyarlathotep]

With the old retail model, companies did not give highly successful games massive discounts weeks after release.

And that doesn't happen in digital either, what actually is your point?
Deep discounting of brand new AAAs within weeks of initial release is entirely retail driven, and always has been.
One of the most common complaints about digital pricing is how infrequently it matches deep retail discounting of shit thats not selling or was overstocked.

You keep making claims that digital sales are deep discounting within weeks of release where physical aren't, and thats 100% not fucking true.
Digital discounts are on a regular timeline, and at predictable levels; 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, 'legacy' ongoing pricepoint. 25-33% off, 50% off, 66-75% off.

I get it, you don't like digital.
Stick to the actual facts on digitals shortcomings compared to physical retial, instead of pulling shit out of your arse and pretending its gold.

 

[Aelphaeis Mangarae]

Let's start with the facts. Crysis 1 sold more than three million copies to customers. Crysis had Securom DRM with a unique key for each copy that activated online so EA knew exactly how many copies they sold to actual customers. So, Crysis 1 on PC, more than three million confirmed copies sold. This is an indisputable fact.

EA claimed that the games old 3 million in 3 years. Where are you getting the idea that EA used Securom data for sales figures instead of their usual retail channel figures? I mean, it would be a clever way to handle sales figures, but it would also be lower than their sell-in values and EA typically prefer to use sell-in because it looks better.

These are the facts. I think that any reasonable person would deduce from those facts that wildy missed sales expectations + much bigger budget = not that much of a sales success.

EA clearly though the game sold enough copies despite its much larger budget to warrant a third game. Yerli was always ambivalent about its sales expectations and whether it met them. We don't have clear sales figures for Crysis 2, but we do have a 3 million sell-in figure and the fact EA didn't cancel the sequel.

Crysis 2 was multiplatform for the same reason modern Doom games are multiplatform. They are not financially viable as PC exclusives because they're too expensive. You cannot sell enough copies of a 6-10 hour long AAA FPS games if that game is a PC exclusive. You cannot avoid rising game budgets. Far Cry 5 sold really well on PC. But it sold under a million copies. Ubisoft are never going to make a PC exclusive Far Cry game. It's just not financially viable. Crysis 2 managed to scrape by only because it went multiplatform. A PC exclusive Crysis 2 never would have gotten a sequel.

Valve proved that piracy was a service problem by investing serious amounts of money in a platform and various regions that were considered dead by publishers due to piracy and finding tremendous success, This is an indisputable fact. There are literally hundreds of singleplayer games that found huge success on Steam. You have no argument here.

Valve themselves abandoned singleplayer games in favor of free to play and multiplayer titles. Steam was the first PC digital distribution platform that did its job properly. But the idea that Valve somehow solved piracy is a naive view. Piracy is still rampant, Steam or no Steam. Piracy is a service issue, but that's not the entire story. People commonly attempt to handwave mass piracy of Steam games despite the storefront being fantastic as not being some kind of big deal. But it is a big deal. Valve didn't stop piracy. They just helped games sell better. Piracy still eats massively into the PC market, and the PC market lags massively behind consoles when it comes to the sales of AAA singleplayer titles.

 

[SRossi]

And that doesn't happen in digital either, what actually is your point?

I already asked. He doesn't have one. He is a clueless (and I guess rather young) dude that likes to play devil's advocate.

He read a lot of stuff about games, the industry and controversies online and came to weird conclusions but he doesn't have a point.

 

[Aelphaeis Mangarae]

And that doesn't happen in digital either, what actually is your point?

They don't give massive discounts to successful games on digital distribution platforms either

Ubisoft and Bethesda and a number of their peers regularly deeply discount successful games within 3 months. Sometimes a mere month after release. Ubisoft are especially prone to it.

 

[lashman]

Piracy still eats massively into the PC market

 

[Copons]

Blurgh

Paradox Interactive: "The 70/30 revenue split is outrageous"

The 70/30 revenue split offered to developers by most platform holders is "outrageous," according to Paradox Interactiv…

www.gamesindustry.biz

 

[Swenhir]

Blurgh

Paradox Interactive: "The 70/30 revenue split is outrageous"

The 70/30 revenue split offered to developers by most platform holders is "outrageous," according to Paradox Interactiv…

www.gamesindustry.biz

Good on the journo to at least have the intellectual honesty to point it it's the industry standard. He doesn't recognize how much the key resellers influence that percentage nor the (massive) differences in feature or supported payment methods but hey, it's a start.

Steam takes 30% of revenue from the majority of games on its platform -- just like platforms operated by Microsoft, Sony, Apple and others. However, Wester suggested that the 70/30 split was based on a model established by Warner Bros. in the '70s, for the distribution of films on boxed VHS tapes.

I mean, how much does it actually cost to deliver a game?

They should try to build their own distribution system and infrastructure to find out. Can't possible be that hard, right?

For all their talk, I wonder why the Discord store launch happened with nary a whimper from the press getting so massively behind Epic and touting their cut right now. It's terrifying how none of these people give a solitary fuck about the PC or doing what's right.