How are they affording this? It can’t be a sustainable model, right?
Fortnite, and it’s not. The store loses them hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
Dont they also get royalties from Unreal Engine?
That’s the kind of competition I want. Not a plucky newcomer with fresh ideas, but an industry titan able to burn more money than some companies ever see in an attempt to undercut the competition. They surely aren’t factoring this as a deficit to recoup when they pull a massive reversal after securing market dominance. That’s never happened in the history of capitalism.
Epic can huff my huffables.
Here’s the details on the financials
https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/exclusive-the-numbers-behind-epics
They’d been paying a fortune for other ways to get more titles which never panned out. Steam said fuck the little guys so they’re trying to capitalize on that right now.
Easy. On EGS most games don’t sell at all, so 0% of $0 is still $0. They get most of their money from Fortnite.
Oh hell yeah. This shit crazy good
I have to give it to Valve, their marketing team is really good.
Do they even have one? I thought it’s rare situation when the product speaks for itself.
I assume they mostly just do Steam sale and store organization stuff these days. Maybe they were involved with the SteamDeck but I mostly saw word of mouth for that.
Right?! Nobody ever talks about all the kids they got addicted to gambling. Bang up job, there.
Yeah, lmfao, one of my friends literally only wants to play cs2 because of the free weekly items… It seems that games with elements of gambling always do better than those without it
Eh, I’ve mostly moved over to Godot for actual game making
This is for the store, not the engine.
Can epic stop the virtue signaling?
Unreal Engine could’ve got us, like, Unreal Tournament. It almost did, in fact, it a little.
Die in eternal fire Epic
That’s pretty cool, actually. Sorely needed in the current economic climate. Good for them.
I wish their software and platform were a lot better to go along with this, but in isolation this is great.
This is great and it’s not like they have shit revenue splits anyway as last I checked it was 88/12 which is by far the best around.
Thats because they have a reputational problem that makes them toxic to the gamer base. If they ever get market share that split will change willy nilly.
I’m interested in why you think they are toxic to the gamer base?
Thought i responded to this, but oh well will do it again.
Epic, EA, Microsoft, sony, ubisoft all have a long history of poor worker conditions or anti-consumer practices.
Valve and gog have 20+ years of decent but not perfect history of worker and pro gamer practices.
The contention in this thread is from people who think valve cant be trusted because capitalism and those who say as long as they continue good behavior they’re a better choice than any of the others in the space. While epic has never shown this procommunity behavior.
Basically gog is valves only real competitor and since they dont support linux or provide many of the game featurss valve does for developers its no contest.
I can’t wait to get more games on my Epic deck, oh wait it was Valve who pioneered an incredible platform that can play AAA games on a handheld running Linux and made compatibility a reality for thousands of games.
They didn’t pioneer it, companies like GPD did. Not shitting in the Steam Deck, love that thing. Just wanting to get the facts straight.
I think it still counts, due to all the work they did on the software side.
Oh yeah. I forgot I have an Epic account.
So what does Steam’s revenue share look like in comparison?
Steam takes 30% at first, and there is a discount after tens of millions of dollars in sales.
Steam offers a ton of benefits for game companies through steam, such as the Friends list, reviews, having a way to show live play from the store page, and a bunch of other things. There is a reason that everyone is flocking to steam, and that 30% cut isn’t keeping anyone away.
Plus steam input, remote play, play together, trophies, hell there’s a whole API for you to use to make your game multiplayer and have it integrate with steam friends easily. So much built in for devs lives to be easier.
Just check out steam works. There’s so much for developers
User base and brand loyalty
Nothing about what Valve does but you can’t afford to not be on Steam even though it’s the inferior product
That’s why EOS works with any platform
Steam is, in my opinion, way better for the user (even if it may be worse for the developer).
Epic lacks features that are important to me like reviews, the ability to view your library in a browser, warnings about DRM, Linux support, a hole bunch of features to discover games, a workshop, big picture mode.
Additionally, in my experience at least, their official launcher under Windows is a buggy mess compared to steam.
And the thing is… Because Steam is better for the user, it becomes better from the developer. 70% of your game’s Steam revenue will always be bigger than 100% of your Epic revenue. It’s probably bigger than 300% of your Epic revenue. That’s why Steam doesn’t need to buy exclusives or run loss leaders or try to lock you in with “free!” promos. Epic needs to pay developers up front to get them to not go to Steam, because in every case a dual Steam/whatever-else release is better than a whatever-else release. So Epic needs to pay the indie game studio that made a $10 game a million dollars for timed exclusivity, which allows the studio to not worry about losing their Steam revenue from selling 130,000 copies. Then they release it on Steam later anyway.
If it was as simple as “cutting out middlemen” or using cheaper middlemen, devs would just be selling you exe files. CDN costs wouldn’t come close to 30% of revenue, after all. People like buying games on Steam. People buy games on Steam that are cheaper and DRM-free on GOG or Itch. People buy games on Steam that are free downloads like Dwarf Fortress. People buy games on Steam that are free browser pages like Cookie Clicker. Epic wants people to be invested in their “free!” libraries enough to actually be like “oh I mean I’ve got the Epic account, may as well buy this game here because it’s cheaper or more of my money goes to the devs or because it’s a timed exclusive…” And people simply aren’t doing it.
EGS has reviews as far as I can tell. I still think Steam is better, but this is a welcome move out of them. Competition is a good thing
Edit: downvoted for pointing out that EGS has reviews. Y’all are weird lol
I was talking about written reviews, not just a like/dislike (star) system
The way Epics reviews work are awful, though. They are trying to be really attractive to developers but they aren’t attractive enough to USERS.
For example, you have to be INVITED to review games on Epic. The system is automated and will occasionally ask for a review after you close a game, assuming you’ve been playing long enough. They claim it’s to avoid things like “review bombing”, but that’s a cop-out to shield bad developers/publishers from the repercussions of their actions (like when Denuvo was non-consensually added to Ghostwire Tokyo a year after release).
Implying review bombing is always warranted is as misguided as it gets. Games regularly get review bombed for something as trivial as having a non-white person for a protagonist.
I don’t disagree that’s a problem, but that is not what I said or implied. That’s the reason Steam has other mechanisms for scoring and scaling reviews. There are plenty of valid reasons for “review bombing” that are organic and natural consequences of developer activity: like adding Denuvo a year after release, adding a launxher or login/account requirement after the fact, etc. Making reviews “invite only” is anti-consumer.
Steam wins again by doing nothing
… and it still won’t dent Steam’s de-facto monopoly.
I would rather buy a game on steam, or better yet on gog, than giving my money to a company that is trying to make store exclusive games a thing.
Eventhough I adore GOG, they really need to step up their linux support, which is non-existent
Heroic launcher works well with gog and shows what games are supported.
I agree but heroic has nothing to do with gog…
Wait, I’m confused. The article is about how Epic won’t take a cut to a point. Surely, you’re not giving money to Epic if you buy the game on EGS?
If my purchase on Epic helps the game reach $1 million in revenue then I am giving money to Epic.
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Yes, because they still allow you to spend your money elsewhere if a new storefront appears on the market. Epic is actively preventing that.
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Yes, that’s what exclusive access to games mean. You can’t buy them from other stores because Epic is actively preventing the developers from doing so.
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So we can’t complain about Valve’s 30% cut, then? Because its a legal agreement that game companies willingly enter into, is it not? What about game companies overworking their developers? It’s all dandy because the devs willingly agreed when they enter into the employment?
You’re also forgetting about games that Epic pulled from other stores after buying the company making them. That’s even shittier than releasing games exclusively on Epic.
I mentioned two stores in my comment, what exclusive access to money are you talking about?
Cool, still fuck em though
At least Valve takes some of the money that they make from Steam and use it for Steam. You cant run an entire gaming platform based on developers alone, you also need to make it at least somewhat bearable for consumers.
