T w e n t y S i d e d
My column this week is about how the Epic Games Store is gobbling up exclusives. This is earning EGS a lot of anger, but most of the anger is over stuff that Steam has been doing for years. I’m fine with hating on EGS, but can we please not hold them to a higher standard than Steam?
One thing I didn’t touch on in the column is the relationship between Epic Games and the money-harvesting creeps at Tencent. Tencent bought a 40% stake in Epic back in 2013, and having that much of the company owned by an outside force is certainly a potential problem.
When I first heard about the merger / partnership / whatever, I wasn’t really worried. I assumed that it wasn’t a big deal, since they “only” owned 40% of Epic. That’s not a controlling share. But company culture is more important than share ownership, and Epic is enthusiastically embracing the habits and mindset of Tencent. I know you come to this site for text and not video, but if you’ve got twenty minutes to spare then the following video by Dan Olson is definitely worth a watch:
Link (YouTube) |
The first part of the video is an obvious April Fool joke where Olson pretends he’s pivoting his channel to making Fortnite content, but then he settles in and begins dissecting the various systems used to manipulate the player into spending money. Seeing it all laid bare, it feels a bit like someone explaining the design of a hand grenade. I’m horrified and disgusted by the intent of the device, but I can’t help but be impressed at the skill and ingenuity of the execution.
After watching the video, the design of Anthem suddenly makes a lot more sense. I assumed that Anthem was a Destiny clone because that was its closest relative in terms of gameplay, but if you look at the storefront it looks an awful lot like Fortnite. Sure, it’s lacking in content and not nearly as successful or alluring as Fortnite, but that’s because Anthem itself is sort of dull and lacking in content. The intent was clearly there.
The monetization scheme used in Fortnite is very cutthroat and cynical. It’s certainly the result of Tencent teaching Epic how to squeeze money out of an audience. Indeed, that’s what brought the two companies together in the first place. Epic wanted to know how to run a successful FtP game, and Tencent proposed this partnership to make it happen. After the merger, four longtime Epic leaders left the company. From the outside it might look like the damage is limited to the design of Fortnite, but it’s very likely we’re witnessing an overall shift in company culture.
I find Tencent to be rather scary. They’re what EA would be like if the EA leadership knew what they were doing. A fool will drive their fans away with grasping hamfisted monetization systems and tone-deaf PR spin, but a clever businessman will calculate exactly how far they can push their customers without causing backlash. Tencent is very good at figuring out where the line is, and pushing things as far as they can without driving people away. They’re good at what they do, which means they will be very successful. That success is likely to make them the dominant force in the company, just like Andrew Wilson’s initial (and largely accidental) success with FIFA put him in the captain’s chair at EA.
My problem isn’t that people are criticizing Epic, but that people are suddenly so keen on criticizing Epic after giving Valve a free pass for so many years. Some of this backlash feels less like people taking a principled stand and more like they’re annoyed because they don’t want to create another login. By all means, let’s dump on the giant corporation making a mess of things, but let’s make sure we’re presenting a coherent opposition. And let’s not be so quick to let Valve off the hook.
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It’s amazing to look back and realise that over the course of what, four games and the first few years when Steam was alright? That Valve took its place in the collective nerdsphere not as a corporation but some divine infallible force and eternal symbol of what Doing It Right looked like.
That hasn’t been remotely true for years and years but people really struggle with accepting that Valve is a big money-making corporation and not the Shangri-La promised to gamers growing out of Nintendos and Playstations. And the poor sap younger generation have just grown up with it always being there.
Gamers have very short memories. People forget how anti-consumer the whole Steam launch felt at the time, when Valve leveraged the release of their highly-anticipated game to pretty much force everyone (or at least, everyone who wanted to play HL2) onto their platform. And require internet connectivity (at least transient) to play a single-player game, at a time when internet connectivity was really not that standard.
Overall, Valve gets too much credit for the good things on Steam, which are mostly due to the work of other companies.
Valve is still a privately-hold company, right? When other companies are caught with their pants down there’s often a quarterly earnings report or something similar that lays out the whole evil scheme, but there are fewer obvious smoking guns with Valve. Gabe Newell’s salary isn’t a matter of public record the way Bobby Kotick’s is (though Forbes has made efforts to estimate it) so Jim Sterling can’t constantly throw up numbers to demonstrate Valve’s injustices as frequently. Almost no one besides Newell has an actual job title at Valve so there are no obvious targets for ire or ridicule the way project leads or department heads or senior execs at other companies can be singled out.
So criticism of the rest of the games industry is often presented like pointing out a cabal of supervillains and that narrative appeals to the outrage social media machine that can drive a news cycle. Meanwhile criticism of Steam can feel like getting angry at a vending machine for not giving you the right soft drink. It’s legitimate and justified, but can easily come across as petty and too impersonal for onlookers to get invested in.
No, I wanted orange. It gave me lemon-lime.
The machine would not make a mistake.
At least it wasn’t the incendiary lemon.
People do not regard these games as exclusives because they were not, in the literal sense of the word, published there to “exclude” others. In many cases Steam is the only platform that a small-time indie can release at all if they can’t or don’t want to enter a deal with a major publisher. I know I am simplifying things, but to release something on Steam it basically takes some paperwork and a small one-time fee. Other platforms do not offer this option, or not to everyone. Therefore, it is the other platforms that exclude many of these games from their stores. It’s not Steam that gets in the way of releases on other stores, but the other stores themselves.
If we imagine a publisher that wants to release their new game on Steam and EGS simultaneously, and then Steam said “no, we don’t want you here”, then of course we couldn’t begrudge EGS for being the only one to release it. But that’s not the case with any of these EGS exclusives.
I know you are just playing devil’s advocate, but we as gamers, as customers, naturally do – nay, MUST – act in our own interests, as such is the nature of capitalism. What may be “good for the industry”, i.e. first and foremost the publisher companies, is not necessarily, and in fact rarely ever, good for us. And it’s not as if the companies would ever behave selflessly “for the good of the industry” whenever it would benefit only us and not them – so why should the burden of some kind of self-sacrifice (as laughable as that very concept may be) be on us. And this is assuming that any of the troubles of the industry are related to or caused by a lack of digital storefronts, which I find a dubious claim to begin with.
Ah well, so you’re not playing devil’s advocate, you really believe the guy. I say he is a liar and knows damn well that what Epic does is not, never was, “for the good of the industry”, nor any other nebulous altruistic purpose. The goal is to carve out a market share with brute force, customer choice be damned.
Now of course profit is the purpose of any company, so I don’t begrudge them for that. However, I have a very deep loathing for anyone who pretends to work towards some noble cause when they are in fact merely serving their own selfish purposes.
People have not at all been giving Valve a free pass when they started Steam in its initial terrible state. The trust and attachment to the platform has been developed over many years during which the platform improved and solved some real problems (e.g. managing our ever-growing game libraries in the post-physical-media era of video games).
Enter EGS, which soes not solve a problem anyone currently has, and instead creates a multitude of new problems, brings back some old problems we considered overcome (e.g. savegame backups through cloud saves), and ices this cake with copious amounts of disregard bordering on contempt for us, the customers.
Because on Steam, Origin, UPlay, GOG, etc, we the gamers are the customers.
On EGS, we are not the customers, we are the product and the publishers are the real customers. That’s a fundamental shift in the relationship between storefront and consumer, a shift that I believe is not accidental, but the actual grand plan behind the EGS.
“Ah well, so you’re not playing devil’s advocate, you really believe the guy.”
To be clear: I believe that HE believes what he is saying. Like I said above, the Tencent stuff is bad and there’s no way to sugar-coat it.
Also, I think giving devs a better cut is 100% a good thing. One good thing doesn’t magically balance out five bad ones, but it IS a good thing. I’m just trying to be fair so people can’t accuse me of reflexive opposition.
Any game that moneyhats to the Epic store and then turns around and releases a physical console package puts the lie in the ‘Valve is taking too much money’ claim in full view. Valve takes less of the publisher’s money than Wal-Mart, Target, Gamestop or any other physical release method. It’s not a small difference, either. A physical box release sold at $60 nets on average $27 for the publisher. Steam nets them $48. In fact, at $40 a sale they’d make a dollar more than physical retail, which they wanted to do once upon a time in the early days of Steam but retail outlets screamed bloody murder over it and threatened to pull their products from shelves.
Do stores even stock PC games anymore? It’s been too long since I went to a Gamestop.
Shamus, do you really believe that a corporate shill honestly believes in his own kool-aid? That’s all he is anymore. There is no difference – *none* – between Sweeney and the executive swarm circling EA, Activision, Microsoft, and Sony. And to bring up Microsoft, Sweeney quite literally is trying to becoming the very devil he denounced a couple years ago.
I think it’s importent to have a clear line between “shill” and “someone who believes stuff I disagree with”.
You claim there is no difference between Sweeney and the EA execs, but that’s simply not true:
* He isn’t a suit by trade. He’s an engineer.
* He has decades of experience as a developer.
* He actually understands the industry. At least, he’s got a grasp on it better than the likes of Andrew Wilson.
By all means, disagree with the guy. I think the partnership with Tencent is grotesque. But I can also see how someone might justify that sort of thing to themselves.
“People like Fortnite, right? There’s no backlash. So it’s okay. We’re not hurting anyone!”
“We’re giving a lot of this money to indies and giving indies a better cut of sales, so we’re good for the industry.”
And so on. He’s not a devil. He’s just a guy I disagree with.
I thought about responding now but I would prefer to wait and discuss, perhaps tonight. You don’t owe me a response, and I appreciate that you did anyway.
The awkward thing is that I’m very conscious this is your site. But I also think you are allowing you aren’t seeing the situation clearly regarding Sweeney. So forgive me if I think very carefully about how to respond first.
I have only two quotes to add to this conversation:
“Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity or incompetence. ”
“Everyone is the hero of their own story.”
In other words, self-justification is a powerful and sometimes destructive tool.
You are….correct.
You win the internet today. Congrats.
>On EGS, we are not the customers, we are the product and the publishers are the real customers. That’s a fundamental shift in the relationship between storefront and consumer, a shift that I believe is not accidental, but the actual grand plan behind the EGS.
And to Valve, you are neither customer nor product. If Valve cared about us as customers at all, there would be a game featuring Gordan Freeman with ‘3’ in the title.
Itch.io is available for indies, and has been for a while. They give you a free page to show your game, and handle payments for you. They even let you set the portion that they will take from your profits. Not Valve or Apple’s 30%, not Epic’s 12% – you can set this percentage down to 1% if you feel like it! Not only is their website a viable alternative to Steam, it’s an extremely attractive one!
Yes, and plenty of indies use itch.io in addition to Steam. However, if you read Gamasutra or go to GDC you pretty quickly realise that sales on itch.io are small and not sufficient to sustain even indies profitably. Itch.io is just too small and the reality is that trying to achieve some level of success, even very minor success, on Steam brings in much more money.
Steam hoarding exclusives was the one part of the article I didn’t really agree with. As you said Steam isn’t being the restrictive one here, all the other storefronts are. As far as I know all Steam ever asked was that if you’re going to release on other storefronts as well they want you to release on the same day and for the same price. And even then clearly there’s leeway since they’re letting Metro: Exodus onto the store in a year. That seems pretty fair to me. Didn’t Good Robot try to get on GoG but was turned down?
I know there’s recently been a huge outcry over Steam not being curated but so many games wouldn’t see the light of day or would be forced onto like Itch.io which is a site I know about for indies but have never cared to go to because Steam most likely has them. I think Jim Sterling did a whole video about how indies are moving to the Switch and getting way more sales. Well ya…it’s curated and if Nintendo accepts you then great! But 99.9% of indies won’t be accepted. Steam doesn’t have exclusives because they want to, it’s that every other major storefront won’t have them. That’s why there’s no complaint about it because if you complain what can Steam do about it? Force Origin, Uplay, GoG, EGS to let all these games onto their own stores? For some people having the curated lists IS the major selling point for people.
Yes, Epic’s exclusivity is obviously worse than the de facto exclusivity of Steam. But I think Shamus’ point is that in a monopoly effectively everything is an exclusive. At least now consumers have the chance for some choice in platform. Hopefully consumer pressure will reduce exclusives on both platforms.
So Steam isn’t and has never been a “monopoly”. This term actually means something more than being dominant. Also, customers do not have a choice in platform when the “competitor” demands exclusivity. Where exactly is my choice for Phoenix Point, Outer Worlds, Borderlands 3? Right, I don’t have one.
Epic is playing the role of Wal-Mart here with loss leaders to drive down competition and once dominant raise the prices again.
Epic could compete just on developer price breaks alone (if they had release a storefront that wasn’t 10 years behind) — they don’t need to yank customers away just encourage them.
I thought the problem with some exclusives to the EGS was that they somehow got some games from Kickstarter that were promising Steam keys as rewards?
If I recall correctly this is the case for one of the games. There are other cases where games were already sold/preordered on Steam and then moved to EGS at least temporarily. Metro and The Walking Dead-The final Season fall into the latter category.
This is a somewhat scummy move as well.
We have to wait and see how all of that shakes out.
To be fair I know that at least the Metro Exodus preorders were still delivered to people via Steam. On the other hand I’m not sure what the status of the planned DLC is.
That’s for The Outer Worlds – and apparently those developers are offering full refunds for the Kickstarter money to anyone who wants it.
Metro Exodus was initially offered on Steam before becoming an Epic exclusive. Those who pre-ordered it on Steam (literally the only exception to ‘NEVER PRE-ORDER’) will still get it and content and patch updates through Steam but you can’t buy it there anymore.
The outer worlds was not on kickstarter. You may be thinking of phoenix point (though while I know that was on fig, I’m unsure if it was on kickstarter either).
You’re right, my mistake.
The developers were offering refunds, but only if you provided them with bank details directly with no 3rd party security. With how secure companies have been with storing personal data taking the refund could easily be a risk larger than $60.
Luckily, none of the game studios are going to be harmed by having their Steam debut being mere months before release. EGS is giving them more than enough money to make up for the delayed hype.
Only time will tell, if the money given to the devs at least balances out the number of delayed sales given the exclusivity. Especially given the fact that some games are interesting but not killer apps. Each and every game, which I personally am interested in and switched to EGS has not enough pull to take me along. I will wait the year.
The other thing is that EGS doesn’t actually offer lump sums of money, but revenue guarantees. You negotiate a guarantee of X dollars in a Y time frame and Epic promise to pay you any outstanding difference at the end of the window. Which means once you pass the revenue threshold it’s like they haven’t actually given you anything at all in return for locking yourself out of the much larger Steam market.
I think it says a lot about the over-saturated and over-competitive nature of the indie market that a deal being offered by Epic, that only really makes sense if you’re expecting your game might bomb, is proving so irresistible to so many developers.
(In most cases the explanation offered (when it’s not ‘the decision was out of our hands’) is something like, ‘whatever happens, Epic have covered the development costs for the project’, meaning that the EGS is effectively subsiding the creation of games like the patronage system of old. That’s kind of amusing in a market context.)
For a comprehensive look at exactly how cutthroat the market is for indies today I recommend Joel Goodwin’s excellent ebook on the subject (it’s free!)
I did not expect that this was done any other way. Given the fact that most publishers offer such deals there is no surprise in that.
Either you get money up front and once your split has covered the amount you get your cut from every sale or you get a cut of every sale from the start but the cut is smaller.
Not the greatest options in the world here. The question still remains if this deal helps the devs in the long run. Is the revenue guarantee enough to cover a possible loss of image and delayed sales if not possibly some lost ones as well.
The typical deal from a publisher is an ‘advance’. It’s exactly that- an advance against future revenue. It’s useful when the author is risk-averse or has cashflow problems.
Epic is not a publisher, and Snapshot is not risk-averse and did not have cashflow problems. There would be no benefit to giving away a year’s exclusivity while accepting an advance, and doing so would actually expose the person who made that decision to civil liability.
The deal as you’re describing is hedging. Like all hedging, it can cut into your gains, but in the current market, removing the possibility for a massive loss is such a great sweetheart deal you’d have to be kind of stupid to pass it up. Gee, should I take a potential cut to earnings or allow for a possible $250 million loss next quarter? Let me think real hard here…
But that really depends on the projected potential cut.
If in you case the cut would be somewhere between 100k and 1m. It is a sweet deal.
If the potential earnings cut can range somewhere between 500k and 500m it is risky.
And so on.
That is why I am stating that it will take some time to see if there are long term consequences to these decisions.
There might be unforeseen long tail things like people really boycotting some devs over this or the game does not sell in the long run due to the first run not being successful leading to a lack of word of mouth.
Gamer boycotts are notoriously, hilariously toothless. If Borderlands 3 is great, these “boycott” gamers will just buy it anyway, run the game through Steam as a non-Steam game and have a good time.
I’m not going to buy BL3 on Epic. If I buy it at all, it will be on Steam.
Steam’s market is not necessarily “much larger”.
Steam has something like 90m regular users, the Epic store has 83m, and that’s before a lot of these big name exclusives are out.
(Also, the Indie market is busily decamping to the Switch where they can get their product noticed, Indie focused Directs are probably helping that a lot too.)
Fortnite has 83m regular users, not the store attached to its launcher. The demographic skews towards time-rich, money-poor teens who are on the service in the first place because it’s a free way to game.
I love my Switch but the gold rush to the eshop is already well in the late stage of opportunity vs saturation. There’s well over 1,000 games on the store, which is slow, crowded, and has dramatically worse discoverability than even something like Steam. If you want to be noticed you either have to already be top of the pile, released in the last week, or discounting aggressively. In all three cases you’ll still need a hefty dose of luck because it’s six games to a page and scrolling down is laggy, load-y and generally unfun.
That’s not the way that it was explained to me as a holder of game shares in Pheonix Point.
“As a reminder to shareholders, upfront payments paid by distributors to Snapshot are counted as revenue, and contribute to returns for Fig investors.”
And people are perfectly capable of waiting. How many is up for question, of course. I’ve been waiting for State of Decay 2 to get off the MS store exclusivity. Ain’t buying it there, period. If for no other reason than the MS store keeps everything encrypted and makes modding near impossible.
Same reason I won’t buy The Outer Worlds from the MS store.
But I’m almost 48 now, I have a massive game library and other non-gaming stuff to do. Plus I think I’ve mostly out-aged FOMO.
Yes, they delayed or even lost YOUR Steam sale. But they were paid more than enough for that.
I mean that’s debatable. Remember back when Microsoft had a timed exclusive for Rise of the Tomb Raider. Sure Square Enix must have been paid huge sum of money to make up for lost sales but not only does it damage the current game’s sales but also any sequels. Rise of the Tomb Raider sold 4 million copies less than Tomb Raider 2013 (7 and 11 respectively). And The President of Square Enix came out and said that the sequel Shadow came out with “a weak start” which would explain why it’s constantly 50% off on Steam. Heck the first week of sales for Shadow 71% were from the ps4! So for that exclusive they cut off 71% of their customers for a year, and when that year was up people had already forgotten about it. You only get 1 launch after all. Heck I got Rise this year for a whopping 14 dollars CAD.
Now it’s possible all the lower sales are due to reduced quality and such but these are major problems and I’m willing to bet when you cut off 71% of your players for exclusivity they’ll be less inclined to play your sequels and that will screw you over long term.
The cost of reduced sales of sequels is indeed large. But it can still be measured in money.
Oh I’m not letting Valve of the hook, especially since they aren’t doing jack shit in reaction. They’re not even lowering their insane 30% ask on each game’s price.
That and their incredible apathy regarding Artefact’s spectacular failure (they still won’t make it free2play!) makes me feel like their mechanisms are utterly clogged by hubris.
That’s not a very historical perspective. ‘Insane’ was the physical retail model, where developers were lucky to see $5 from a $50 sale after all distribution and publishing partners had taken their bite of the pie. That Valve (alongside Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo and Apple) were willing to offer a comparatively generous 30/70 split for access to their reach and distribution channels was the reason indies were able to go from a fringe, semi-professional cottage industry selling a few hundred copies of their games in the mid ’00s to a chunk of the market so vibrant and accessible it began to compete itself into an existential crisis within a decade.
Valve could definitely do more, however. I’d like to see them offer something like an up front promise that the first $10,000 is exempt from a cut for all developers.
Yes, but the point is that a 30/70 split is EXTREMELY profitable for the online game store. Valve are basically printing money. It isn’t a directly comparable situation with the worse split at retail because retail has hugely higher overheads. I would hazard a guess that Valve’s net profit % on games turnover is much, much higher than the net profit % retail stores have on their games turnover.
So we have a situation where Valve have been deliberately charging excessive fees because they are the big boys and can get away with it. From that point of view I am very happy that Epic are taking them on and effectively pointing out that an online game store can be profitable with a much smaller percentage (12/88 split). That in turn puts that much extra money back in the hands of the developers.
There was a recent statement from Valve about Artifact, actually. Maybe the response is still apathetic, but in case you hadn’t seen it:
Towards A Better Artifact
They at least know there’s a problem.
What exactly do you want Valve to do? Epic isn’t gaining exclusives because of the cut. It’s gaining exclusives it pays for. If Valve announces tomorrow that they’re reducing their cut to 10%, everyone is gonna clap, anyone who was going to take Epic’s money to become an Epic exclusive will STILL take Epic’s money to become an Epic exclusive, and Steam will have cut their revenue to a third for no gain whatsoever.
The only way for Valve to really fight back, is to start paying for exclusives of their own. Is this really the future of digital distribution that the advocates of “more competition” want?
I’m pretty confident you are wrong. As someone who is developing a game (part-time) and is keeping up on the game dev scene as much as possible, the revenue split is a massive difference for developers. Getting paid a big lump sum exclusive amount is also huge, but it doesn’t change the importance of the revenue split difference.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but no game has become an Epic exclusive because they offer a better revenue split. They’ve all become exclusives for the lump sum. And if Steam offers the same split as Epic, the lump sum will still make them choose Epic exclusivity.
I bet Steam could gain some exclusives just by offering a better cut. Steam does have the advantage in that they don’t need millions of dollars in marketing to get users.
To say nothing of the fact that it’s all very well crying about storeholder greed, but for the system to function we actually want the platforms the games live on to be financially healthy, especially considering this digital age where when a store goes under, everyone loses access to all their purchases. A race to the bottom on revenue share is hardly conducive to financial health – Steam might not be threatened but the likes of GoG, Humble and Discord most certainly stand to be.
Is access to Steamworks included in the 30% cut? Because if it is, well, Steamworks is infrastructure and infrastructure isn’t free. Come to think of it, how useful is the Workshop? I don’t have answers to these questions, but we may need to do more research before saying Steam is just taking 30% to stick it in their own pockets.
I think the supposed success of third party titles on EGS is something of a paper tiger. The statements about Metro Exodus’ sales are very carefully worded to exploit an obvious amphiboly, one that only becomes clear if one fully understands a set of (somewhat obscure) relevant facts. The statement goes something like, “Metro Exodus sold 2.5 times more copies than Last Light did on Steam.” A few concerns:
-Metro Exodus had a much bigger marketing push than Last Light.
-Exodus was also riding Last Light and 2033’s coattails.
-Is that just the Epic Store sales versus Steam sales? We don’t have hard figures, so we can’t know, and the person making the claim knows this.
-Metro Last Light was released twice on Steam, the second release was called Last Light Redux.
-After Redux was released the original Last Light was pulled from the Steam store and it’s now impossible to get a copy of the original release (which is a real shame, the Redux releases aren’t unambiguous improvements over the originals) and has been for about four years now.
-Are they including the Redux sales with the original Last Light release? Somehow I doubt it. I think they’re including only the Steam sales of the original Last Light, a product which hasn’t been available for sale since early 2015, and measuring that against all three platforms and wording their statement ambiguously to create the illusion that it’s within a mile of being an apples-to-apples comparison.
The comparison was over the same time period too.
The problems with Epic have been going on since Tencent acquired their share. The switcheroo with Fortnite, closing Paragon, the accusations by Bluehole, now this bullshit. It’s telling that the people who put Epic on the map back in the day are no longer with the company. Like Shamus said, if Tencent are EA doing it right, then Epic feels like a version of Bioware doing it right (at least after reading the Kotaku article yesterday and looking at the culture change from a merger with a financial partner that can dictate some shots).
I’m not sure you understand the reason for why people dislike these exclusives.
This reminds me a lot of a discussion I had in these very comments sections with Campster about Steam Greenlight and adult games. He kept singling out and attacking Steam for censoring adult games in the system, and acting like they were bigots while I kept trying to make him understand that the whole videogame industry was at fault here and Steam was the only one at least trying to do something about it.
Surely you have to concede that if Steam is the only one giving these developers the possibility to release their games, then getting angry at Steam for this would be absolutely preposterous. No one will be mad at the Epic Store for bringing exclusives that no one else cared about. Hell, they are indeed porting three Playstation David Cage games, and from what I hear they are the ones who came up with the idea, so it’s perfectly fine if they want to keep those games exclusives to their store.
See, again the problem is not just the mere fact that they have exclusives, but why and how. They don’t have the majority of their exclusives because they’re the only ones who want to give those games an opportunity, and certainly not because they’ve been before other stores. They’re doing it to force people into using their store. I don’t know about you, but I like to choose a place to buy because it has some services or features that I find appealing, not because they make themselves the only choice. I honestly can’t find a way to put a good spin into this without ignoring this major issue.
Worse: sometimes they get exclusives by the process of removing games that were already for sale on Steam, removing games that hadn’t launched but were able to be pre-ordered on Steam and even making deals with developers who had successful Kickstarter campaigns under the promise of delivering on Steam and have them ignore those promises to become exclusives to them.
And yeah, yeah, those are “timed” exclusives and all, but funny how all those exclusives always become “timed” after there’s immense backlash. Plus, what’s going to happen a year or so from now when those games launch on Steam? Are they going to be at full price? Are they going to bring some extra content? How are they going to compensate to people who had to wait a whole year for those games, if at all? It’s too early to accept that consolation prize.
I don’t think this is a fair assessment of the situation. You seem to be putting too much stock into what gaming news websites are claiming is the reason people don’t want to use the EGS (i.e. “Waaah! Installing a new client is too much work!”) instead of the actual reasons, which these websites keep gleefully ignoring (the exclusives system is predatory, their store is in dire need of basic functionality even months after launch, they insist on the anti-consumer approach of not having forums or the ability to review games, etc.).
Sure, yes, giving developers a more fair share is great. It’s fantastic. But it’s also a wake-up call. Look at how many developers instantly jumped ship under the promise of more money (well, “potential” more money that depends on a number of sales I’m still not convinced they’re getting) without even taking a second to consider what their customers wanted. This is a double sided street. Why should I care about a developer that clearly cares nothing about me?
People have been clamoring for a good competitor to Steam for years. The reason people aren’t happy with the EGS isn’t that they don’t want to move from the familiar (I mean, sure, there are a few people here and there that do, but I think it’s clear they’re the minority), it’s that the new option in town just doesn’t cut it. Accepting something merely because is different is no less silly than refusing it merely because it’s not the same.
The worst part is that this could have been easily avoided. If Epic hadn’t insisted on forcing exclusives, people would have had a good reason to consider using their store: cheaper prices and free games. All they had to do was present their benefits and let people make their choice. But alas…
There are valid points here. Your perspective on why the exclusivity is a problem is insightful to someone like me who doesn’t care about said exclusivity.
Assume I’m not disagreeing except in this reagard. “How are they going to compensate to people who had to wait a whole year for those games, if at all?” kind of begs the question as I see it. People don’t have to wait except in that, as old Ben Kenobi said, “You must do what you feel is right, of course.” They will choose to wait.
There are consequences to rolling Paragon, if that’s how one sees refusing to use the Epic Store. Specifically, anyone who doesn’t see it as Paragon has no incentive to reward. In the dev’s mind, everyone could have just bought the game from Epic. Since the devs took the timed exclusivity, they don’t see the player buying the game during that time as a concession and not doing so as praiseworthy.
To the real/perceived reason distinction, please allow me to speak as someone who, again, doesn’t much care whether I buy on Steam or Epic. I hear your legitimate issues with the store. Here’s the thing: much like those devs who jump ship, I can be bought. I got an Epic account to buy Hades because I like Super Giant; I didn’t need a shopping cart, reviews, or forums. I log in every two weeks for the free game; again, the missing features don’t matter to me. They don’t damage my UX. It’s interesting to read about how they damage other people’s UX because they must be doing things differently than I am. People complain about the business practice of predatory exclusivity. Well, makes no difference to me, since the UX is not degraded in my use of the store, so it’s not perceivably worse to be buying it from Epic. That brings me to not buying because I don’t want to support the business. The political power of where an individual puts their capital is undoubtedly a fire starter, so I’ll just say I’m not bothered enough by Epic as an entity to let them have some of my money.
Realized I didn’t say what that last part has to do with real/perceived complaints.
To me, all Epic seemed to cost was one more account plus launcher. Like Shamus suggests above, I’m trying to learn why it seems to be costing other potential users more than that while Steam didn’t.
May I introduce you to GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux? It is a full OS as defined by POSIX that has received much support and love from the videogame publisher/retailer Valve and isn’t at all supported by the Epic Games Store run by Tencent.
As GNU+Linux offers its users vast freedom and power to define the way they wish to do their computing I can only recommend in the strongest terms you let yourself be introduced to a philosophy and technology that will change your life for the better.
That might be the kindest Linux pitch I’ve ever read.
I linked below in another one of your comments, but http://askagamedev.tumblr.com/post/182220552875/what-would-necessary-for-linux-to-become-bigger gives the cause of the problem.
I see now that there are people who have technical reasons they can’t use Epic. There just aren’t a large percentage, and it’s sad that several devs are willing to leave them out in the cold when they don’t have to.
Kind, yes. A bit obnoxious, also yes. I’d have just said that Linux respects your freedom, and supports an ecosystem that doesn’t allow nonsense like spyware, vendor lock-in, etc.
It’s a meme, so I deserve 0 credit for it. Thanks, though!
Dangit. I didn’t know it was a meme; I just thought you were serious / evangelizing in an annoying way. ^^;
I think devs are willing to leave anyone out in the cold when they require 25 times as much overhead as the rest of the playerbase. And the Game Dev’s recommendation – “If Linux gamers could all concentrate with one build and a unified set of drivers, it’d make things a lot easier” – is basically asking Linux to surrender the adaptibility that is the core of it’s appeal.
Steam didn’t support Linux for a long time. And Epic is looking to hire people to make their client (CEF, specifically) work on Wine/Proton.
Also, just call it Linux.
That’s not really relevant. Epic is competing with Steam and other stores as they exist now, not as they existed in the past. Right now, Steam and GOG have excellent Linux support. Epic could have chosen to have Linux support at launch. Epic chose otherwise. They don’t deserve any credit for Linux support until they actually offer it.
Does it offer DirectX support? Because I need DirectX support.
Steam didn’t because at the time it was Steam or nothing.
Now, I have 600 dozen logins spread over tons of websites and programs. Its getting harder and harder to manage that stuff.
Now, what is Epic offering that is worth adding one more to that list?
The answer is – nothing. They are offering nothing. They have nothing to offer. Even if you think adding an Epic store account is trivial – they still have nothing to offer that’s worth that trivial amount of effort. They know this – which is why they’re throwing money around to lock titles down. Because that’s how they plan to get something to offer you to make it worth adding one more running program and one more login and password to that ever-growing list.
That is obviously not correct, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
They are offering a game that you want, that is not on Steam. How much do you want that game? Enough to create another account/password? Probably not enough to change operating systems, but then, isn’t some of “Does this game support Linux?” actually on the developer and not the store?
Now you can complain that that game WOULD have been on Steam if it weren’t for Epic, but you cannot, fairly, ask “What are they offering that Steam doesn’t?” because they have clearly taken steps to ensure that there are answers to that one.
Without this attempt at locking out distribution channels – they have nothing.
So that’s why they’re doing the thing you hate?
Actually, better question. What WOULD suffice to get you to move? I’m getting the sense that the whole complaint is “I don’t want to, and they are making me!” but if they didn’t MAKE you, there’s nothing they could do to get you to move. So what choice do they have?
So I don’t want to sound overly combative but I’d prefer if we didn’t attribute intentions. For example I could argue that a number of developers claimed that game development was becoming more expensive and the “base game price” should go up so, just as much as you claim that those devs “don’t care about you” I could argue that they’re “going over to Epic to not have to raise prices” or “they go over to epic so they can have more profits and thus spend more money on making better games”, I don’t think this is their first consideration (even if I believe that the devs getting a bigger cut is beneficial to the development of their games) but we can go all day by speculating on intentions.
Also, I will point out that most of the devs who were so considerate to release their games on Steam did not care enough to release them on GOG where they’d be expected to drop DRM.
This is especially true of indie devs, who especially on Steam may well not have a guaranteed audience to rely on. Simply having a guarantee that their game will not bomb is such a tantalizing offer in the present climate that it’s no surprise so many have taken it.
Nobody wants the game they put so much hard work, money, and time into to vanish without a peep into the depths of the Steam store and sink their small studio for good. This has become such a common occurrence on Steam that all Epic has to do is guarantee some measure of success to land basically any indie studio they want.
It’s not that these little companies “don’t care” about their players – it’s that they’re doing what they need to in order to keep the lights on and keep making games. Between the significant chance of total failure and having all one’s financial worries obliterated before the game even comes out in exchange for an exclusivity deal, why would an indie studio choose the former?
It’s not about profits or greed. Nobody goes small indie to make money. Success for them means they get to keep making games.
If you look at the indies who have one Epic exclusive, they’re not really “small”. They’re established studios like Coffee Stain and Supergiant who have already risen to the level that their games automatically get press and would normally get higher billing on any given digital storefront than, say, Pyrodactyl.
I don’t think this really counts as philanthropy by Epic. They’ve targeted studios who will – judged on previous performance – make money, who will provide their own exposure / advertising, and who are at that tricky point where they’re just getting comfortable making a decent wage and a commercial failure will mean people losing jobs. As pointed out above, they’re not giving lump sums but guaranteed income, so if these games sell, Epic doesn’t even need to pay out. They’re basically just selling insurance.
What they conspicuously haven’t done is gone out and help unknown studios. Tiny studios are in some ways less vulnerable to big cash injections, because they don’t have to make payroll in the same way as, say, Obsidian, and can go back to their day jobs if this game dev thing doesn’t work out. They don’t need guaranteed income as much as they need exposure, and Epic (who have only just implemented basic search functionality!) don’t really seem to be any more interested in providing exposure than Valve is.
Oh I’m not saying that Epic are some kind of knight in shining armour for indies. They very clearly picked high profile titles that would draw attention and their store in its current sorry state is just not suited to actually handling a large number of titles. My answer was specifically to the notion that the devs who went over to Epic have somehow turned against their customers.
They targeted relatively small studios that were making products that were expected to be unique, certain to actually be released, and could pull people to the EGS.
Tiny studios that don’t have products that would make people switch to EGS wouldn’t do it; games that have many substitutes that are nearly as good also wouldn’t work.
Eh. GOG curates their store based on some esoteric process that makes little sense to me, so it’s possible for an indie dev to have their game rejected by GOG.
This is true. We got a hard “no” out of GoG when we tried to put Good Robot on the platform.
I really wanted people to have a no-DRM version of the game (without having to run my own storefront) but GoG wasn’t interested.
That’s fine. I still love the platform anyway. I just wanted to point out that Leocruta is correct about GoG’s curation.
Please allow me to take your mention of Good Robot and try to use it to illustrate a couple frustrating points that you seem to have not considered in your defense of Epic:
A) You say “The problem is that nobody gets upset at Steam for having thousands of exclusives”. But Good Robot ended up a Steam exclusive. Why should I be upset at Steam for that?
B) Let’s say Good Robot is released soon, in the current market. Given no other incentives, I assume you would want to release the game on both Epic and Steam: 88% of a smaller userbase vs 70% of a larger one wouldn’t be enough to push you exclusively towards either, even if the difference in user numbers is unknown and possibly not that large. You did want to release on GoG, after all. You would, of course, try to push your fans towards Epic which, even if barebones and lacking in basic features, is undeniably better for you, the developer that we care about. So far so good. No one has a problem with this arrangement, even if it isn’t ideal.
Now, let’s say Epic offers you their standard “exclusivity money” deal. It’s an offer large enough that you’re willing to overlook the loss of sales. (There will be an unknown amount of people who is willing to buy your game on Steam, but not on Epic) So, you accept the deal. And you win, a guaranteed income. Something very valuable indeed, as I think you yourself discovered with Good Robot. Epic wins, the income of your game if it’s a smash hit and some new users even if it isn’t. But they do win, or they wouldn’t offer that deal. So everyone wins.
Except for Steam. So, let’s see it from Steam’s perspective. What would it take for them to “win” against Epic’s tactics, or at least “stop losing”?
Let’s say they match Epic’s cut, as many people want them to do. So they lower it to 12% as well. Now, the choice you face as prospective game developer is 88% of every sale on Steam, vs 88% of every sale on Epic, PLUS the guaranteed money for your game to become an exclusive. So your game still becomes an exclusive, Valve has earned nothing with this move. Steam HAS to offer a similar exclusivity deal as well. There is absolutely no other way for Steam to compete.
And where does that lead us? Epic has its exclusives. Steam has its exclusives. Origin, Battle.net, UPlay, all have their exclusives. But almost no game is shared between the stores. And every smaller store that cannot afford exclusives is annihilated. We have traded the accidental and largely benevolent hegemony of Steam for an absolutely locked market, where you can no longer shop around for better deals on HumbleBundle or GreenManGaming, or buy DRM-free from GoG. Because Steam can adapt and survive Epic’s push by simply adopting the same tactics. While GoG is already on financial trouble, and HumbleBundle and the like are incompatible with Epic’s wannabe monopoly.
I don’t see how HumbleBundle is incompatible with Epic, especially since it was said in the gameindustry article that Shamus linked in his article says that there had been a deal between Humble and Epic.
I don’t know much about the game store stuff, but I have had problems with Steam involving their treatment of gambling in their games and their apparent dislike of refunding games. I am sad that Epic’s biggest game has some similar shady gambling shenanigans.
I stand corrected, on that specific point. Apparently Epic’s exclusivity means “exclusively everywhere but Steam”. That still leaves GoG dead though, or at least reliant on Epic’s permission to survive.
And have you seen the video about Fortnite’s monetarization? Valve may have some problems with microtransactions, but Epic is ten times worse. And it is highly hypocritical to use it as a point against Valve, when at worst they both engage in the same behaviour.
Steam has to compete by /making Epic expect to lose/.
If so many people refuse to switch to Epic for Good Robot that Epic can’t offer enough money to make Good Robot exclusive for Shamus to profit from the deal, the deal doesn’t happen.
Epic doesn’t expect to get their money back on the exclusives, they expect to get their money back by getting new users.
Personally, I’ll take the free games and buy any exclusives that I want; I have zero loyalty to Steam. But for EGS to make a net profit from me, they’re going to have to develop user experience that I like at least as much as Steam, because even if they offered lower prices I’m not price-sensitive enough to go there first while they are still making a net profit on the sale.
But DRM on Steam is entirely optional and the choice of the developer/publisher. I would have assumed Good Robot on Steam was released DRM free anyway.
I’m sure it is, but Steamworks games still require Steam to be installed. A game through GoG can be burned to a CD, transfered to another computer, and will run just fine standalone.
(To be clear, this is the system as I understand it. I’ve never personally tried to run a DRM-free Steam game without Steam installed.)
Kerbal Space Program on Steam is DRM free and you can just launch it without Steam, and it has some Steamworks stuff implemented (e.g. trading cards) but runs fine without Steam anyway.
That is true but while there have been cases of somewhat puzzling rejections (I believe Zachtronics’ Opus Magnum was one) I suspect GOG would not deny, say, Outer Worlds or The Sinking City, yet I don’t remember seeing them marketed at GOG despite it being more consumer friendly due to no DRM.
Look, I’m not trying to pretend Steam is perfect. There is definitely an issue regarding how they accept games. Many developers have already claimed that due to how their games are integrated into Steam they have problems releasing updates into other platforms. Whether this is an unexpected issue due to Steam’s infrastructure or a purposely put barrier for Steam to avoid competition is up for debate, but the fact is that it’s there and makes some developer choose not to release on GOG because they simply don’t want the users to have an inferior product just because they chose another platform.
Again, there’s the problem of them needing a high number of sales to reach the same amount of money they’d get simply from Steam’s much higher exposure. Their lack of transparency and extremely fast decision making betrays a complete lack of consideration. They simply saw numbers that sounded more appealing to them and jumped ship instantly. The smarter developers are carefully bidding their time, seeing how others do before going exclusive.
Plus, all you have to do is read interviews with developers. A few started claiming that yes, they wanted more money to make better games, but, again, only after the immense amount of backlash. Originally, they were all “More money? Sign me up!”. Sure, you can still claim that they wanted that money to develop better games, but, again, the quick way they made the decision makes it look less like their hearths swelled than that their eyes glowed with dollar signs.
To clarify, I’m not trying to paint devs, indie or otherwise, as some kind of self-sacrificing saints (and I have my own set of problems with the Epic store but they’re mostly like Shamus’ feature related rather than principle related) but I also never understood the expectation that people (in whatever industry) need to explain or justify wanting to be paid for their work, or wanting to be paid more. To me this is literally a no brainer, devs who made the game I like get more money, if this can happen without me paying more that is good. I don’t need to know if they spend those money to buy better rendering software, to pay rent or to buy fancy erotic toys, it’s their money and they earned it by delivering a product (I’m talking about paying for the game, Kickstarter and other such platforms are a somewhat different matter). I could very well demand that they release the game for free after selling so many copies. What would your opinion be if devs did not go Epic exclusive but instead released on both stores but raised the price on Steam to the point where they’d be getting the same amount of money?
I suspect we’ll ultimately have to disagree, our difference of opinion primarily lies in deciding whether what the devs are doing here is harmful to the customer and our mileage somewhat varies. From a purely academic standpoint it would be most interesting if Valve now took steps to secure exclusives for Steam and how the community would react to that.
Fact: Tencent’s 40% stake of Epic also bought them two seats on the board of directors.
Fact: Tim Sweeney declares that Tencent has “zero” say in how Epic is run.
I would try to reconcile these two facts, but greater men than I have been driven mad in the attempt.
(Source)
I don’t want to be in the position of defending Tencent, but I feel the need to say that the claim isn’t QUITE as preposterous as it seems on the surface.
Back in my Activeworlds days when we were publicly traded, we supposedly had a board of directors. I never saw them. They never visited the office. Our CEO never consulted them on day-to-day operations. Presumably they would get involved if something happened with the stock price or someone needed to do a press release, but I never heard anyone in management express any concern over what the board would think or do.
They were, basically, guys who owned a bunch of shares and were thus given power that they never used.
So the claim that two seats on the board gives them “zero” say is, in abstract, a plausible thing.
However, it’s pretty obvious from the design of Fortnite that they must have SOME influence on the company. Even if the board isn’t handing down mandates from on high, the partnership has Epic’s designers working closely with Tencent’s designers, and so the behavior of management is pretty much beside the point. Tencent doesn’t need to MAKE Epic do anything if they’re already eagerly doing it of their own volition.
Regardless of how little the board exercises their power, they are the ones who hire and fire the CEO (at least how most companies are set up). The most factual information I can find is Wikipedia and the original article it cites. The Wikipedia article quotes Sweeney as saying Tencent has the right to nominate directors for the board, but it doesn’t have much control over their creative work, and the other article backs up the claim of two chairs. I can’t find how many directors total. If those two chairs do represent 40% of the directorship, they only need to convince one other person to make large decisions, assuming decisions where they only need a 50% majority. If the 40% is contains some portion of non-voting / doesn’t-get-directorship (I’m not a business major, I don’t know the terms for this), then that would imply more chairs, and less percentage of the large business decisions. Either way, they do have at least some power over the CEO, which would one way or another influence Sweeney’s decisions. The board is also usually used as a resource of advisors, for the CEO to bounce ideas off of in advance, so that they can more smoothly make decisions in the long run, rather than making mistakes and being fired. ;)
Seems to be 40% from what little is available.
As to Shamus point that “the board are only interested in the money”, that’s basically still in line with my point; I’m certainly not claiming that those guys are on the shop floor personally removing references to A A Milne from the code, but I find it difficult to believe they’ve got nothing to say regarding how Epic goes about leveraging their IP and large envelopes full of money into market influence.
I also completely agree with Shamus’ point about how they’ve approached exclusivity; if they’d gone the route of conspicuous dev philanthropy and free swag, the Epic Launcher would almost certainly be stinking up my desktop right next to Uplay and Viveport.
Giving away a game every two weeks isn’t “free swag” enough for you?
Still, the power is there.
If its not being exercised then its because the company is doing what the board wants already. So the board doesn’t need to step in.
And there’s always the ‘friendly lunch’ and ‘discussion’ about topics’ totally not related to the direction of the company and your future there’.
Not saying Tencents doing anything or pushing the company in these directions, but to say someone with seats on the board ‘has no say’ in how the company is run is only accurate until Tencent can get a majority of the board-members on the same page and thereby destroy whatever faction is currently in control.
Tim Sweeney himself admits that “All members of a board of directors weigh in on discussions and vote as fiduciaries on behalf of the interests of the company. Tencent’s directors are super valuable contributors whose advise and participation helped make Epic what it is today.” https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1095515651832201217
The statements seem incompatible to me.
Okay yeah. That’s 100% incompatible.
It’s POSSIBLE that board members can be hands-off in some companies, but in this case Sweeney is just hanging himself. I see that both of his claims we’re discussing appear next to each other in that Twitter thread. This isn’t him being two-faced and saying contradictory things in two different places, this is him contradicting himself within a single conversation.
I THINK what’s he’s doing is splitting a VERY fine hair. “They vote and have power and are part of the decision-making process, but they can’t dictate terms to us because they don’t have controlling share.”
He seems to be arguing that Tencent couldn’t MAKE Epic do something they flat-out didn’t want to do. That would be comforting, if not for all the stuff about corporate culture I talked about in the original post. If your culture supplants the extant culture, you don’t NEED a controlling share to run things.
If he’s trying to reassure fans, he’s… not doing a good job.
There is a major difference between exclusives that were secured via contract, and exclusives that exist because steam is THE major storefront for PC gaming.
I agree that we should uphold Epic to the same standards we do Valve. But I feel like for every person that hates on the EGS for sometimes petty reasons, there is also one defending it simply because “competition is healthy” without actually caring what form that competition takes. It’s a fact that EGS is currently an inferior platform to Steam. And no, a bigger cut for creators do not make up for the lack of Reviews, Forums, issues with account security, the tencent business and a clear “Publishers first, Consumers second” attitude that Epic is currently trying to push. And that’s not even mentioning that said “extra cut” will most likely land in the pockets of publishers, instead of Developers in a lot of cases.
Epic practically had a blueprint on what the current minimum standard for a storefront is, and yet elected to simply strong arm itself into the market by buying out Exclusives, in an attempt to make people bite the bullet and use their trashy storefront despite its issues. And yet many people act like it’s somehow controversial to take a stand against it. You see many, many people opting for piracy rather than installing EGS, and unless Epic lifts itself of the couch and does some actual work, they will torpedo their store before it ever has a chance to properly take off.
I don’t regard Valve as some divine entity. But steam remains the superior storefront. A way to fix that would maybe try to address some of the issues EGS is suffering from, instead of trying to play the heroic martyr that just wants to give those poor creators more money. At the end of the day, you need buyers for your product. Unless Epic really does plan to just keep paying people for lost sales and die on their “Publishers first” hill.
Although you make the case in your article that Epic is basically fighting fire with fire, so to speak, with the exclusive games, I don’t think that’s reason to absolve them of that particular sin. The reason is, that they could have done something else to gain users, and to fight the exclusives that Steam has, in a much more pro-customer way, that I don’t think anyone would object to – free copies of games that the person owns on Steam. GOG did this (and might still be?) a couple years ago, and it got me to log in and use their store more than I otherwise would have. Carving up the market into brand-exclusive zones is annoying – giving away free things would be enjoyed!
“they could have done something else to gain users,”
I 100% agree. Heck, if you’re throwing (say) a million bucks at an indie team for an exclusive lock, why not take that stick and turn it into a carrot? Instead of buying an exclusive lock, give them a million bucks in exchange for the rights to give away 50,000 copies of the game. “Hey kids, sign up to use the Epic store and you’ll get a free copy of Gun Guy!”
That would generate goodwill rather than resentment. Also, there would be a certain FOMO if they made it clear they only had 50k copies to give away.
It would be a classier move all around, and people would be less salty about the unfinished storefront.
At the very least – offer a purchase discount.
‘Buy from Epic – not only do we only take an 18% bite but you can get the game for 82% yourself if you pre-order’
I don’t know what deals they made for the games they are giving away. I assume that the developers aren’t fine with getting nothing.
And a million dollar advance payment for less than 50k new users seems like a really bad deal all around; it’s not a really great deal for the developers who made exclusive deals, and it’s not a really great deal for Epic.
Or, hey, Epic could forward the lower cut to the players. As it stands now, that difference goes right into the publishers’ pockets (even the actual developer might not see any of that money, depending on their particular publishing contract); that needn’t even change, instead of using their Fornite money to bribe publishers, they could instead give publishers the 88% cut and gamers a correspondingly lower price.
You can bet that a lot of people would choose to buy from Epic instead of Steam if a game were 10 bucks cheaper on the former, as evidenced by the proliferation of key resellers where many people go to get keys cheaper than when buying directly from one of the regular storefronts. That’s in fact what I initially expected when the EGS launched and announced the smaller cut, but as it turns out this didn’t happen.
What boggles the mind now is how people defend EGS by repeating “but Steam’s 30% cut” (which always reminds me of the “but her emails” mantra), even though a) the players gain nothing from the smaller cut on EGS, b) selling retail takes away a much larger cut.
The problem with this approach is that Steam supposedly has some Amazon-style small print in its contract that says you’re not allowed to list a game for a lower price on another platform.
I don’t know how they enforce that, but that’s what indies tell me whenever I suggest competing with Steam on price.
Pyrodactyl handed the Steam integration on Good Robot, so I never dealt with it directly except for adding a few bits of code for achievements to hook into.
Yeah, I heard about that part of the contract/TOS/whatever. This should be a viable target for Epic to attack. For example, a game sold for 60$ on Steam could be nominally listed on EGS for the same, but EGS would also give you 10% of that as extra balance on your EGS account for any purchase (something like Steam’s wallet that EGS would need to implement for that).
And this is just off the top of my hat. There are probably other methods to do this that technically fulfill the premise of not listing the game for less than on Steam, while effectively being cheaper anyway.
And most likely EGS did think of other options than exclusives, too. But I don’t think they would even want to compete on prices, as Tim Sweeney himself has been on record complaining about “sales culture” and wanting to end that. The 12% cut was at no point intended to allow games to be sold at lower price, but only to benefit the publisher/developer. As I said in another comment, I believe Epic regards these companies as their actual customers, not us.
I think the interpretation these days is that if you list your game at a lower price on another platform, you have to offer the game at that price on steam at some point in time.
Which would explain why places like greenmangaming et.c. can sell games at lower prices most of the time, since the prices on steam do eventually reach the same low point during the big sales years down the line.
Though GOG are retiring their fair price policy and GOG Connect (the feature that duplicated the games from your Steam library) was not active during the spring sale so who knows how long they can keep these policies up.
GOG Connect requires developer or publisher cooperation. I suspect that they may have run out of or be running low on cooperative developers and publishers.
I’m aware, which furthers my point really, this is not something they can reliably guarantee to keep doing, and the fair price policy is entirely on them, leading one to suspect that there may be some truth to the rumours about themnot being in such a great financial shape.
I remember buying a copy of the orange box a looong time ago because I’d heard so much about it, and was so frustrated it contained a steam code rather than a game that I never bothered playing it. To this day I don’t play a lot on the PC, but that’s more to do with my gaming habits than anything else. I do have a steam account now.
If you’re all in on getting launchers to play these games on PC already, then I think that’s a bit different from the console exclusivity that makes people on this site frustrated whenever a Spider-Man update comes along because it’s on a Playstation and not on a PC. Buying a different console for a game like Street Fighter 5, Bloodborne, Ratchet & Clank, Cuphead or Bayonetta is an investment of hundreds of dollars. Making an account at Epic Games costs you what, an hour of your time? Like yeah, maybe this three month old store doesn’t have as many features as a decade-old one. Naturally. You can still play unique games on it. That’s its selling point right there, as it is for any new console, and unlike a new console you don’ have to pay anything to access it. The privacy concerns feel more like an excuse than relevant with how much we all use google’s stuff. What privacy? I’m also uncomfortable about it but I have no illusions about how much stuff the corporations probably already know.
I’ll agree the way some of those exclusivity deals have gone aren’t exactly beautiful, handing out money to devs already promising their games on other storefronts. That stings a bit more than when publishers bankroll a game’s development to get the exclusivity, or makes it themselves. But you’ll still get to play those games for no added price on the same actual platform( PC) without it costing you a thing.
Regardless of how little you value your own privacy, one more account means one more place that can be hacked and get your banking info. In a decade plagued by companies who don’t know how to secure things, that’s a large reason not to want yet another login with access to your money.
Additionally, epic’s account security isn’t particularly inspiring, and their launcher scrapes your steam game playtime and friends list.
Luckily modern financial security is better than that.
What is Epic offering that is worth the effort – however trivial – of making that new account?
Yo you get to play the videogames that only they have.
That’ll be a great selling point to drive customers to my new grocery store.
Hey, we’re a new store and we’ve arranged a ‘deal’ with all the egg producers in the country – you can only buy eggs from us.
Would you consider that store to be offering you something worthwhile?
What have you ever bought a new console or joined a new pc store for if not for the games you can only get there?
I’ve bought game on GoG just because I like them better. I’ve bought games on HumbleBundle because they were cheaper. I have not bought a single game exclusive on the Windows store because it’s terrible. There are other ways to compete.
Nope. Not once in my life.
I’ve never owned a console (any of them – and I was alive and kicking when Atari was big) and have never bought a game from, say, Origin that was only on Origin. There has, IMO, never been a game that was worth paying $300 plus dollars for. Not that RD2 didn’t sorely tempt me for a bit there.
That’s not entirely true – I’ve bought some old games on GoG because that was the only storefront selling them – and not because GoG was paying to lock others out.
But that reinforces the point I’ve been making – GoG offered me something worth installing it for. Epic is taking something away to force installation to get it.
Console size and controller feel. Plus the PS2 played DVDs and the PS4 plays Blu-rays.
If you consider eggs worthwhile? Yes.
All the stores had eggs. Now I’ve bought them out and you can only get eggs at my store – but you consider that as adding value?
The question was “Would you consider that store to be offering you something worthwhile?”
You didn’t ask if they added value.
I am going to sell square eggs, and I will only sell them at this store because they paid me to have exclusivity on the new fancy thing. To be fair this metaphor breaks down somewhat but on the other hand I could argue that games are luxury products while eggs probably classify as “base needs”.
Maybe I’m not in the comments enough, but I think this is the most Shamus comments I’ve seen in a post that didn’t specifically ask for dialog.
My take on the issue is that EGS is paying for exclusivity. Steam gets ‘exclusivity’ by being the bigger market, so it’s the first choice for devs to go to. If they never bother to release on the second choice, that’s no big deal. I’m not aware (and correct me if I’m wrong) of any deals where Valve paid out a bunch of money to get a game published on Steam, but not on one of the other platforms.
So, EGS is paying money to make things more annoying for the consumers, in the hopes of annoying some of them into installing EGS. If, as suggested above, they went the “free game for using EGS” route, they would be spending money to help consumers, and get the same (or nearly the same) end result, without the bad PR.
Now I personally cannot use the EGS, because they choose not to support Linux. Steam does. Now, I’m hearing rumors that Borderlands 3 will be EGS exclusive for 6 months, which just means that I will not be able to play it for 6 those months. And that sucks, so I might be a bit of sour grapes here, but I don’t think so.
They do offer (a?) free game for making an account on EGS, I believe Subnautica is one of the games/the game you can get. It does a little to alleviate their anti-consumer behaviour, but they could do far better.
Specifically a different free game every two weeks for the first year to whoever has an account, so 26 games in total if you signed in at the first one. Subnautica was I think the first one.
The Borderlands 3 rumor got confirmed this morning. Release date in September, Epic exclusive on PC until next April. This isn’t a surprise in hindsight, as 2K Games and Private Division (The Outer Worlds publisher) are both under Take-Two’s umbrella.
I saw a comment a couple hours back, where someone said that they foresaw this days before the leak that started the rumor. They basically said that if they were going to release it on Steam, they’d have announced the September release date during last week’s show. They knew from the Metro and Outer Worlds incidents what sort of response they’d get, that if they announced the Epic deal in front of a live audience they’d have been booed off their own stage.
I am a Linux gamer, so I have a slightly different point of view of things. Let’s compare.
Valve:
+ All their games run on Linux.
+ They roll their own distro.
+ Have invested in open source projects to make the ecosystem better.
– Steam is basically DRM.
EGS:
– Doesn’t run on Linux.
– Pays companies for exclusive year-long deals so I will have to wait quite a while before any chance of a Linux release.
– Same kind of DRM as Steam.
Now I don’t like DRM, but after all that Valve has done to promote, support, and improve the state of Linux gaming I must admit they have me wrapped around their finger.
Interesting. I have a friend in Guam who runs into storefront region trouble using the Epic Store. Apparently there are people who have to wait for technical reasons when there are timed exclusives.
With apologies to the Linux users, Ask A Game Dev gives a (as usual, cold) explanation of why this might occur for Linux (yes, SteamOS is one solution, but needing to use one distro is often counter to the reasons users choose Linux): http://askagamedev.tumblr.com/post/182220552875/what-would-necessary-for-linux-to-become-bigger
Why are you even talking about Epic though? If they don’t support Linux and that’s all you use, the two of you have nothing to say about each other. It’s like… you’re commenting on a Keurig story… but you don’t drink coffee and would not change your mind about doing so.
Um, most of his points are about how Epic doesn’t do Linux and its policies make it harder for him to get Linux versions of those games. That’s pretty relevant to a complaint about them, especially as since Steam DOES do Linux they potentially could as well. So they won’t do what he wants, and make it harder for others to do what he wants.
Not supporting Linux is pretty different on an order of scale than not having a shopping cart. That’s like complaining that your favorite game doesn’t have VR. Sure, it’s possible that could make them consider adding it… but it’s about as difficult as developing a new game. My point being, they will only consider adding Linux support if they see the profit there. My assumption is that it’s trivial compared to say, putting the game on sale to 50%.
You’re missing the additional part about Epic exclusives, because that means that even if another site wanted to support the game on Linux they can’t until the exclusivity ran out. So the complaint is less about things like no shopping cart and more like complaints about the exclusivity deals: Epic won’t do Linux but won’t let anyone else do it (for that game) either.
If Borderlands 3 (for example), wanted to do Linux and Epic would not sell that version, they’d just launch it with the Steam version. So I don’t really see that as a separate point?
NO, because the exclusivity deal is that no version of the game can exist on another store while the deal persists. The non-epic release is pushed back a year, and the non-epic release, by dint of being Steam has Linux. That is a direct chain of making it physically impossible for someone to obtain a game for an entire year more than if their crappy store and practices simply didn’t exist.
You personally don’t want to support Linux? That’s fine at base. It’s not when you’re deliberately preventing your business partner from doing it.
If Borderlands 3 (for example), wanted to do Linux and Epic would not sell that version, Gearbox would not deploy the Linux version until the timed exclusive had ran out.
Linux has a small market share. If a dev is already willing to trade X number of potential sales JUST for a guarantee that the game will break even on launch, having to sacrifice the launch period sales from Linux market isn’t going to change their mind. Only devs that develop exclusively for Linux would balk at that, and IDK if such devs even exist.
But on the other hand, a delay of a year between the game’s official launch, and the release on Steam would at the very least place any Linux sales outside the “initial sales” window, meaning the already marginal profitability of Linux ports and Linux support would be significantly reduced, meaning less chance of Linux support going forward on future games.
Publishers already can and do take a “take it or leave it” attitude to Linux sales. If Epic courts enough deals like this over the next few years, the result could be a chilling effect on the already fragile Linux gaming market. It’s entirely understandable that Linux gamers would bristle at the possibility of being entirely discarded in the mid-indie to AAA space purely as unrelated collateral damage in some shitty Game of Thrones scheme.
On the other hand, it could theoretically lead to more Linux ports because the devs have a year before they CAN release it on Steam. If the deadline was coming up for Steam release, maybe they have to not do the Linux release and then don’t bother doing it later because without the marketing of launch, it won’t get noticed. However, the exclusivity period means they get a second launch on Steam, with all the marketing that will entail. And maybe that is enough time to put out the Linux version, that before they didn’t have enough time to get to.
Extremely unlikely. That time period is functionally the games post-launch cycle, during which the devs work on all the major bug fix patches and start ramping up or DLC and the like. This isn’t effected by what store they launch on first. As far as the dev schedule’s concerned, that’s an arbitrary difference.
If working on a Linux port wasn’t already in the roadmap for that period, launching on Epic instead of Steam won’t change anything. Steam buyers, regardless of OS, will simply get whatever version of the game would have existed +6 months after initial release if said initial release had been on Steam.
But, just for the sake of argument, lets be very generous and say there’s a 50/50 chance you’re right, and they will use that time to work on a Linux port when they otherwise wouldn’t. This is still not good news for Linux gamers, as you’re trading a 100% chance some games will have Linux for a 50% chance that those same games will.
As I understand it, devs generally don’t create Linux versions after release. Sometimes they finish the Linux version after the main release (because it’s a lower priority), but making a Linux version involves some degree of concurrent development. Anything that’s currently getting a Linux version (like BL3, probably) will still be getting one anyway, just delayed with the Steam release. Delaying that release by signing with Epic can’t lead to more Linux ports where there otherwise wouldn’t exist, but it CAN lead to publishers axing work on Linux versions of games further down the line, because the new sales numbers show that Linux accounts for 0% of sales during the most valuable period.
You’re also vastly overestimating the bump in sales or marketing the Steam release will entail. Even with true cross-platform timed exclusives (i.e. going from PS or XB to PC), it’s very rare for that to be notable. Yes, it’s easy to think of notable exceptions (such as Tomb Raider), but that’s the thing: those are exceptions, not the norm; not to be expected or planned for. And this won’t be a cross-platform timed exclusive, where there’s a whole untapped market waiting behind the gate. This is just a vendor timed exclusive on the same platform. These games will have already had their PC release, already had their day in the sun on that platform. Anyone who REALLY cares will have been expected to have made an Epic account already, ’cause for a Windows user, that’s literally all it takes.
Linux users will be the only true new market being opened up in such a release. But Linux sales are tiny as is (already not worth it or borderline so in many devs eyes), and by making this deal with Epic, publishers are demonstrating they consider that market worth sacrificing during the most critical period, so it is fairly scary for Linux.
The previous Borderlands games are all available on Linux today. The next one won’t be, at least until April 2020. And that’s on Epic’s shoulders. They’ve already done the work to port their engine to Linux.
Sure, Linux gamers are a minority. But we have a right to complain.
Shamus, please don’t assume that people who don’t like Epic’s practices are okay with Valve’s practices. That may be true in some cases–I’ve seen some surprising comments from die-hard Steam fans–but I think it’s perfectly legitimate to criticize Epic for doing something that Steam also does. The Epic Store is new. It could have been anything that Epic wanted it to be. Instead, from what I can tell, it’s Steam with a different logo and a policy of third-party exclusives (Hades, Rebel Galaxy: Outlaw, these being the only two that I care about at the moment) rather than first-party exclusives (Half Life 2, Portal, Team Fortress 2). People who wanted something better than Steam and were disappointed are naturally going to express more dissatisfaction with the disappointing new thing than with the disappointing old thing. I’d also like to stress that it’s possible to be disappointed with the Epic Games Store for reasons unrelated to Steam. I for one am disappointed by their lack of Linux support and the fact that they decided to use a proprietary client rather than a web-based store, and I’d be disappointed by those things whether Steam existed or not.
I am also apparently much less concerned about Tencent than you are. That’s mostly because while, yes, I’d expect Tencent to have some impact on Epic’s first-party offerings, at this point I don’t see how Tencent’s stake in Epic can effect the non-Epic games on the Epic store. I don’t like predatory, manipulative monetization strategies any more than the next man, but they’d exist with or without Tencent and I’m not convinced that they’d be any less prevalent without Tencent.
With regards to exclusives:
I think that if a 3rd party decided to launch on Epic exclusively because Epic offers a bigger cut, people would be (more) okay with it. It’s “throwing money at titles to get them exclusively on Epic” that people have a problem with.
Nope, this does not track. “People would be okay with devs choosing Epic because they would make more money there. What bothers them is when they accept a cash money deal from Epic. A deal that involves… making a money based decision to choose Epic.”
You don’t see the difference between making more money per customer and just getting a stack of cash regardless of the number of customers?
Hint, one give the customers a choice, and the other one takes choice away. I can’t imagine why the customers would complain.
It’s more “People would be okay with devs choosing to only sell their game on Epic because the cut is higher and so they want all of their sales there. What bothers them is Epic sweetening the pot with offers that only apply if they only sell their game on Epic.”
I don’t think “people” should have a say on that? Like… at all. These “people” are shit heads who wouldn’t lose a second of sleep if the company went out of business entirely.
If the company’s choices make you mad, then don’t buy their product. But where did this “don’t accept deals that only benefit you” stuff even COME FROM??
Well, if giving a shit about predatory business practices that benefit *companies* at the cost of *customers* makes me a shithead, then a shithead I shall be. And yeah, I will vote with my wallet and if that means companies doing things that screw me over go out of business then so be it because I dont actually owe them *anything*. Where did this “people should care more about business’s well-being than their own” even COME FROM??
What Im saying is that maybe someone having a different opinion or set of priorities from yours doesnt make them idiots or evil, eh?
People keep insisting that Epic should compete purely on price to beat Steam. Which is insane, Steam chops brand new games to 25% or more off within a month or two. That’s a great way to become the App Store, where people complain that a $5 port of a $40 game is laughably overpriced.
So, Epic cannot compete with Steam on price. They cannot compete on features. They, in fact, can offer absolutely nothing of value to me, the consumer. Why is this a good thing again?
They can compete on features, but expecting a brand new product to immediately beat the established one on day one is kinda nutty. GOG has some better features than Steam, but it did not start out that way. They had to update for a while. They can compete on price, but only after they have a userbase who are hypothetically willing to buy a game on Steam OR Epic store. As a way to lure in droves of customers, I think this exclusive thing is an expected move. It is literally what every other store does (Origin, Uplay, etc).
I think the difference here is one of availability. If Metro’s deal (Epic appears to be offering revenue guarantees, marketing support, and loans to finish development, but I don’t know what Metro’s specific deal was) was generally available to other games, and part of the general “reasons game developers should release on the Epic store”, I think people would be more accepting.
What Epic appears to be doing is the Uber/Walmart business plan of getting market share by selling your product below cost for a few years, and that’s something a lot of people are rightly suspicious of.
From the Escapist article;
Nonononono. Nobody’s complaining that Epic has ‘exclusives’. We’re complaining that Epic has been *buying exclusivity*.
As PC gamers, we’re not used to that – console gamers are familiar with Sony and MS paying for a title to be developed only for their platform, we’re not used to and don’t accept that sort of behavior.
A company doesn’t want to sell in a store (or on a platform) – fine. Their choice, they’ll have to deal with it. If someone only wants to sell on Epic – fine, they’ll have to deal with that. If Epic is paying them to lock down the distribution channel – yeah, I have a problem with that. Same as if Steam had done so.
That’s certainly a justification for their shitty behavior, a good one even. Its still shitty. And Origin and uPlay are also-rans because they are *publisher-specific* stores – and with no other features that are worth the hassle. I don’t want a separate launcher for the games from EA and the games from Ubisoft and the games from Activision. Hell, waaay back in the DOS days I used to get pissed at games that forced installs into ‘Publisher Name/Game Name’ folders – nobody cares enough about the publisher to organize their libraries around them.
“A company doesn’t want to sell in a store (or on a platform) – fine. Their choice, they’ll have to deal with it. If someone only wants to sell on Epic – fine, they’ll have to deal with that. If Epic is paying them to lock down the distribution channel – yeah, I have a problem with that. Same as if Steam had done so.”
I find this BAFFLING.
Scenario A: Gearbox wants, for no reason, to ONLY sell on the Epic store for 6 months. Consumers don’t like it, but they accept it.
Scenario B: Gearbox decides to sell only on Epic for 6 months for the completely rational reason of a direct payment of money or a guarantee to prevent losses, paid by Epic. Consumers are FURIOUS! How dare the storefront use its resources to court suppliers?! How dare the company entertain legal offers and then accept them! The GALL!!!
In the former case they’re mad at Gearbox only. EGS set up some ground rules, Gearbox responded to the incentives created. It isn’t Epic’s fault that Steam charges such a relatively high commission.
In the latter case, they’re pissed at both Epic and Gearbox. Gearbox for, as above, valuing some amount of cash over catering to their customers, and Epic for interfering in how the customer chooses to buy their games.
I’m not sure why it needs to look at root certificates, but I suspect that a lot of the things EGS is doing are anti-cheat. Industry juggernaut Fortnite runs from this launcher, and so there are safeguards built into the system to stop cheaters. I can understand people objecting to the snooping around that EGS does, but the important thing to note is that this isn’t going to be all that different from what Steam does for Team Fortress 2 players.
I don’t play a single game that uses Valve Anti-cheat (as far as I am aware) and this behavior is not *Steam’s default* – again, as far as I am aware. And if I am wrong and Steam is doing this, that doesn’t make it ok for Epic to start. It means Steam needs to stop.
I don’t care what Steam locks down when playing Team Fortress. I don’t care that Epic feels they need to lock everything down *by default* because they’re coming from the Fortnight MP game mindset. Its not ‘spyware’, I certainly agree with that – but its still not polite.
And this is the one that I’m basically OK with.
In fact, I’d be more than a little upset with Steam if they tried to lock that info down now in response to other apps using it.
I completely agree. I was opposed to Steam for years, and only started using it after getting stuff on it through a Humble Bundle in 2009, six years (!) after its debut. Steam has a shit-ton of exclusives, but for some reason people are really bothered by Epic doing the same. I like that Epic gives me a free game every month, and it’s not a shitty one either.
I actually appreciate the fact that it comes without social features.
“I actually appreciate the fact that it comes without social features.”
Dear God, this. Every damn app wants to be the new Facebook. No, Discord, I don’t want a new gaming hub, I want a chat program – don’t inflict slow-loading splash pages on me because you dream of competing with Steam.
I don’t want a new app. In fact, I would prefer to have zero gaming apps (unless we’re counting games themselves, in which case I want a whole bunch). I would like for Steam, for Epic, and for anybody else with who might want to put more redundant software on my computer to remember that (a) I already have a web browser, thanks, and that (b) it is perfectly possible to sell video games without a proprietary browser. There’s no need for them to make their own annoying custom version of Chromium, not when there’s already regular old boring non-custom Chromium, Firefox, Chrome, Edge, whatever they’ve got on Mac these days, and more besides. They should let me use my browser of choice to load store pages–which, to be fair, Steam does–and buy and download games–which Steam very much does not do. Heck, it would be outright less work for them. Beyond that there’s certainly no need to force me to launch some client before I can launch my game or to run it in the background while my game is running. I’ve already got an OS and a start menu for that. The only thing I might conceivably miss would be auto-patching. Then again, I lived well over 30 years without the benefit of auto-patching and I’m not sure I’d notice if it went away.
I was one of the last holdouts for TeamSpeak 3 over Discord, because TS3 could just launch and had better voice options. If they just stopped doing updates that required manual intervention on my server, I’d sill be using it.
Glad I’m not the only one! The only features of GOG Galaxy and Steam that I rely on are cloud saves and auto-updates, and lack of the former wouldn’t be a dealbreaker. Rarely, I use the Steam cloud to upload screenshots. On the other hand, apparently the Epic store doesn’t even have a shopping cart, so it’s missing some really basic features too.
“Steam has a shit-ton of exclusives, but for some reason people are really bothered by Epic doing the same.”
I feel like a cursory attempt at research on the anti-EGS arguments would show this is due to a matter of approach. Valve never moneyhatted devs or publishers to “bribe” exclusivity for their platform. Quite the opposite; the vast number of Steam “exclusives” existing is due to Valve opening up their platform to an unprecedented degree and allowing nearly all comers to set up shop there in a time when no feasible alternatives existed. While I would agree that this current landscape is not ideal and probably requires a bust-up of some kind, let’s not pretend that we got here by Valve strong-arming the market outside of their own internally developed releases (ala Half-Life 2). Valve attained this dominance by making strong, convenient platform that ushered in unprecedented opportunity for the PC ecosystem. Compare this to Epic’s method of throwing bags of money at companies to keep titles restricted to their garden; in some cases totally disregarding the social contracts that preceded them (see Phoenix Point and Metro Exodus).
I am not naive. It’s not surprising that Epic feels this is their only move to make. But behavior like that is certainly alienating to me and makes it quite easy to skip their store altogether.
I don’t know if I can word this so that it doesn’t sound like a gotcha, so I’ll just state in advance that I’m genuinely curious about your opinion, Shamus.
Previously, you said that the problem with EA isn’t greed but incompetence. Now you say that Tencent is scary because it’s like EA except competent. Did you change your mind about EA?
Shamus’s article was ‘this is how EA is failing to do what EA seems to be trying to do’ not ‘this is how EA is failing to be a good, responsible corporate citizen.’
The article never addressed whether EA should have those goals it appeared to be pursuing, just that it was very, very bad at accomplishing them.
A lot of people interpreted my column as saying that EA wasn’t greedy. To be clear, I didn’t say that EA wasn’t greedy. I said that EA’s PROBLEM wasn’t greed.
As in: All giant corporations are greedy*, but EA is really bad at it and that’s what we’re mad about.
Tencent is REALLY GOOD at greed, which is why Fortnite players aren’t review-bombing the game, despite the fact that Fortnite’s monetization is vastly more effective than the monetization in Battlefront II.
* This is an over-simplification, of course. Different companies have different values and it gets pretty complicated sometimes. But when we’re talking about AAA publishers, it’s an acceptable simplification.
I get that, but it also looked to me like you were saying that greed in itself isn’t all that bad. For example, if EA were more competently greedy, they’d understand that they get more money by making the studio that’s famous for story-driven single-player games develop a story-driven single-player game.
I think the main thing I’m not understanding is this: Are you saying that if EA was more competently greedy, we’d have fewer valid reasons to be mad, or that we wouldn’t be mad even if there were valid reasons. (Because competent-EA/Tencent know exactly how far they can push things.)
“it also looked to me like you were saying that greed in itself isn’t all that bad.”
Eh. My problem is that:
1) There are a few very distinct definitions of “greed” that people use, and so I generally shy away from using the word.
2) It’s not a persuasive argument. If I was talking to Andrew Wilson directly, I wouldn’t try to convince him that he’s being greedy, and THEN convince him it’s a bad thing, and THEN convince him that there’s a better way. I’d just jump right to the “better way”. Greed is an appeal to a moral code and Wilson’s worldview isn’t going to be receptive to that line of reasoning.
“Are you saying that if EA was more competently greedy, we’d have fewer valid reasons to be mad, or that we wouldn’t be mad even if there were valid reasons. (Because competent-EA/Tencent know exactly how far they can push things.)”
Both.
Some of the things EA does are needlessly destructive both to the games and to their bottom line. If they stopped doing that stuff, we’d have fewer reasons to be mad.
Some of the things EA does could make money if done competently. (If their monetization worked more like Tencent’s.) I’d still dislike it. A LOT of us would. But generally the masses would let it slide, the way most people don’t see anything wrong with Fortnite.
That makes sense. After watching the video you linked, I’m really surprised that there isn’t more outrage about Fortnite’s business model.
Until EGS has an offline mode as good as steam, I won’t be using them. Only have internet access via my phone and I can’t do tethering.
Origin’s offline mode fails my needs as I tend to only have internet access for my pc when visiting my brother for a week every few months.
This makes EGS’ lack of offline mode unacceptable.
Also, the 6 month exclusivity on Borderlands 3 and the year for The Outer Worlds means that not only can I not play them for an extra 6 to 12 months, it also means I pretty much have to avoid certain areas of the internet for that entire time to avoid spoilers.
Not refuting your argument, just curious: why can’t you do tethering? I know some carriers in some countries forbid it in their TOS, but afaik that is rarely detected or enforced unless used excessively. Just some launcher checking the online activation now and then I would assume should fly under the radar so long as auto-updates are disabled.
I’d love some competition for Steam, maybe Valve would have to wake up and start doing things. The last thing I saw Valve do was release a paid card game into a market totally saturated with F2P and P2P options. The problem with Epic’s anti-consumer behavior to me is that this industry when given the option, will always pick quick money over curating a long term brand. I don’t see competition for Steam, I see Epic bringing in the next wave of awful things I have to deal with and everyone else joining them.
In an ideal world I wouldn’t need a launcher attached to any of my games but pretty much no one is willing to give up DRM or trying to for a network effect to let me stay off some client storefront.
Ah, then apparently you haven’t heard that in the last couple weeks Valve actually admitted that review bombing was a thing and might be an issue (I think it’s following the problem with Devotion but obviously not sure). The details are somewhat vague but it seems they’re going to review (as in yes, by an actual human being… or at least a very believable cardboard cutout) sudden spikes in reviews going “against the trend” and will block them from affecting the average if they are “off topic”. To clarify, they will not be vetting all reviews individually but rather will block the entire period the suspect reviews came in, also, the definition of “off topic” is naturally problematic with the official statement citing “things that do not affect player expierience, such as EULA changes or DRM”. I think “the game hasn’t been working for anyone for three months because DRM servers are a butt” is something that affects player experience, it certainly did mine.
I’d love to see it work out and its nice to see them doing something but I actually prefer review bombing. If something is wrong with the game I want to know whether it’s in game or shady publisher/developer business. Sudden changes in rating are already covered by their current system. I can filter obviously trash reviews myself, I already have to do so with how they promote “funny” reviews or reviews of 2 lines in length. From my perspective this makes the storefront even worse since now I can’t trust it to have up to date information. I’d rather they spend those man hours curating the storefront so it’s usable and not full of garbage. This helps if you try and sort the store by rating but I browse elsewhere and come to Steam for a purchase as a last resort. I guess I’m too jaded, I don’t trust anyone in this industry to filter feedback for me.
So a bunch of people have already said this and I know I’m late to the party, but I wanted to touch on the “exclusives” rebuttal in the article, because I think it suffers from a serious case of ambivalence in the definition of “exclusive” itself which rends the argument, if not moot, at least a lot weaker than it could otherwise be.
The difference, I think, comes down a distinction between…let’s call them a de jure exclusive and a de facto one. To illustrate the difference, look at how you’d need to get to the International Space Station between the time the space shuttle was retired and the rise of private space enterprises. You’d have only one choice: to take a Russian Soyuz craft to and from the station. This is a de facto exclusive, but not a de jure one; Russia is the only choice because no one else had the capability of getting people to the ISS, but there’s no law anywhere that says that only Russia is allowed to ferry people. And no one was complaining about this because that was just the way things were, whereas if, say, the U.N. were to pass a resolution to that effect you can bet there’d be some uproar.
Now talking about Steam, I feel this is a crucial distinction to make: the only de jure exclusives on Steam are Valve’s own games, which they aren’t selling on other platforms. (We can argue about whether or not they should, but this is no different behavior than all the other publisher-run storefronts which contain their own games as de jure exclusives.)
Every other game that is exclusive to Steam, however, is a de facto exclusive: it’s only available on Steam for a reason that isn’t due to a legal obligation. Maybe it’s an indie publisher that couldn’t get it accepted anywhere else. Maybe the devs use Steam’s connectivity features, or version management, and don’t want to redo that work to make it work on other platforms. Maybe they genuinely hate all other stores, or maybe they did the cost/benefit analysis of putting it up on other stores and decided it wasn’t worth it, it doesn’t matter. The point is, Valve is not forcing them, legally, to sell only on Steam. And that distinction is why people can be, legitimately and without hypocrisy, cool with (de facto) exclusives on Steam* and unhappy with (de jure) exclusives on the Epic Games Store. Using the term ambivalently allows for a dangerous bait-and-switch in the argument by conflating the two types of exclusives and accusing people of hypocrisy for feeling differently about them.
If Epic Games had simply announced their store with its revenue split model, and devs had flocked to it of their own accord and abandoned Steam and all other stores in the process, there would be some grumbling, sure, but those would be de facto exclusives, something the devs chose, and something that could conceivably change if, say, Steam were also to lower its cut (or something). It’s the whole process of buying de jure exclusives that gets people annoyed, because the only thing stopping a game from releasing on the EGS and Steam concurrently is that legal stipulation by Epic Games. (Well, to be fair, there could be other factors involved—it’s possible a dev would want to sell only on the EGS even without that legal clause for various reasons—but that’s the cause that people are immediately going to latch on to.)
To be clear, I’m not really personally affected by the EGS (yet, anyway); I’m not interested in any of the exclusive they’ve got, and as a Linux gamer I’m used to there being games I simply can’t play. There’re enough good games out there now that I can afford to pass on a few now and then, but I just wanted to defend those getting annoyed at Epic Games’ practices and explain the distinction that they (and I) see.
*while also wishing that it didn’t need to be that way, and recognizing that Steam is not perfect.
The reason why I’m mad at EGS is for one reason only – They’re literally buying a huge swath of games to be exclusive to their platform. Most new game announcements come with the tag “EGS exclusive”.
I wouldn’t care if they launched at the same time on Steam/EGS, but Epic is clearly throwing around hundreds of millions of dollars for the exclusives and their game giveaways. They’re literally spending huge cash in what feels like a very dirty way. At this point it feels like half of the next six months of releases will be EGS exclusive. That’s ugly.
They’re throwing around their cash, not competing with Steam. Competition is one thing, buying out is another. The Chinese way, I guess.
I’m disappointed that you are so very wrong in this matter Shamus. People never let Valve off the hook. In fact, they are actually being left uncredited for a lot of work they had done with their steam store: providing easy to use and auto updating support for mods via Workshops, creating controller API for every modern controller under the sun, and automatic refund with no question ask policy. They also had Steam Events for their upcoming upgrade and going to let their network API being used for every developer who wanted to do so.
Their improvement over the year with their stores however seems pale in the face of their aparent in action towards the oversaturationg of PC games market. Many blame them for not having curation or control quality of some sort. I asked you: who was responsible for criticizing Valve’s tight curation, Steam Greenlight, and planned $1000 entrant fee? It’s the goddamned indie devs themselves. Game like Kenshi, Undertale, Baba is You or heck literal assets flip like Getting Over It With Bennet Foddy wouldn’t never got the chance had Steam used curation like in the old day. The situation of Steam today is the result of Gold Rush, and if you are blaming Valve for lack of curation that’s only mean you are afraid of competing in a truly open market.
Now with Epic themselves, securing timed exclusive is a really bad strategy that doesn’t and shouldn’t have its precedent on PC market. PC is always been known for its openness ever since IBM release their first PC with modular design and off the shelf parts. Epic limiting PC consumers choice to their own store for games that is not theirs is against the very principle that had build what PC market is today. That is not competition, that is Epic attempt to replace Valve and become the dominant player over the market and wanted to become the sole player.
I don’t want to repeat myself over and over with very same argument why Epic business strategy is harmful to the PC community. You could read what my community had written here after gruelling battle against troll in forum online.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/18YudW7kBCBTSr3kJp_4EEiEmT5I7c2B5/view
You do realise that every single item in the Fortnite store is cosmetic-only, and are completely optional? These comments, and the Olsen video, seem way over the top. Olsen’s disdain for the actual gameplay in Fortnite comes through loud and clear, it’s like he can’t believe that anyone is playing for fun, they must be a prisoner of the monetization scheme. I understand that it’s not for everyone and that there are lots of people who hate Fortnite and BR games in general, but I think the millions of players, and that Fortnite consistently holds the no. 1 spot on Twitch show that people do actually enjoy the gameplay.
What would be a non-cynical, non-cutthroat, non-disgusting monetization scheme? Maybe people just want a bunch of free cosmetics for their free-to-play game? Oh wait, you could actually do that – the current season’s battle pass was available for free just by playing the game, for free, and earns you enough vbucks to get the next season’s battlepass.
I bought the first battlepass about 18 months ago, and haven’t felt the need to put any more in despite playing regularly for those 18 months. I *wanted* to pay Epic some money to reward their business model. An optional, cosmetic-only pass where you know exactly what you’ll be getting for your money seems great to me, especially when compared to the other monetization schemes out there. Call of Duty Black Ops 4 is a full-priced game, but also has randomized loot boxes which contain non-cosemetic items! I think your disgust would be better pointed in its direction at least.
“What would be a non-cynical, non-cutthroat, non-disgusting monetization scheme?”
Context: I generally dislike the entire notion of live service games. I hate mixing financial decisions in with gameplay. I hate having a game attempt to sell me things from within the game itself. I hate this trend and I’d much rather pay a fixed fee and get everything. Barring that, I’d prefer the old-school MMO model where you pay a flat monthly fee and get access to everything. I despise buying a game a piece of content at a time. I get that these games are popular and make tons of money, so the industry isn’t going to stop making them anytime soon, no matter how disgusting I find them. Still, that’s where I’m coming from.
More specifically: Some people don’t care about cosmetics. I really enjoy that part of a game and I like to fiddle with my appearance often, so the Fortnite model is really off-putting to me. The idea of having my avatar constant shifting between various bland bodies makes me crazy, and the idea that I’d need to pay money every time I want to wear something new is a dealbreaker.