Steam v Epic Games Store Furor

[dsmart]

A free game every 2 weeks. The value of these games tends to be $15-$20 on the store after the free period. At first I thought EGS would pay the devs maybe $3-$5 for each giveaway, but I'm starting to believe that EGS is probably paying full whack, e.g. $15-$20 ( minues the EGS 12%), whatever the normal price of the game is to the devs. My reasoning?

While I can't divulge how the model works, I can tell you with certainty that they are not paying devs full price for free games. A dev selling a game for $20, isn't getting $20 - 12% per copy. Think about how bundles work and are priced, and you will have an idea.
 

My understanding is that the Phoenix Point dev said he could afford to refund ALL of the crowdfunding backers out of the EGS exclusivity deal money, however many million that was?

$47K people funded the game for about $800K. So yeah, they can afford to refund everyone because I am quite sure that it's something they were expecting, and have worked it into their deal with Epic.

You only have to make the supposition that Tim Sweeny is not an idiot, link that to the very visible amount of money they are putting into this, and the only logical conclusion is that the EGS is going to be a monster when it hits its full capabilities.

It's not. At the end of the day, I envision it being just another store, but with few exclusive titles. In other words, like GoG, HB, GMG etc

PS I should have asked this at the start sorry. Are we allowed to use the F word if we are not using it to insult someone? Sorry if the answer is no.

We try to keep it respectful and PG-13 around here. Not because you can't use swear (as long as it's not at someone) words, but because we want to try and maintain quality discussions.

[tuberchimpy]

My take on the recent Epic news.
Industries of Titan, and The Outer Worlds - slightly gutted these are Epic store exclusives. Microsoft store laughed my ass off :)

Epic game store windows application really kills my home PC if I have any chrome tabs open,  also if I browse the EGS on my PC at work in chrome that's pretty hard on my work PC too.  It is exacerbated by the EGS app wanting to refresh and take centre stage on my PC after I quit an EGS game. Uggg, I hope they fix this.

I do like that EGS is causing some non windows games to be ported to windows. Journey, Detroit Become Human, other Quantic Dream stuff, and a few others. These were never going to hit PC before EGS came along. What else that was never going to appear on PC might now make the leap? I am really excited by this possibility.

Derek how do game devs in general feel about EGS. The better cut is obvious, but I'm more after are there any devs dancing around because they feel the tyranny of steam is over and there is a new dawn? Is there a new feeling of hope in people you speak to, or is it just business as usual?

To all readers here have you paid for anything on EGS yet?
I have bought Satisfactory and will probably buy Journey, Industries of Titan, and Outer Worlds when they release.

I like the competition to Steam, not so keen on the exclusives, am interested to see where this all goes.

PS Mr Sweeny please make your client less sucky!

[dsmart]

Derek how do game devs in general feel about EGS. The better cut is obvious, but I'm more after are there any devs dancing around because they feel the tyranny of steam is over and there is a new dawn? Is there a new feeling of hope in people you speak to, or is it just business as usual?

It's just business as usual.

As I have said in all my Twitter threads (latest) on this, the primary issues for defections are:

- 12% v 30% royalties (more money!)
- review bombing on store reviews
- community toxicity (as per above)
- store discovery (too many titles, poor algorithms etc)

Those are very compelling reasons to do exclusives with EGS, without even thinking about the ramifications of leaving Steam for a period of time.

Thus far, Valve has attempted (with hilarious results) to address 1&2; almost as an afterthought.

At GDC, it's almost as if Epic locked-up all the titles there. It's hilarious really.

[dsmart]

FF to 10:50.

They got those quotes from this thread. Also this.

[tuberchimpy]

Vampire Bloodlines 2 same price on EGS as it is on steam :(
Dev just keeping the difference.

[tuberchimpy]

Rage 2 has appeared for pre order on steam. I guess Fallout 76 wasn't enough to entice people into the Bethesda store.

[wiser3754]

Oh how I miss the good old days. Just pop in the disc, run setup.exe, install, click shortcut and away you go. Now it seems filing your tax returns isn't too dissimilar from this.

[dsmart]

Rage 2 has appeared for pre order on steam. I guess Fallout 76 wasn't enough to entice people into the Bethesda store.

https://twitter.com/bethesda/status/1110225138979651584

"We’re pleased to announce that RAGE 2, Wolfenstein: Youngblood, Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot, and DOOM Eternal will be released on Steam as well as beth.games/2Mhhqoi. We will also be bringing Fallout 76 to Steam later this year."

[tuberchimpy]

https://twitter.com/bethesda/status/1110225138979651584

"We’re pleased to announce that RAGE 2, Wolfenstein: Youngblood, Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot, and DOOM Eternal will be released on Steam as well as beth.games/2Mhhqoi. We will also be bringing Fallout 76 to Steam later this year."

Allow me to translate for you :)
"After Fallout 76 tanked and with low uptake on our "yet another launcher storefront" to install we've realised that the Epic Game Store is going to solve out 30% steam cut problem for us. We've had a lot of justified bad press recently, and gamers have started to realise they shouldn't give us a free pass on buggy poopshows, especially when we forget to include the charm. Some Bethesda internals want to keep our storefront so we've given it one last throw of the dice by giving Morrowind away free for one day to see just how effective Tim Sweeny's idea of free stuff to drive install base works. But of course we are Bethesda, so we can't take an idea without cocking it up with that Bethesda secret sauce somehow. So the free stuff will be only during a one day window, and our servers won't be able to cope. We won't learn how effective the Sweeny gambit is, because one day is just a stupidly small window to try it out and get good data, but we are confident some customers will patch that for us, lord knows we can't be arsed.
The reality is We'll be retiring our own "yet another launcher storefront" as soon as we think we can without losing any more face. We can't endure any more humiliation, and Todd's shrink has insisted he gets a PR person for the sake of his own sanity. We'll be launching on EGS in the future, steam also, but we are passing steam's extra 18% on to the customer, and we'll be encouraging our own "yet another launcher storefront" to become ever more invisible until it can be finally put to rest, hopefully with no one noticing, and our fans can go back to making our games great again."

[Backer42]

Oh how I miss the good old days. Just pop in the disc, run setup.exe, install, click shortcut and away you go. Now it seems filing your tax returns isn't too dissimilar from this.

I miss the times when there was retail trade with actual price competition. Now it's just publisher price fixing with the highest prices worldwide in my region (they even divided the EU into two regions, so they could charge me higher prices than my neighbors, imagine paying twice as much in California than in Florida). "Digital" games cost the same in every store, regardless of "storefront", just locked to the GeoIP.

BTW: I don't care much about the launcher chaos and I won't participate in any consumer tribalism. The "exclusives" thing simply lets me put the platform as a whole further on the backburner until I abandon it completely, when it gets too inconvenient and expensive. I don't need "PC gaming", when other platforms have a better selection, much more convenience AND better prices.

[tuberchimpy]

I had a quick compare olf steam prices vs EGS prices the other day. They were exactly the same. I am happy devs are getting more money, but I thought part of the selling point of EGS is that it would result in cheaper prices for the consumer? Dev's aren't keeping the lion's share and passing on a small saving, devs are keeping the lot. I expected at least a buck or two off to tempt the consumer.
( Obviously exclusives can't be compared. )

[Backer42]

I had a quick compare olf steam prices vs EGS prices the other day. They were exactly the same. I am happy devs are getting more money, but I thought part of the selling point of EGS is that it would result in cheaper prices for the consumer? Dev's aren't keeping the lion's share and passing on a small saving, devs are keeping the lot. I expected at least a buck or two off to tempt the consumer.
( Obviously exclusives can't be compared. )

Publisher price fixing and store exclusives means no competition. Retail going away also makes Steam completely uninteresting to me. The digital only release of X4: Foundations marked the point, where I stopped buying PC games (on release).

From a gamer's PoV I couldn't care less about these digital store shenanigans. EA dropping out of Steam only meant that I didn't notice their releases anymore. Recently I found out, that they released Titanfall 2 in 2016 already. I completely forgot that it even exists, it's like these games are invisible. 

So I wish them fun with whatever business model they come up with on PC, I don't care. Goodbye, Microsoft.

[DemonInvestor]

I had a quick compare olf steam prices vs EGS prices the other day. They were exactly the same. I am happy devs are getting more money, but I thought part of the selling point of EGS is that it would result in cheaper prices for the consumer? Dev's aren't keeping the lion's share and passing on a small saving, devs are keeping the lot. I expected at least a buck or two off to tempt the consumer.
( Obviously exclusives can't be compared. )

No... EGS is trying to win through cutting Valves game supply off... by offering a (short-term) better deal to producers.
By the way, game companies don't compete directly against each others, as every product is it's own mini monopoly. No matter how cheap Tropico 6 will be, it will never be Anno1800 - and i'm not talking quality or anything.

[tuberchimpy]

I seem to remember that one of the "selling points" of the EGS is that it was supposed to offer the potential that counsumers could get a better deal as well as devs. For instance I think Metro was five bucks cheaper when it moved to EGS? The difference between the valve slice and the EGS slice, especially if you use the engine too, was large enough that devs could make more profit AND charge the consumer less.
Apart from one example, Metro Exodus, the devs are just keeping all the extra cash, not passing a portion of that on to the cunsumer.

I am happy for devs to make more profit from paying less to digital distibution platforms. Game devs making more money will benefit consumers because it will add to the incentive and competition to make games. For a 60 dollar game, a dev/publisher gets almost 11 bucks more selling on EGS, if sales for that game are measured in millions, then that's 11 million bucks per million sales. That is incentive to make more and better games. It is good for the industry and consumers.

But the unfortunate reality is it's not going to reduce the nickle and diming cash grabs inside games. Dev and publishers paying EGS less is not going to reduce pedocaches ( lootbox gambling ) or any of the other crappy money squeezing practices the industry is so addicted to. If anything it may even encourage this crappy behaviour.

One interesting side effect is that extra cash incentive doesn't apply to free to play games. They get no benefit from the EGS, unless they start selling bundles on the EGS. If anything the EGS will incentivise a small nudge away from free to play, but I think the markets and mentality between free to play and purchased games is probably so vast that the effect will be next to nothing.

My biggest gripe with the EGS so far is that it runs like a dog on my PC. It will happily kill chrome stone dead when it is running in my tray, and when I leave an EGS game the game likes to try and prod the EGS back to life for some extra fork you marketing, but instead of ressurecting the EGS from its slumber, my PC just grinds to a halt. It really kills everything inclusing the OS, EGS is a real pile of dog**** on that front.

[Backer42]

No... EGS is trying to win through cutting Valves game supply off... by offering a (short-term) better deal to producers.

This can only work, when there is no retail market anymore. The platform is really in a sad state.

By the way, game companies don't compete directly against each others, as every product is it's own mini monopoly. No matter how cheap Tropico 6 will be, it will never be Anno1800 - and i'm not talking quality or anything.

That's why we used to have price competition in the retail market. Publishers now expect me to pay higher fixed prices in digital, when I ever paid in retail (all that with huge retail margins far higher than 30 %).

And I won't. I will simply opt out, until the video game fad falls out of fashion again.