Epic vs Steam

[Timinator]

Something I was thinking about with these exclusives, lets say 12 months later or whenever they are not exclusives.

Instead of the 88/12 revenue split, it goes to others that might do a 70/30 split.  Since the game isn't new, I doubt they can realisticly sell at the full price.  I'm sure some would buy, most would want a discount for something a year old, even if its only now available.  I'm also thinking about the Master chief collection, PC players have waited a decade for Halo 3 ...

So 88% is more than 70% of course.

But lets say only 40% of normal customers choose this vs their preferred buying location.
That remaining 60%, how many will buy on day 1? Will it be the full price? maybe 75% off? hard to say. 

So turn down 70% split to maybe get 75% of 70 later.  Sure Epic will give them a cash injection to say thanks for stopping by.



I was also thinking, its one thing to have multiple places to buy things.  In some ways that is fine, there used to be many sites that got you a steam key.  Use only Steam, or use 100 different ones, that doesn't matter.

What matters is every publisher, and company who wants you to install their software, AND have it running, Steam, Origin, Blizzard, Uplay, Epic, Gog Launcher etc.  and all the non game things like the adobe launcher. 

[Sssith]

I personally don't care about revenue splits. 

Things I do care about:

• Proliferation of installers
• What those installers are doing on my computuer
• Prices
• Sharing/friends/multiplayer -- easier to do these things from one platform

Ultimately Steam has grown into a pretty good platform and has made it easy to get a hold of a game at a reasonable price.  Usually the more competition there is the better the experience for the customer.  For the most part this they have treated us, the end customer well, and for the most part, we have not wanted another platform. 

I think the problem is that we are not the only customer in this equation.  I think it is fair to call the game developers another customer and in their case, I think it is pretty clear they both want and need more competition for their services.  They care about the splits and well they should.  Up to now, Steam has mostly held all the cards.

It seems to be that Epic is going the opposite direction than Steam.  They are willing to treat game developers better and the end customer worse.  Personally, I hope to see Steam win out in this but they will probably need to adjust how they treat game developers.  I think exclusives suck for the end customer. 

Time will tell how this plays out.

[Pixie]

What I care about most in this situation is paid exclusives. It's anti-consumer horseshit. I didn't mind Epic starting their own store initially. I don't care about having another launcher, since I still just launch everything through Steam anyway (games from the Uplay, Bethesda, Microsoft, GOG, and whatever other launchers will all still start in Steam just fine, although Origin games can be super finicky about it).

I did start caring when they started paying developers to make their games ONLY on Epic. I started caring more when they pulled bullshit like the deal with Metro Exodus, or Satisfactory. People bought those games to have ON STEAM, only to have the devs pull them off Steam at the last second? Oh hell naw. Satisfactory was kickstarted with the promise of Steam keys, only to have the devs say "whoops, no steam keys for you" right when the game came out. WTF? Now we get the promise of Heavy Rain, Beyond Two Souls, and Detroit getting PC ports... but only if you buy through Epic. No, just no. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.

The spyware fiasco is just one more straw on the camel. A launcher should not be performing 2 million operations on your hard drive in the first few seconds of being launched. Epic should not be reading your Steam data, or counting how many games you own that use non-Unreal game engines. Etc. Not surprising, though, since the Epic launcher was [partially?] built by the guy who fucking made Steam Spy, and was secretly working on the epic launcher for like a year while encouraging people to use Steam Spy.

Add on top of all that the lazy security of Epic regarding your account and it's just a major NOPE for me.

I'm not even going to START on the issue of Epic being 49% owned by Tencent... a company that was involved in creating China's terrifying "Social Credit" system.

My bottom line is "Fuck Epic" and I will never, ever buy a game from their store. It's the first time I've ever blanket boycotted any one storefront, but there it is.