Epic paid $10.5 million upfront for Control exclusivity

Not to rain on your parade, but that first link is just a press release written by 2k - and to add insult to injury they're throwing around useless stats like "more than 70 percent of consumers purchasing [sic] the game digitally" to which I can only say: I *think* (it's been that long) the last time I bought a game and received a "physical" copy was starcraft II, so way to provide some insight 2k. We'll never know what the sales "could" have been if it had been available on multiple platforms, but since even the hardcore Valve haters aren't talking about how feature-rich and exciting the EGS is we're looking at a best-case scenario of no difference to sales. I'm sure some accountant somewhere crunched the numbers to show that they could make more in interest from a lump sum than the anticipated loss of sales by being an EGS exclusive. Either way I can't be bothered to install yet another launcher, so if I remember this game when it's finally released on steam I might buy it, but odds are I just won't care by then. The general trend of EGS buying exclusives on PC is annoying enough that it would take a seriously exciting game to make me change course from my current trend of "that's more effort than I'm willing to put in to buying a game I was mildly interested in."
 
I find it funny that the Epic defenders constantly assume that anyone making the obvious comparison to Steam are fanboys. I have my share of issues with Steam and digital distribution in general but the fact of the matter is that they set the bar and EGS falls way short, I could compare it to any of the other launchers and it would fall short too though.

If the lack of functionality and flexibility were my only issues I'd simply take a wait and see approach but they also seem to have the worst privacy policy of the bunch(which is saying something these days) and I really don't like them buying exclusivity. I don't doubt they got more than just exclusivity for that 10.5m but other developers have also said that the deal they made was too good to turn down which means they're getting a lot more than a reasonable amount of guaranteed sales. It's rather hypocritical of them to claim that they're trying to offer competition when their main action to try to catch up to the competition is anti-competitive, the lower commission would impress me more if they didn't feel like a cut-rate service.

At this point I have no intention of ever installing the EGS launcher again much less buying anything from them but I'm willing to rethink that if they start offering a better service and stop trying to buy their way into the market with exclusives.
 
I find it funny that the Epic defenders constantly assume that anyone making the obvious comparison to Steam are fanboys. I have my share of issues with Steam and digital distribution in general but the fact of the matter is that they set the bar and EGS falls way short, I could compare it to any of the other launchers and it would fall short too though.

If the lack of functionality and flexibility were my only issues I'd simply take a wait and see approach but they also seem to have the worst privacy policy of the bunch(which is saying something these days) and I really don't like them buying exclusivity. I don't doubt they got more than just exclusivity for that 10.5m but other developers have also said that the deal they made was too good to turn down which means they're getting a lot more than a reasonable amount of guaranteed sales. It's rather hypocritical of them to claim that they're trying to offer competition when their main action to try to catch up to the competition is anti-competitive, the lower commission would impress me more if they didn't feel like a cut-rate service.

At this point I have no intention of ever installing the EGS launcher again much less buying anything from them but I'm willing to rethink that if they start offering a better service and stop trying to buy their way into the market with exclusives.

I find it funny you're unwilling to use a different launcher to play a game. You can make up all the BS excuses you want. You sound exactly like a social justice warrior. Complaining about the tiniest irrelevant things like it's the end of life as we know it.

I guess it's a win-win. You can enjoy complaining while everyone else is enjoying playing games.
 
I find it funny you're unwilling to use a different launcher to play a game. You can make up all the BS excuses you want. You sound exactly like a social justice warrior. Complaining about the tiniest irrelevant things like it's the end of life as we know it.

I guess it's a win-win. You can enjoy complaining while everyone else is enjoying playing games.

I was wondering when you'd show up in this thread.

As for your comment I currently have 5 launchers installed, another launcher while annoying is not the issue.
 
I find it funny that the Epic defenders constantly assume that anyone making the obvious comparison to Steam are fanboys. I have my share of issues with Steam and digital distribution in general but the fact of the matter is that they set the bar and EGS falls way short, I could compare it to any of the other launchers and it would fall short too though.

If the lack of functionality and flexibility were my only issues I'd simply take a wait and see approach but they also seem to have the worst privacy policy of the bunch(which is saying something these days) and I really don't like them buying exclusivity. I don't doubt they got more than just exclusivity for that 10.5m but other developers have also said that the deal they made was too good to turn down which means they're getting a lot more than a reasonable amount of guaranteed sales. It's rather hypocritical of them to claim that they're trying to offer competition when their main action to try to catch up to the competition is anti-competitive, the lower commission would impress me more if they didn't feel like a cut-rate service.

At this point I have no intention of ever installing the EGS launcher again much less buying anything from them but I'm willing to rethink that if they start offering a better service and stop trying to buy their way into the market with exclusives.

There are plenty of valid complaints against EGS, but I think sometimes people get a bit too worked up over the exclusives thing. Let's be frank here, Steam is fucking garbage for indie devs these days. Discoverability is neigh impossible unless you have an actual marketing budget, but if you can't afford to throw a few hundred grand (at the low end) into marketing you are getting buried under a mountain of asset flips and other garbage because Valve refuses to care about what goes on their store. There was a report recently showing that indie game sales on Steam went down 70% year-over-year with a 47% loss in average game revenue. Over the last couple years we've seen more and more indie devs flock to consoles, especially the Switch, where they're going to get a chance at actually making money. Epic is going to them saying "Hey, we're going to make sure you don't have to close your doors and guarantee you will at least break even on your release". Epic (and some of the studios that have taken the deal) deserve flak for how things get handled from time to time and I think they really should stay away from AAA publishers and focus only on smaller titles (preferably ones that aren't crowdfunded), but I can't get mad about Epic giving some of these games more of a chance than they would have otherwise.
 
So concurrent players of around 250k is kind of pathetic compared to the kind of numbers it would have done if 2K had made the game available on multiple stores. It would've been 7 figures. Especially when factoring the insane advertising budget - there wasn't a bus or billboard that didn't have BL3 on it at least in LA.

Doubtful, very doubtful. Doubling is about consistent with most other games (PC or console). There are some exceptions such as Witcher 3 which had their first proper console release or studios going from small to big such as CD Projekt Red. This simply isn't the case with Borderlands 3 or Gearbox who have had multiple well known games and IPs. Gaming has grown but it hasn't grown 7 fold in the past few years. That would be a 100% increase per year.

No doubt sales would probably be higher if it was Steam exclusive but the difference is marginal, enough so that the lower fees outweigh any sale number loss when it comes to profits.

Borderlands 2 (so far) has sold around 20 million copies on all platforms and that is about as high as it gets, the series has more or less plateaued. I'm sure BL3 will go higher but it won't be that much higher because this series simply isn't as definitive as Witcher 3, GTAV or similar. Frankly, the past games had some flaws and it looks like BL3 while popular just isn't as ground breaking as it once was.

We'll never know what the sales "could" have been if it had been available on multiple platforms...

What we do know is the high priced sales figures on PC are about what we expected in terms of growth. I think that is fairly obvious, the vast majority die hard Borderlands fans aren't going to be swayed by EGS.

What will be interesting is seeing how medium term sales go. Perhaps after the week 1-2 die hard Borderland fans are done purchasing we'll see sales taper off at a higher rate. I doubt it, but it is certainly possible.
 
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Not to rain on your parade, but that first link is just a press release written by 2k - and to add insult to injury they're throwing around useless stats like "more than 70 percent of consumers purchasing [sic] the game digitally" to which I can only say: I *think* (it's been that long) the last time I bought a game and received a "physical" copy was starcraft II, so way to provide some insight 2k. We'll never know what the sales "could" have been if it had been available on multiple platforms, but since even the hardcore Valve haters aren't talking about how feature-rich and exciting the EGS is we're looking at a best-case scenario of no difference to sales. I'm sure some accountant somewhere crunched the numbers to show that they could make more in interest from a lump sum than the anticipated loss of sales by being an EGS exclusive. Either way I can't be bothered to install yet another launcher, so if I remember this game when it's finally released on steam I might buy it, but odds are I just won't care by then. The general trend of EGS buying exclusives on PC is annoying enough that it would take a seriously exciting game to make me change course from my current trend of "that's more effort than I'm willing to put in to buying a game I was mildly interested in."

Well the response was to a different person. odditory wanted sales numbers which are clearly there. And indicated as being in the 7 figured. Not to mention over 1 billion net. Love it or hate it, the game was successful on EGS' one year of exclusivity model.
Would've been or could've been doesn't matter. It's successful by any metric.


There are plenty of valid complaints against EGS, but I think sometimes people get a bit too worked up over the exclusives thing. Let's be frank here, Steam is fucking garbage for indie devs these days. Discoverability is neigh impossible unless you have an actual marketing budget, but if you can't afford to throw a few hundred grand (at the low end) into marketing you are getting buried under a mountain of asset flips and other garbage because Valve refuses to care about what goes on their store. There was a report recently showing that indie game sales on Steam went down 70% year-over-year with a 47% loss in average game revenue. Over the last couple years we've seen more and more indie devs flock to consoles, especially the Switch, where they're going to get a chance at actually making money. Epic is going to them saying "Hey, we're going to make sure you don't have to close your doors and guarantee you will at least break even on your release". Epic (and some of the studios that have taken the deal) deserve flak for how things get handled from time to time and I think they really should stay away from AAA publishers and focus only on smaller titles (preferably ones that aren't crowdfunded), but I can't get mad about Epic giving some of these games more of a chance than they would have otherwise.

This is a rant that for the most part is irrelevant. Steam is a platform provider. I don't expect them to market games period. Nor is it their responsibility to do so. People learn about games from things other than Steam and then simply search for them and buy them on Steam. There is precisely zero games that Steam has shown me via any of its methods that have made me buy that game other than already knowing what I wanted in the first place. And to be clear, I've been on Steam since literally the beginning.

I learn far more about games from independent game sites and these forums than I ever have or ever will from Steam. Complaining about this is like complaining that Best Buy doesn't market titles either. And neither really does Gamestop. That's the devs responsibility to get the word out there. Marketing is a companies real job. Do you also complain that small businesses trying to sell through Amazon don't get marketed by Amazon? Make a good product, start a grass routes campaign. Blast social media and offer copies for people to review same as everyone else. There are plenty of strategies that can be done for little or no money provided your product doesn't suck.

As for the rest, yeah, they'll move to wherever they'll move to. That's called "strategy" and what smart business people do. If they see opportunity and take it good on them. If Epic can make their value proposition better and these devs take it, good for them. I have zero problems with the devs. They make their choice, they have to live with it.
 
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There are plenty of valid complaints against EGS, but I think sometimes people get a bit too worked up over the exclusives thing. Let's be frank here, Steam is fucking garbage for indie devs these days. Discoverability is neigh impossible unless you have an actual marketing budget, but if you can't afford to throw a few hundred grand (at the low end) into marketing you are getting buried under a mountain of asset flips and other garbage because Valve refuses to care about what goes on their store. There was a report recently showing that indie game sales on Steam went down 70% year-over-year with a 47% loss in average game revenue. Over the last couple years we've seen more and more indie devs flock to consoles, especially the Switch, where they're going to get a chance at actually making money. Epic is going to them saying "Hey, we're going to make sure you don't have to close your doors and guarantee you will at least break even on your release". Epic (and some of the studios that have taken the deal) deserve flak for how things get handled from time to time and I think they really should stay away from AAA publishers and focus only on smaller titles (preferably ones that aren't crowdfunded), but I can't get mad about Epic giving some of these games more of a chance than they would have otherwise.

I don't buy that limiting themselves to a smaller market is helping indie devs with exposure, there's plenty of other things they could do with EGS that I would be in favor of but when I looked at the store it emphasized AAA games just as much as the Steam store. If a game can't make any money on it's merits then it deserves to fail, Epic isn't going to continually prop up others failed business models and they certainly aren't doing any of this for altruistic reasons.
 
There are plenty of valid complaints against EGS, but I think sometimes people get a bit too worked up over the exclusives thing. Let's be frank here, Steam is fucking garbage for indie devs these days. Discoverability is neigh impossible unless you have an actual marketing budget, but if you can't afford to throw a few hundred grand (at the low end) into marketing you are getting buried under a mountain of asset flips and other garbage because Valve refuses to care about what goes on their store. There was a report recently showing that indie game sales on Steam went down 70% year-over-year with a 47% loss in average game revenue. Over the last couple years we've seen more and more indie devs flock to consoles, especially the Switch, where they're going to get a chance at actually making money. Epic is going to them saying "Hey, we're going to make sure you don't have to close your doors and guarantee you will at least break even on your release". Epic (and some of the studios that have taken the deal) deserve flak for how things get handled from time to time and I think they really should stay away from AAA publishers and focus only on smaller titles (preferably ones that aren't crowdfunded), but I can't get mad about Epic giving some of these games more of a chance than they would have otherwise.

There are two issues at play here:

1) Valve's lack of quality control makes finding a good indie game a little difficult. I'd be less interested in viewing indie games I find on Steam because of the sheer amount of utter garbage. Indie games used to mean something like Red Orchestra Ost Front. Lower budget, but top notch gameplay and features that mainstream developers only started catching onto many years later. Now the market is flooded with utter trash with incomplete assets. This certainly hurts smaller developers that relied more on Steam searching.

2) The poor descriptions. Game descriptions are purposefully vague. An online based game that has an offline mode counts as being a single player game like Dishonored. You can read a description and literally have no idea what genre of game it is supposed to actually be. This isn't all Valve's fault, but they need to start enforcing stricter standards for game descriptions. If I do happen to see a game on Steam I have to head off to Google to read an article to find out what kind of a game it actually is.
 
News just came out that Borderlands 3 is cleaning up like never before on EGS, as did Metro Exodus.


First day and already double the all time concurrent record for PC users. So obviously healthy PC sales.

You can keep ranting, but you already lost.


I doubt those figures have anything to do with the Epic launch platform, and more to do with people being excited about a sequel to a beloved franchise. I agree that Epic making Borderlands 3 an exclusive isn't going to have as big an effect as the Steam devotees would like. But in comparison:

Oblivion: 2 million copies first week
Fallout 3: 3 million copies first week
Fallout New Vegas: 5 million copies first week
Skyrim: 7 million copies first week
Fallout 4: 12 million copies first week

A good sequel of a good franchise should have a big sales growth. I didn't buy the first Borderlands, but I bought Borderlands 2 on sale, eventually played it, and found out I liked it. So I bought Borderlands: The Pre Sequel on release.

I'm not against a new company offering competition to Steam. Almost all of my games are on Steam, and I like it that way, but I have no qualms about buying from someone else. I'm not buying from Epic, though, because I don't trust the values of the company and I don't trust their long-term commitment after the money gets thin. I do trust Steam, I think they're playing the long game, and that's really all that I want - someone who will still be here 20 years from now when I want to download the original XCom again.

But that's just me.


P.S. Fallout 76: 1.06 million copies the first week....
 
I doubt those figures have anything to do with the Epic launch platform, and more to do with people being excited about a sequel to a beloved franchise. I agree that Epic making Borderlands 3 an exclusive isn't going to have as big an effect as the Steam devotees would like. But in comparison:

Oblivion: 2 million copies first week
Fallout 3: 3 million copies first week
Fallout New Vegas: 5 million copies first week
Skyrim: 7 million copies first week
Fallout 4: 12 million copies first week

A good sequel of a good franchise should have a big sales growth. I didn't buy the first Borderlands, but I bought Borderlands 2 on sale, eventually played it, and found out I liked it. So I bought Borderlands: The Pre Sequel on release.

I'm not against a new company offering competition to Steam. Almost all of my games are on Steam, and I like it that way, but I have no qualms about buying from someone else. I'm not buying from Epic, though, because I don't trust the values of the company and I don't trust their long-term commitment after the money gets thin. I do trust Steam, I think they're playing the long game, and that's really all that I want - someone who will still be here 20 years from now when I want to download the original XCom again.

But that's just me.


P.S. Fallout 76: 1.06 million copies the first week....


It looks like it took 10+ days to sell 1.82 Millions copies of BL2.
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...-shifts-1-5-million-copies-in-september-in-us

So more than double the sales, in about half the time. Excellent growth.

Not saying it has anything to do with the platform, and that is the point, most people don't give a shit about the platform/launcher. That rhetoric is just more of the toxic vocal minority in PC gaming, that needs to rant about everything.
 
It looks like it took 10+ days to sell 1.82 Millions copies of BL2.
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...-shifts-1-5-million-copies-in-september-in-us

So more than double the sales, in about half the time. Excellent growth.

Not saying it has anything to do with the platform, and that is the point, most people don't give a shit about the platform/launcher. That rhetoric is just more of the toxic vocal minority in PC gaming, that needs to rant about everything.
Wow so if someone has vaild points but disagrees with you they are toxic?
 
Wow so if someone has vaild points but disagrees with you they are toxic?

So you think the majority of gamers actually care about the store they buy games from?

Is it not more realistic that the majority of people buying a game just want the game and don’t care about the politics?

I hate ESG, I want border lands, wanting BL3 won. I got BL3.

Other than that you took a small snippet of his post and made it into a thing, so maybe you are toxic.
 
95% of the buying public could care less what launcher they need to use. Some of you act like using another launcher is some huge deal. Annoying as it is, it was nothing compared to having to dig out the manual and look up some stupid word in it so you could play your game.
 
95% of the buying public could care less what launcher they need to use. Some of you act like using another launcher is some huge deal. Annoying as it is, it was nothing compared to having to dig out the manual and look up some stupid word in it so you could play your game.

Remember the star flight wheel... I do.
 
So you think the majority of gamers actually care about the store they buy games from?

Is it not more realistic that the majority of people buying a game just want the game and don’t care about the politics?

I hate ESG, I want border lands, wanting BL3 won. I got BL3.

Other than that you took a small snippet of his post and made it into a thing, so maybe you are toxic.

I would say in this case a good bit does. Time
will tell when some of the games hit steam also politics has nothing to do with it. Everyone has their own resones mine are i like steam and don't like to be forced where to buy something form. However frist party titles on a publishers own store I can understand but making third party games for only one store is dumb and that's why I don't ues it

Also I'm far form toxic I could care less what you do with your time or money and I respect your opinion without name calling.

Facts are you cannot say it's outside the realm of possibility that the egs numbers are fake/padded by them and publishers it's not like the old days where you had to ship boxes we are talking numbers on a counter on a store that pays publishers to put the games on it. Is this what is happening who knows we will find out when they hit steam.
 
... Annoying as it is, it was nothing compared to having to dig out the manual and look up some stupid word in it so you could play your game.

Remember the star flight wheel... I do.


I have played so much of the original Master of Orion that I still have all the ship names memorized. And that is sort of pathetic.
 
I don't buy that limiting themselves to a smaller market is helping indie devs with exposure, there's plenty of other things they could do with EGS that I would be in favor of but when I looked at the store it emphasized AAA games just as much as the Steam store. If a game can't make any money on it's merits then it deserves to fail, Epic isn't going to continually prop up others failed business models and they certainly aren't doing any of this for altruistic reasons.

What Epic emphasizes tends to change based on whats out. Rebel Galaxy got priority at one point, Ubisoft games got pushed at one point, before Borderlands 3 came out Epic was pushing Control. Untitled Goose Game has the top spot at the moment. Borderlands 3 is in the number 2 spot and after that its another 10 spots of smaller titles. In the short term EGS is a much better place for smaller studios to get attention. Now, that will change as the store grows. EGS lacks features that could prove to be beneficial to discoverability as they add more and more titles. They need categories, a recommendation system, an advertisement banner that changes when you refresh or go to the main page, store pages need to link to similar games, they need developer/publisher pages, and so on. EGS could easily end up being worse than Steam in this regard if Epic doesn't pull its head out of its ass and get in gear on improving the store.

Of course its not altruistic. Where did I imply that it was? There is no such thing as an altruistic for-profit company, especially not one the size of Epic.
 
I would say in this case a good bit does. Time
will tell when some of the games hit steam also politics has nothing to do with it. Everyone has their own resones mine are i like steam and don't like to be forced where to buy something form. However frist party titles on a publishers own store I can understand but making third party games for only one store is dumb and that's why I don't ues it

Also I'm far form toxic I could care less what you do with your time or money and I respect your opinion without name calling.

Facts are you cannot say it's outside the realm of possibility that the egs numbers are fake/padded by them and publishers it's not like the old days where you had to ship boxes we are talking numbers on a counter on a store that pays publishers to put the games on it. Is this what is happening who knows we will find out when they hit steam.

You are making a straw man.

Re read his post, re read yours, you will see that you are seeking a bone to pick.

If you truly believe what you post then time will tell.

Reality is your allegations amount to fraud and potential stock manipulation, my admittedly anecdotal evidence suggest BL3 sales are accurate. All my friends and some idiots in vent now discord I know from years ago gave up and got ESG just for BL3.

Maybe they are padding, but just a likely (more so imho) people wanted a proper f’ing borderland sequel and got it regardless of store front. I know I damn well did.
 
Facts are you cannot say it's outside the realm of possibility that the egs numbers are fake/padded by them and publishers it's not like the old days where you had to ship boxes we are talking numbers on a counter on a store that pays publishers to put the games on it. Is this what is happening who knows we will find out when they hit steam.

And the reason they'd risk SEC fines by lying about something like that is what exactly? "They could lie" is a pretty unsteady leg to base your entire argument on. 2K won't give a damn about making Epic look good and the money from 5m sales is nowhere near enough for them to bother lying about it. And no, we'll know before it hits Steam. We will know when Take-Two files quarterly financials and discusses game sales as part of their report. If Borderlands 3 makes enough of a blip in their financials to matter they'll call it out.
 
95% of the buying public could care less what launcher they need to use. Some of you act like using another launcher is some huge deal. Annoying as it is, it was nothing compared to having to dig out the manual and look up some stupid word in it so you could play your game.
Deliberately trying to downplay the spectrum of ways Epic is pissing people off with "it's just another launcher" is just a way of advocating for a company that specifically acts to damage consumer choice, and refuses to compete on the quality of their product. Hostage taker and gatekeeper, that's all they are so far. The free games and their launcher overall would be much better received if they weren't simultaneously trying to block games from being sold on other stores. A place exists for EGS but they could be way smarter about it.

Epic isn't really trying to improve their store and featureset despite hundreds of developers on the payroll. Whereas Steam and other stores compete on features that accompany the launcher (discussion community, workshop, friends lists and chat client, wishlists, Linux support, reviews , etc). All those features being absent on EGS, but consumers still having to pay the same $59.99 price for a game EGS poached from Steam, and it's a net loss for consumers. There is no upside or value add. Epic hasn't made the PC gaming ecosystem better. For an example of Steam competition done right, see what Microsoft is doing with Xbox Game Pass. Consumers have a new avenue with that service, there's a value add.
 
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:rolleyes:

Upfront guarantees don't play games. See a few posts up where they already doubled the all time concurrent user record for PC, on the first day.
I'd not believe the questions pitchford asking, let alone a random "stat" without any numbers and sources to back it up. He's just firing smoke. I don't believe for a second that any game on EGS is doing better than it would've done without it. And if you do, well you're easily fooled.

Gaming is more popular than ever, so it's pointless to compare peak players of an old game to a new one anyway, it doesn't tell you anything useful. So this would be meaningless even if we assumed Pitchford is a saint and isn't trying to skew the picture at all.
 
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All those features being absent on EGS, but consumers still having to pay the same $59.99 price for a game EGS poached from Steam, and it's a net loss for consumers.

I think there is a disconnect here. When Epic refers to a "good deal", being "beneficial to the industry" or "offer competition" they are referring to the developers/publishers. What is good for them isn't necessarily good for gamers.

For a digital client, their customer is the developer/publisher. The gamers come second. A gamer doesn't download a client for the hell of it, they download it because a game they want is locked to it. Likewise, Valve didn't try to amaze gamers but releasing a client that was a net benefit to gamers. They went in hard trying to grab anyone who would be willing to sign up with them by offering developers an awesome deal that couldn't be had elsewhere.

And at this point, practically every publisher/developer is contacting Epic on their own accord to get in while the deal is good. The only exception are the Japanese developers who seem to very slow when it comes to making changes to anything PC related.

Gaming is more popular than ever, so it's pointless to compare peak players of an old game to a new one anyway, it doesn't tell you anything useful.

Actually it does. If the game flopped hard it would've had numbers lower than the previous title. If the game sucks the player base will taper off quickly which means less sales for any multiplayer based game as time goes on. People are less likely to buy a game if the population is lower and most people play Borderlands as a co-op game even if it can be played offline.
 
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It's not a hurricane, but even if it were the issue many have is that it's being forced on them in a shady manner by paying for exclusivity and with a poor solution in place, AKA the actual EGS that has no justified reason to be a decade behind Steam in terms of features and capabilities. Nor does Origin, Battle.net, uPlay, etc. Some of these are improving, but it's clear the profit driven nature of those making the decisions are doing 'just enough' for their launchers to get by.

I have several games via EGS, purchased and free, like I do with Origin and uPlay, but they ALL lack the features & support systems that make Steam great.

I'm all for competition, but it *has* to be competitive for the consumer and with the EGS it simply is not by any common sense metric.
The developer is receiving trucks of cash, Epic is creating friction by fragmenting the market and the consumer still has one choice at the same price as before.
On those points, it's worth making your voice heard if you have a dissenting opinion on Epic's path forward.

If the end goal is to put pressure on Valve to reduce their fees, I'm not sure this is the best approach.

Good on the developer for taking advantage of an offer, I hope it works out for them.
I am interested in the game, but I don't feel it's worth $30 and will wait for a sale.
If one never comes, then neither does the sale! :)

I am not of the "one game store to rule them all" mentality,
and while I see the point of making one's voice heard, I
don't believe that "voting with my wallet" will make one iota of difference
to the way the game launcher wars play out. Life is too short to worry about that.

Lest we forget, steam was "forced" on us back in the day to a similar degree of
collective outrage and I think it's fair to say that Epic is at least the leader in the
distribution of quality free titles - isn't that good news for the consumer?

The cynical side of me believes the "goal" is not to put pressure on valve to
reduce their fees and help developers, it's just to make the biggest
continuously milkable cash cow they can just like steam, origin et al.

I have the GoG, Uplay, Origin, Epic and Steam launchers installed on my PC. I
agree Steam has the best functionality and feature set and I have added all my non
steam games to my steam library so it serves as a universal launcher on my desktop.

I'm concentrating on the most important aspect which to me is playing the
games and having fun in the process.
 
I'd not believe the questions pitchford asking, let alone a random "stat" without any numbers and sources to back it up. He's just firing smoke. I don't believe for a second that any game on EGS is doing better than it would've done without it. And if you do, well you're easily fooled.

Gaming is more popular than ever, so it's pointless to compare peak players of an old game to a new one anyway, it doesn't tell you anything useful. So this would be meaningless even if we assumed Pitchford is a saint and isn't trying to skew the picture at all.
Yeah, if the whole "98% of people don't care where they buy their games" trope were true, and 2K limiting their PC sales to EGS was a decision they were happy with based on actual copies sold, then the cherrypicked stats they chose to share seemed like intentionally avoiding numbers they should've been happy to share for vindication.

This is smelling like a repeat of the Metro Exodus bluster, when Tim Sweeney took to twitter to proclaim it had "sold more in the first week than Last Light did in it's first week!", but the EGS boosters took that weirdly narrow slice of data and ran with it as "Exodus breaking sales records, gamers don't care which store they buy on after all"'. And yet a few months later we saw the THQ Nordiq CEO during an earnings presentation shake his head like "FML, next question" when asked how Exodus sales on EGS had really been.

What will be interesting to see is if some of these AAA publishers sign any more exclusivity deals after their test cases (Exodus, BL3, Control). That will be the only way to gauge if they were legitimately pleased with EGS sales performance.
 
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Yeah, if the whole "98% of people don't care where they buy their games" trope were true, and 2K limiting their PC sales to EGS was a decision they were happy with based on actual copies sold, then they wouldn't have needed to cherrypick such weirdly specific stats for what they chose to share and puff up.

It's true 2K has tended not to break out sales by platform in the past, however if BL3 sales on EGS were truly "record breaking" then it would've been a slam dunk to share the number and claim vindication.

This is very reminiscent of the lacklustre Metro Exodus sales on EGS being smokescreened by "It sold more in the first week than Last Light did in the first week!" (when the franchise was still a relative unknown), but the simples and shills took that specific slice of data and ran with it as "Exodus breaking sales records".

Nothing will stop Epic from behaving like scumbags since they're flush with Fortnite cash and the bribes aren't illegal; what will be interesting to see is if these AAA publishers sign more exclusivity deals after being burned. That will be the only way to gauge how happy they truly are about EGS sales, behind the PR smoke and mirrors.

Except, they wouldn't. Outside of extreme, unrealistic, scenarios there is no way they would reveal more information than they have. You are expecting transparency from a notoriously secretive industry and from the same company that sent PIs to harass a Youtuber and got his channel shut down because he shared leaks on BL3. Why do you think 2K gives a damn about making Epic look good? They cherrypick the stats that have the most impact. No one has yet to provide an actual reason why they would need to blatantly lie (and risk a SEC investigation).

Instead of hopping on the incredibly flimsy "but they could have" line of "reasoning" maybe the question you should be asking is: What was the previous record? This was 2K's best selling PC launch. Cool, means it didn't fail on EGS like people were, stupidly, hoping it would. So, what game held the record before and what was that record? BL2? Bioshock Infinite? An X-Com title? Civ? All are contenders.
 
Yeah, if the whole "98% of people don't care where they buy their games" trope were true, and 2K limiting their PC sales to EGS was a decision they were happy with based on actual copies sold, then they wouldn't have needed to cherrypick such weirdly specific stats for what they chose to share and puff up.

It's true 2K has tended not to break out sales by platform in the past, however if BL3 sales on EGS were truly "record breaking" then it would've been a slam dunk to share the number and claim vindication.

This is very reminiscent of the lacklustre Metro Exodus sales on EGS being smokescreened by "It sold more in the first week than Last Light did in the first week!" (when the franchise was still a relative unknown), but the simples and shills took that specific slice of data and ran with it as "Exodus breaking sales records".

Exodus sold 250% more than Last Light on PC (in its first week). That is impressive if you're using real world standards. That lines up with what the industry would consider excellent growth. BL3, across all platforms, saw a 50% increase (5 million sales). Most of those are console (like for most AAA games). The typical break down this generation is ~50% PS4, ~30% PC, ~20% Xbox One. Let us say, hypothetically, that not releasing BL3 on Steam caused a 50% decrease in sales on PC. That number would jump up to 6.5 million. Which is a big jump, but still far from "seven fold". They would need to have moved 16.8 million sales (up from 2.4 million for BL2) to get that number. And that simply isn't happening on any platform. And considering 2K is claiming strong sales across all platforms, we can assume that BL3 wasn't a flop. Even if you don't want it to be. As mentioned above by someone else, faking sales figures could get them in some legal trouble.

Your expectations of how well game sales increase just doesn't align with reality. And plenty of sequels see a big dip in sales or a plateau. About half of all AAA games don't see massive sales leaps. That is the nature of the business; many see massive dips or stay stagnant. Examples: Dishonored 2 sales were down 40%. Wolfenstien 2 sales were down by a large margin. Battlefield 4 sales dropped below Battlefield 3. Watch Dogs 2 saw a huge decrease. Shadow of the Tomb Raider, same deal there. Deus Ex Mankind Divided? Yeah, same issue.

Very few games are raging success stories that blow their predecessors out of the water. For every Fallout 4 or Witcher 3 there are many more that see declines or stay at the same level.

As for exact sales numbers, that is practically never given. Very few game companies publish exact numbers. At best you get figures such as 40% down, 70% up, ect.
 
I think there is a disconnect here. When Epic refers to a "good deal", being "beneficial to the industry" or "offer competition" they are referring to the developers/publishers. What is good for them isn't necessarily good for gamers.

For a digital client, their customer is the developer/publisher. The gamers come second. A gamer doesn't download a client for the hell of it, they download it because a game they want is locked to it. Likewise, Valve didn't try to amaze gamers but releasing a client that was a net benefit to gamers. They went in hard trying to grab anyone who would be willing to sign up with them by offering developers an awesome deal that couldn't be had elsewhere.

And at this point, practically every publisher/developer is contacting Epic on their own accord to get in while the deal is good. The only exception are the Japanese developers who seem to very slow when it comes to making changes to anything PC related.
The customer is whoever is footing the bill for the end product, no customer means no middle man payment. You are correct that they've lost sight of this fact though.

I don't see any major publishers rushing for an exclusivity deal much less doing so without incentive like some do with Steam, it's no surprise that they had to go to a b list publisher like Deep Silver for their first bought exclusive for a AAA and a has been like 2K for their second.
 
The customer is whoever is footing the bill for the end product, no customer means no middle man payment. You are correct that they've lost sight of this fact though.

I don't see any major publishers rushing for an exclusivity deal much less doing so without incentive like some do with Steam, it's no surprise that they had to go to a b list publisher like Deep Silver for their first bought exclusive for a AAA and a has been like 2K for their second.

Since when is 2K a has been?
 
Since when is 2K a has been?

Their claim to fame and associated glory years were when they went toe to toe with EA on sports games, they lost that fight a long time ago even if their games were usually superior. Outside of that they have Borderlands, Mafia, and Civilization... Am I missing any?
 
The customer is whoever is footing the bill for the end product, no customer means no middle man payment. You are correct that they've lost sight of this fact though.

I don't see any major publishers rushing for an exclusivity deal much less doing so without incentive like some do with Steam, it's no surprise that they had to go to a b list publisher like Deep Silver for their first bought exclusive for a AAA and a has been like 2K for their second.
And in fairness to 2K, based on tweets from Randy Pitchford in Dec 2018 swearing how much more evolved EGS would be by the time BL3 came out (a tweet that didn't age well), seems like the deal was struck late 2018 some time, which was 3-6 months before Epic really started the backlash ball rolling by trying to bribe publishers to remove their games from Steam mere days or weeks before release. Epic also seems to monitor Steam's Top50 wishlisted, and spams offers to those developers after they've enjoyed months or years of free advertising on Steam and release is imminent.

Then to make matters worse, Tim would take to twitter and make comments to antagonize people further, adding fuel to the backlash. It's short sighted, undermines and squanders the goodwill of the free games they offer.

So 2K probably wasn't thrilled by Epic's behavior as it unfolded and they continued to create their own bad press, weren't thrilled by the lack of promised improvements to EGS, but were already committed.
 
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It's short sighted, undermines and squanders the goodwill of the free games they offer.
The free games they offer seems like adding insult to injury, especially since they launched right around the time when they did their first major deal with metro exodus.

I'm not going into a crap restaurant just because they offer free salads. I'd rather pay for my salad at a nice place.
 
Actually it does. If the game flopped hard it would've had numbers lower than the previous title. If the game sucks the player base will taper off quickly which means less sales for any multiplayer based game as time goes on. People are less likely to buy a game if the population is lower and most people play Borderlands as a co-op game even if it can be played offline.
Yes, that gaming in general is more popular. You can't derive any conclusion about the effect of egs exclusivity on the game. Nobody expected it to bomb completely, even if I personally hoped it would. The people who have the backbone to reject exclusivity are few and far in between.
 
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And in fairness to 2K, based on tweets from Randy Pitchford in Dec 2018 swearing how much more evolved EGS would be by the time BL3 came out (a tweet that didn't age well), seems like the deal was struck late 2018 some time, which was 3-6 months before Epic really started the backlash ball rolling by trying to bribe publishers to remove their games from Steam mere days or weeks before release. Epic also seems to monitor Steam's Top50 wishlisted, and spams offers to those developers after they've enjoyed months or years of free advertising on Steam and release is imminent.

Then to make matters worse, Tim would take to twitter and make comments to antagonize people further, adding fuel to the backlash. It's short sighted, undermines and squanders the goodwill of the free games they offer.

So 2K probably wasn't thrilled by Epic's behavior as it unfolded and they continued to create their own bad press, weren't thrilled by the lack of promised improvements to EGS, but were already committed.

That would make sense and they are the biggest publisher to go along with it. I still think they're in a much less comfortable position than they used to be which would explain them being willing to take that risk.

My language might have been harsh but I actually hold no ill will for 2K or Deep Silver it just doesn't surprise me that they weren't able to turn down quick, guaranteed money even if it runs the risk of be a bad long term move.
 
Never bought a game off EA's Origin b/c of this 'forced to buy it through us and us only' heavy-handed tactic. Not going to buy anything from the pic store for basically the same reason, but at least the Epic store has it exclusive for just a limited time.
My game backlog is over 100 games deep. I can afford to wait and buy it where I want.
 
Wow so if someone has vaild points but disagrees with you they are toxic?

There is clearly a toxic PCMR reaction to this when anyone just tries to talk about any that happens to be on EGS , moderators have to step in and warn the same people to not turn this into another stupid rant about EGS thread.
 
there is definitely a reason to care about launchers because most of them incorporate some form of DRM into the games they distribute and this drm requires a phone home to it's servers and if the distributor suddenly disappears for whatever reason, all of the games you purchased are suddenly unplayable and unretrievable.

I certainly dont like having another thing i have to boot into windows for, and I dont like having another program trying to stay alive all the time and log/report home whatever it is they're stealing from my computer for their telemetry metrics. But I'd rather have competing digital stores than a single massive one that can dictate and control prices. Even if the bigger one is better in basically every way as far as the consumer is concerned.

Plus, am I supposed to wait months for BL3 to be available on other platforms? yea...no.
 
Lol, people defending steam saying it updated it's platform to support DLC (which gives it more money), to support Linux (which gives it more money), to allow people to watch their friends (Which costs them nothing to do, and the implementation is worse than Nvidia's free one)...Also GAMESTREAM is far better than steam for local game streaming if you have an nvidia card, and thats also free.

Get off your high horse, Valve has not kept up like you'd expect a company with that name to. You can quote my post in fragments and say it's irrelevant to the topic, but Valve is not making new games anymore and shouldn't be a sale gateway.

Games that sell on Valve take a profit hit, leading to worse games in the long term. You may disagree but if you are a company that sells more than one game ever, you learn from your past performances financially. Look at blizzard, for example; and their addiction to mobile games that suck (and suck your money), over their long loved successful list of franchise games.

Their UI looks like it was made in 2005, even with any skin you can install, and I've tried many. The chat is horrible, the reliability of their network is often questionable, and you can't even change your login from a 20 year old email address that you probably got rid of 15 years back. If Valve was the company it used to be, you could play actual games on Linux, or do something actually eye-opening rather than sales figures of other companies games.

In my unpopular opinion, a game store should be agnostic to any publisher, if one should exist, and serve files with leased licenses or something in a blockchain type of fashion. Either way, Valve's model sucks and it's a monopoly. It's like only having a bad Walmart to go to.
 
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This is smelling like a repeat of the Metro Exodus bluster, when Tim Sweeney took to twitter to proclaim it had "sold more in the first week than Last Light did in it's first week!", but the EGS boosters took that weirdly narrow slice of data and ran with it as "Exodus breaking sales records, gamers don't care which store they buy on after all"'. And yet a few months later we saw the THQ Nordiq CEO during an earnings presentation shake his head like "FML, next question" when asked how Exodus sales on EGS had really been.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/metro-exodus/sales

“Epic Games store has exceeded our expectations in terms of sales in actual units of both Metro Exodus and Satisfactory during the quarter,” Wingefors tells us. “Epic Games store is in fact the group’s leading digital platform in terms of revenue generated by units sales in the quarter ending March.”

In other words, direct game sales through the Epic store brought in more money for THQ Nordic in the quarter than sales on Steam, PlayStation Network, or Xbox Live. That can be partially attributed to the higher revenue cut developers receive through Epic, but it takes more than a few percentage points to compete against the big install bases on console.

Wingefors adds “my statement yesterday” – that ‘absolute majority’ bit noted by many on Twitter – “about console share of Metro Exodus sales was referring to the two console platforms combined – both physical and digital revenue. This is still the majority of the revenues of Metro Exodus.”
 
Never bought a game off EA's Origin b/c of this 'forced to buy it through us and us only' heavy-handed tactic. Not going to buy anything from the pic store for basically the same reason, but at least the Epic store has it exclusive for just a limited time.
My game backlog is over 100 games deep. I can afford to wait and buy it where I want.

Well EA has the resources to run their own platform for their own games - why would anyone ever expect them to give up 30% of sales to Valve if they didn't have to? It's the same with Blizzard and their launcher app (although they were never on Steam).

You'd be the worst businessman in the world if you had the resources and product appeal to cut out Steam, but didn't do it.
 
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