News Epic Games Store

Arc said:
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Mike Rose (@mikerose@mastodon.online)

Attached: 1 image Let's talk about the Epic Store! 🧵 #GAMEDEV THREAD TIME 🧵 The Epic Store is fascinating, because it overwhelmingly has a very specific clientele -- younger people who play Fortnite And while that doesn't usually translate into people who will pay money for any other games on...
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Interesting thread on how a small game on EGS outsold the Steam version in the past year. Mike's theory is that the Epic userbase skews towards younger Fortnite users who are more interested in cartoony games than the average Steam user. I think that's reasonable, but I also think the fact that Epic's library is much smaller than Steam's and there is a front page carousel that lists all games on sale (when a major event isn't going on) are also possible factors that help give it more exposure compared to Steam.
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Not saying Mike did not consider this as a reason. My initial guess is Family Man was part of the Humble choice back in May 2021. Folks who wanted it could get it as part of of the Choice for cheap, or if they did not want it, could trade/sell it off. This likely satiated the Steam key market. From a glance, the game is going for as cheap as 0.35USD on the shady key sites. In either case these folks would only show as activatations and not sales, and that is still not factoring if they are sitting on keys meaning you could not even look at activations to tell this story unless you know how many keys are in the wild versus what has been activated.
 
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ExistentialThought said:
Not saying Mike did not consider this as a reason. My initial guess is Family Man was part of the Humble choice back in May 2021. Folks who wanted it could get it as part of of the Choice for cheap, or if they did not want it, could trade/sell it off. This likely satiated the Steam key market. From a glance, the game is going for as cheap as 0.35USD on the shady key sites. In either case these folks would only show as activatations and not sales, and that is still not factoring if they are sitting on keys meaning you could not even look at activations to tell this story unless you know how many keys are in the wild versus what has been activated.
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While it may explain sales on Steam, it doesn’t factor in that a lot of people saw the game on EGS and bought it there irrespective of cheaper Steam keys being available.

At the very least it’s indicative of a user base for the store being there, even if it’s not the one Epic was going for with their exclusives.
 
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Its certainly a correlation v causation issue, given that it's just that one game, but I'm not exactly shocked that the main audience for Fortnite might skew younger and thus prefer a certain type of game that doesnt make a huge splash even on Steam where the audience is all over the place in demographic terms
 
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Sonic Frontiers hasn't released on EGS despite the English website saying it would. FWIW, the JP site never mentioned EGS and the JP Sonic site mentions EGS for Origins and Colors so I think the NA webmaster made a goof. Or maybe it'll release on EGS later. Who knows at this point? :shrugblob:


crimsonheadGCN said:
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I could have swore Sergiy said achievements wouldn't be mandatory, but looking at his Twitter history, I think I imagined that. Still an interesting policy since it will just add more workload to developers.

Edit:



The "graphic design is my passion" promo is back!
 
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curi0usBystander said:
Aren't EGS cheevos more restrictive ? With their XP system ? What happens with Early Acces games that love to add more and more stuff as they expand the game?
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Here's the achievement requirements documentation:

XP requirements for Epic Games Store achievements

Your Epic Games Store achievements’ XP (Experience Points) must follow these requirements:


  • Each product must have exactly 1000 XP in total, regardless of how many achievements you define.
  • You will receive an error message if you try to add more or less than 1000 XP for a game.
  • You cannot push your achievements from Dev to Stage if your product’s XP is more or less than 1000.
  • You can view your product’s XP total in Game Services > Achievements > Epic Games Store achievements, above the achievements table.
  • The XP value for each achievement must be a multiple of 5 (such as 5, 10, 15, 100, 110, or 200).
  • The minimum XP for a single achievement is 5 and the maximum is 200.
  • Note: If you plan to add DLC with achievements, or require more than 1,000 total XP across your achievements, you should continue to use Epic Online Services achievements. Support for more than 1,000 XP is coming in a future release.
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Basically something like The Binding of Isaac wouldn't work with Epic achievements as there are over 600 of them and even giving a minimum of 5 XP each would take it way above the 1000 XP cap.
 
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curi0usBystander said:
Aren't EGS cheevos more restrictive ? With their XP system ? What happens with Early Acces games that love to add more and more stuff as they expand the game?
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I don't like this. There's a significant chance that Epic's rules will restrict achievements on Steam as well. Devs won't bother to make different sets of achievements for EGS and Steam.

More than ever, I hope devs and publishers will stop bothering with EGS. Some of them already did, but Epic's influence and cash throws should not be underestimated.
 
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Arc said:
Sonic Frontiers hasn't released on EGS despite the English website saying it would. FWIW, the JP site never mentioned EGS and the JP Sonic site mentions EGS for Origins and Colors so I think the NA webmaster made a goof. Or maybe it'll release on EGS later. Who knows at this point? :shrugblob:



I could have swore Sergiy said achievements wouldn't be mandatory, but looking at his Twitter history, I think I imagined that. Still an interesting policy since it will just add more workload to developers.

Edit:



The "graphic design is my passion" promo is back!
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sad they didn't hit me up

Iu3Dvpc.png
 
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Ge0force said:
Perhaps Epic's exclusivity contract now implies that the game is given away for free if it flops? 🤔
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Actually, the court documents stated that games that massively underperforms (not just underperforms as 95% of Epic exclusives underperform, but "massively underperforms" can be negotiated to free giveaway or something else. I do very much remember that element from the court documents.

So unless that has changed, it does indeed mean it really underperformed.
 
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Might explain the Sonic Colours Steam delay.

I'm also secretly hoping this is why Kingdom Hearts is gummed up, but we all know that's just Square Enix thinking they can announce the Steam versions when they have more to say about KH4.
 
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Timmy's dedication to this crap is beyond comprehension. I'm just so sick and tired of hearing about Epic. All the drama, dreading new game announcements, the idiot minions, blah blah blah. I just don't want to spend any energy on it anymore. And it's quite clearly been a failure. I can't imagine acting like this as a rich af person. Yeah, maybe it is straight up delusion.
 
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I too would like to not pay my mortgage and have a free lunch. Alas, I use products and services to survive and/or make more money, so I pay.

Love it or loathe it, that’s how the world we inhabit works.

I also love how Tim reduces any open or semi-open platform storefront to doing nothing (despite evidence to the contrary), but praises the console makers to high heaven and tries to carry water for their 30% that is somehow justified (and has nothing to do with the fact that if Fortnite was yeeted from Xbox, Switch or PlayStation then Epic would lose a massive amount of revenue).

It’s so transparently obvious that if he could undermine those guys to reduce their 30% cut he would.
 
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www.reuters.com

Epic's 'failure of proof' in Apple antitrust case questioned by appeals panel

"Fortnite" video game maker Epic Games on Monday asked a three-judge federal appeals panel to overturn portions of a lower court antitrust ruling that largely favored Apple Inc and its multibillion dollar App Store payment business.
www.reuters.com www.reuters.com

Epic and Apple will be in court today to appeal last year's verdict in their case. I don't think a new ruling will be announced for up to a year though. Regardless of the 9th Circuit's ruling, there will probably be an appeal to the Supreme Court in the future, however it is not guaranteed the SC would take on the case.
 
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fantomena said:
I honestly expected Goat Sim 3 to review well as it looked really good in the videos, but it's not.
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It does not surprise me too much. I feel the bar for goofy games has risen dramatically over the years and it is risky to rely on wonky physics or zany minigames to be a standout.
 
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Arc said:
www.gematsu.com

Volition moves from Deep Silver to The Gearbox Entertainment Company

Saints Row developer Volition will move from being a subsidiary of Deep Silver, to being a subsidiary of The Gearbox Entertainment Company, Embracer Group announced. Embracer Group is the parent co…
www.gematsu.com www.gematsu.com

Being a subordinate to Randy Pitchford, a fate worse than death.
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tbh cant be worse after being under Deep Silver :-D (still shocks me Embracer didnt kick all the former Deep Silver execs that took the company to the point of near backrupcy before)
 
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Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

www.bloomberg.com

(Archived version in case you hit a paywall).

Alphabet Inc.’s Google paid Activision Blizzard Inc. and Riot Games millions of dollars to not launch competing app stores or to prevent developers from making Android apps outside of the Play Store, according to a court filing from Epic Games Inc.

Fortnite maker Epic Games is in a heated legal battle with Google and Apple Inc. over whether the tech giants’ app store practices are anti-competitive. In an amended complaint on Thursday, Epic says Google agreed in January 2020 to pay Activision $360 million over three years after the game publisher discussed launching its own app store.

Activision, which had said such a decision would depended on whether it could “find the right deal/solution” with Google, then agreed to launch its games on the Google Play store before they debuted on other app stores, the complaint says.

“Google understood that its agreement with ABK effectively ensured that ABK would abandon its plans to launch a competing app store, and Google intended this result,” according to the complaint. A Google spokesperson denied this characterization, saying these deals do not restrict gaming companies from launching competing app stores.

Activision called Epic’s allegations “nonsense. We’ve confirmed Google has never asked or pressured us or made us agree not to compete with the app store,” the company said in a statement. “We’ve submitted documents and testimony that proves this.”
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I'm glad Epic would never pay to make games exclusive to their store. It's so sleazy.

madjoki said:
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4.87, almost perfect!
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I couldn't stomach 20 minutes of the first Goat Simulator. Two hours sounds like torture.
 
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Man, Epic can keep Evil Dead. Boring AF.

The minimap is terrible, can't tell where you are meant to go or do most of the time. You constantly get ambushed by the terrain and walls and enemies just appear.

Also the epic client is the slowest MF'er in existance. The library section clearly can't handle the amount of games they have given away and takes ages to load and filtering takes even longer.
 
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