Epic paid $10.5 million upfront for Control exclusivity

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).
Guess he won't be buying Half Life 3 either. oh wait.
 
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?

WWE games (still big sellers), their gambling simulator masquerading as a basketball game still brings in a lot of money. They're definitely not as big of a name as they used to be, but I wouldn't call them a "has been".
 
There is no reason for loyalty especially when I think steam has really fallen off when it comes to attracting publishers as it used to be very good at advertising your game once it hit steam but that is no longer the case anymore with the massive influx of trash clogging the new games list.

One of the advantages of pc gaming over consoles is publishers and devs is that they can just sell their game directly to customers without anyone else directly taking a cut if they got the infrastructure. If you don't have it you'd have to be insane to not go with the one that one that offers the best cut of your own game regardless of controversy. Especially when you consider they will still get most of the greatly overstated 'hold outs' money as they are timed exclusive anyways.

Main point being exclusivity to a store is rather meaningless in pc gaming, it's not like on console where it's locked certain hardware forever or something it's just a easily installed launcher. Even if every single game ends up having its own launcher (most big publishers are moving to this already anyways) it's still better then what we had in the past were you had to research game patches and then wait in line for downloads on them for every game you own.
 
There is no reason for loyalty especially when I think steam has really fallen off when it comes to attracting publishers as it used to be very good at advertising your game once it hit steam but that is no longer the case anymore with the massive influx of trash clogging the new games list.

One of the advantages of pc gaming over consoles is publishers and devs is that they can just sell their game directly to customers without anyone else directly taking a cut if they got the infrastructure. If you don't have it you'd have to be insane to not go with the one that one that offers the best cut of your own game regardless of controversy. Especially when you consider they will still get most of the greatly overstated 'hold outs' money as they are timed exclusive anyways.

Main point being exclusivity to a store is rather meaningless in pc gaming, it's not like on console where it's locked certain hardware forever or something it's just a easily installed launcher. Even if every single game ends up having its own launcher (most big publishers are moving to this already anyways) it's still better then what we had in the past were you had to research game patches and then wait in line for downloads on them for every game you own.
I don't really mind the game launchers, the credentials are cached have them set to not launch on startup and they just launch when you run the game you want to play anyways, its just an extra second or 2 maybe between the double click and the actual game starting. I would rather my money for the games I like end up in the hands of the developers than a middle man. 15 years ago setting up a digital storefront, an sales app, and getting hosting and storage in place was a feat. Now not so much.
 
Main point being exclusivity to a store is rather meaningless in pc gaming, it's not like on console where it's locked certain hardware forever or something it's just a easily installed launcher. Even if every single game ends up having its own launcher (most big publishers are moving to this already anyways) it's still better then what we had in the past were you had to research game patches and then wait in line for downloads on them for every game you own.

Do you have any idea how many big name game developers that made great games have just suddenly gone out of business with absolutely no warning in the past 30 years? You want your games tied to a dedicated launcher by the likes of Looking Glass Studios, Cavedog, Bullfrog, Westwood, and the plethora of others that died too young? It's a recipe for disaster.

And I don't see how anyone could blame Steam for not being able to find Indie titles. I primarily play Indie games and the majority of the biggest and best Indie titles are on Steam and they're easy to find: Hollow Knight, Shovel Knight, The Binding of Isaac, Enter the Gungeon, Bloodstained, and hundreds of others. It's exceedingly easy to find "under the radar" titles as if you're in the mood for a Metroidvania all you have to do is go to Steam and click or search for the tag and check out videos, screenshots, live streams, the forums, or take a quick look at the reviews...most of them things that EGS doesn't even have. Or you go to the store page of a game you do like and look at the "Others like this game" section or click on one of the other descriptive tags. If that wasn't bad enough most Indies are on Steam AND GOG AND IndieGala as well as the others so you do at least have a choice on where to purchase them. EGS is stealing these games from the small stores too. Everyone keeps bringing up EGS vs Steam but what about the game store market as a whole?
 
do mostly steam. i have bought off of epic because of metro exodus could care less about bl3.have ubisoft installed but nothing i care for. I have no loyalty to any store front. if i want something i have zero problems buying from any store. could care less about feature's as long as it doesn't lose a save.
 
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.
Because running your own store costs a lot of money. Infrastructure, AWS hosting, CDN (bandwidth), customer support staff, programmers, a company department with management people just dedicated to the store, payment processing fees, opportunity cost of lost sales due to smaller market size due to smaller userbase. Steam's 30% fOr dOInG nOtHiNg is in reality a service/outsource fee for absorbing all that bullshit, plus exposure to the biggest userbase.

But by all means keep believing lAzY VaLvEs 3o% cUt is money they're saving free and clear by running their own store and platform.

In EA's case they had other long-term interests for losing money by going their own way rather than selling on steam.
 
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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.

Its all so tiresome, this debate. It has been amazing to watch Epic's PR campaign for their store out the gate play the spin game. Oh, they're fighting the good fight while using exclusives, sometimes two weeks before release, demonizing their customers as toxic gamers for liking reviews and forums or cloud saves and mod workshops. Their real customers are devs/publishers, the game makers! As they start a retail store. Then people wonder why there is a backlash? Oh, but here are some free games, many of which have been out for years and were basically marketing to get people to buy new/upcoming games from those devs (Subnautica, Rebel Galaxy off the top of my head).
 
Do you have any idea how many big name game developers that made great games have just suddenly gone out of business with absolutely no warning in the past 30 years? You want your games tied to a dedicated launcher by the likes of Looking Glass Studios, Cavedog, Bullfrog, Westwood, and the plethora of others that died too young? It's a recipe for disaster.

I think that has more to do with DRM then the launcher itself which is a different issue. I believe there should be laws passed on protecting consumer rights to software when it comes to expiring DRM systems in place if they go out of business. I even think valve should lose the case with France they are currently fighting on reselling your digital games or whatever too.

As of right now losing the games entirely to being unplayable isn't a massive issue, when they do go out business most games get picked up and republished and sold somewhere else from what I've seen.
 
Because running your own store costs a lot of money. Infrastructure, AWS hosting, CDN (bandwidth), customer support staff, programmers, a company department with management people just dedicated to the store, payment processing fees, opportunity cost of lost sales due to smaller market size due to smaller userbase.

But by all means keep assuming lAzY VaLvEs 3o% cUt is money they're saving free and clear by running their own store and platform.

In EA's case they had other long-term interests for losing money by going their own way rather than selling on steam.

You're wrong. Look at all the mid sized developers that have been doing exactly what you're saying they can't do. For the past 5 years nearly every non Indy sized developer has been launching on their own and only moving to steam months or years later.

Even some of the top most played games on Steam started out that way.
 
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.

You can certainly make that argument. Epic's stance seems to be: Less fees = higher chance of success as more fees can be put into development / quicker recouping of sales which = chance of a better game or sequel.

Of course, if enough gamers don't buy the games on EGS then that falls flat. Seems like this isn't the case though for the bigger games. People willingly put up with buying a console for Nintendo or Sony games so in general a free client program isn't much of a deal for most.

For bigger studios we know that just means pocketing the fees, but in general those are launching on their own platforms now.

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.

Practically every big AAA game that doesn't have its own launcher is going to Epic. Exception seems to be Japanese developers.
 
You're wrong. Look at all the mid sized developers that have been doing exactly what you're saying they can't do. For the past 5 years nearly every non Indy sized developer has been launching on their own and only moving to steam months or years later.

Even some of the top most played games on Steam started out that way.
This has nothing to do with the rhetorical I replied to, which was "why wouldn't EA stop selling on Steam so they can save 30%". It's native or just intentionally obtuse to insist you're "saving 30%" by running your own store. An obscure indie with their own obscure website where they let you buy a zip file of their game through a PayPal link doesnt disprove this.
 
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You have to figure rockstar probably paid steam $200-400 for GTA5. My question would be what did steam do to earn that 200-400 million? Give them a webpage and host some files.
So yeah, hello rockstar launcher, goodbye steam. Some games produce tons of money. companies are going to have to compete to put those games in their store. If they don't....
go look on their "upcoming" page. I see one that I have heard of. which may be a good thing for lesser known games getting visibility... but probably because they could not swing a better deal
 
This has nothing to do with the question i replied to, which was "why wouldn't EA stop selling on Steam so they can save 30%". It's braindead or just being intentionally obtuse to insist you're "saving 30%" by running your own store.

They won't save 30%, it will be closer to 20%. Epic claims they make 3-4% per sale at 12%. Most big publishers are going this route because it simply costs them less. They don't have to deal with nearly the amount of issues Steam has to either, such as catering to 3rd parties, advertising for 3rd parties, ensuring they abide by the rules, work on algorithms in search on the store and whatnot. They're just going to sell their own IPs so you don't need to deal with the range of things Valve has to.

If you really think Blizzard, Bethsada, Rockstar or EA went this route to intentionally loose money you need a reality check.
 
Because running your own store costs a lot of money. Infrastructure, AWS hosting, CDN (bandwidth), customer support staff, programmers, a company department with management people just dedicated to the store, payment processing fees, opportunity cost of lost sales due to smaller market size due to smaller userbase. Steam's 30% fOr dOInG nOtHiNg is in reality a service/outsource fee for absorbing all that bullshit, plus exposure to the biggest userbase.

But by all means keep assuming lAzY VaLvEs 3o% cUt is money they're saving free and clear by running their own store and platform.

I specifically said "resources and product appeal to cut out Steam" and not "lAzY VaLvEs 3o% cUt" - but by all means, keep spouting that r/fuckepic toxicity wherever you can. Might want to step out of the echo chamber before your brain rots though, because currently you're attempting to manufacture an argument with me using your own points for both sides...

Smaller user base means fuck all if your customers are willing to buy your products regardless, and running your own store can result in offering your service to other pubs/devs and competing with Valve et al, allowing you to grow the user base on your own service. I have Steam because I bought The Orange Box back in 2007 and Steam was required for me to play: it's the exact same situation with EGS and Fortnite (or UT4 lol), Battle.net app and Blizzard games, etc.
 
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.
The purpose of origin is not to cut out steam, is to have all the data the players provide steam.
If you just wanted to cut out steam from the revenue you can sell steam keys.
 
You need to stop assuming your opinion is anything other than a basically irrelevant fringe one.

News just came out that Borderlands 3 is cleaning up like never before on EGS, as did Metro Exodus. The extremely angry, "no steam, no buy" ranters, are an irrelevant fringe in the market and seem to be dwindling as time goes by.




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.
So where is the number? This also isn't about Steam, but please, keep deflecting criticism by believing we all worship at the feet of Lord GabeN. Note how Outer Worlds is launching everywhere except Steam, so the revenue split argument is moot considering literally every storefront except Epic takes a 30% cut.
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.
The 5 million figure is across all platforms. All publishers so far have been purposefully obtuse about sales figures on EGS. The fact we don't hear about Metro anymore leads me to believe that they're including Epic's guaranteed sales in the PC figure to come up with their sensationalist headlines.
 
The 5 million figure is across all platforms. All publishers so far have been purposefully obtuse about sales figures on EGS. The fact we don't hear about Metro anymore leads me to believe that they're including Epic's guaranteed sales in the PC figure to come up with their sensationalist headlines.

Given that we know every deal Epic makes with studios is different we cannot say for certain that either game had a minimum sales guarantee.
 
Given that we know every deal Epic makes with studios is different we cannot say for certain that either game had a minimum sales guarantee.
Every deal that was revealed had a minimum sales guarantee so far. The only difference is how much that guarantee was.
 
Every deal that was revealed had a minimum sales guarantee so far. The only difference is how much that guarantee was.

Except, you know, the game this very topic is about. Epic didn't tell 505 "we guarantee your game will sell x copies on our store" they basically gave them a loan. Its essentially the same thing book publishers do for authors and game publishers sometimes do for game developers.
 
Except, you know, the game this very topic is about. Epic didn't tell 505 "we guarantee your game will sell x copies on our store" they basically gave them a loan.
Do you have a single fact to back that up? The 10.5 mil already guarantees 200k sales. A down payment is as much of a loan as the epic store is good for gaming.
 
The purpose of origin is not to cut out steam, is to have all the data the players provide steam.
If you just wanted to cut out steam from the revenue you can sell steam keys.

you can't sell steam keys if everyone buys them from steam anyway. it also does not make sense to have an ea launcher then sell steam keys so people can use the steam launcher which then runs the ea launcher
 
Well reasoned, and very astute. Congratulations. It explains a lot, just not in the way you'd like.

I would like to hear your twisted logic to why it does. Because it's pretty obvious you're completely wrong to me.
 
you can't sell steam keys if everyone buys them from steam anyway. it also does not make sense to have an ea launcher then sell steam keys so people can use the steam launcher which then runs the ea launcher
You should try that again. Because you clearly failed at the basics. If you still can't figure out what I said I'll help, promise. But first try on your own.
 
I would like to hear your twisted logic to why it does. Because it's pretty obvious you're completely wrong to me.
Wrong about what, and does what? You have to be more specific than that. Otherwise I give you the same advice as above.
 
You should try that again. Because you clearly failed at the basics. If you still can't figure out what I said I'll help, promise. But first try on your own.

if people have no choice then they do what they have to in order to play the game. If ea sells on steam then steam also sells the same keys. ea then is in competition with steam to get the sales. Steam sales cost them 20-30%. People buy from what they are used to. in this case many will just buy from steam so the game can be "in their steam library". every steam sale is lost revenue. how many new players without the ea store will purchase from ea? I'd speculate 0%.
 
Do you have a single fact to back that up? The 10.5 mil already guarantees 200k sales. A down payment is as much of a loan as the epic store is good for gaming.

Most reports call it an advance. Advances are different than saying “we promise x sales”. Using the author example for a moment: a book publisher will give an author an advance on their book to purchase publishing rights for it. The author will not get paid royalties until their book sales enough copies to get over that advance. The publisher isn’t saying “we promise your book will sell x copies or we will pay the difference” which is what a sales guarantee would be. Looking at the statement the Ooblets devs made it seems liked Epic gave them both an upfront payment (probably an advance) and a sales guarantee. They seem similar but are technically different. While there are no details Epic’s sales guarantee likely covered the remaining amount that would be needed for the devs to break even on their game.
 
Reading this thread... :facepalm::facepalm: ...dang people chill out. :)
Not life or death.


Idk maybe steam been out for 20 years and EGS is relatively new. Don't act you don't remember what a shit show steam was on release. Far worse then EGS is now. Now in 5 year the EGS hasn't improved much then you have a right to complain.

I recall the issues Steam had upon release, and I recall Valve was literally breaking new ground when the platform came out, there was NO playbook they could learn from, no history of good and bad ideas surrounding such an online service.

They had to figure it out for themselves, and there were growing pains along the way.

What's Epic's excuse?
They are entering a space with 15 years of long history, ideas both great and bad, with the ability to see what mistakes were made along the way AND improve on them.

That's my point of contention here, as a consumer, for what would be the same cost to me, EGS currently has little to offer as an alternative store/launcher and zero justification for not already having cherry picked the best features from Steam, et al. and incorporating them into their solution to be competitive.

What happened in Fortnite within months after Apex Legends dropped?
-Epic added reboot vans to FN, copying the respawn beacons in AL.
-Epic added a ping system to FN, copying the same from AL.

Why isn't Epic applying that mentality to EGS?

I'm all for competition to Steam, but so far all Epic has done is create chaos, given consumers no positive benefits from Epic's actions and taken away consumer choice.

In several cases, consumers had already made a choice and Epic provided enough incentive for a dev/publisher to abandon published release plans.
It's 'acceptable' that consumers were given refunds if desired, but the bad PR and friction created with these situations should have been avoided entirely, but money talks...

That's not competition.
 
The purpose of origin is not to cut out steam, is to have all the data the players provide steam.
If you just wanted to cut out steam from the revenue you can sell steam keys.

Pretty sure Origin accomplishes both tasks, and I don't see how you could make the statement that it has nothing to do with cutting out Steam when they pulled their games off Steam to sell on Origin.
 
does anyone play a game since all of the launchers are nothing but scumbags trying to screw each other over?
that is like saying stores are scumbags trying to screw each other over. but you still probably shop at walmart and amazon
 
Reading this thread... :facepalm::facepalm: ...dang people chill out. :)
Not life or death.

I'm all for competition to Steam, but so far all Epic has done is create chaos, given consumers no positive benefits from Epic's actions and taken away consumer choice.

In several cases, consumers had already made a choice and Epic provided enough incentive for a dev/publisher to abandon published release plans.
It's 'acceptable' that consumers were given refunds if desired, but the bad PR and friction created with these situations should have been avoided entirely, but money talks...

That's not competition.

eh, if you never spent a cent on EGS you can still have a full library of some 40 free games to play. I'd hardly say that is providing no positive benefits.

and to you and me, these are just games of no consequence either way, end result amounting to having a game in "this list" instead of "that list".
For game developers though it is about paying mortgages and having a job tomorrow. epic guarantees allow them to do that.
vs steam, they just get lost in the trash.
 
The purpose of origin is not to cut out steam, is to have all the data the players provide steam.
If you just wanted to cut out steam from the revenue you can sell steam keys.

No, they cut it out to avoid paying fees, especially for DLC. Essentially Valve required all DLC to be sold on Steam and not exclusively within the games themselves. This way by forcing all the DLC onto the Steam store page Valve gets a cut of the profits of each bit of DLC. As such Valve told EA they were no longer allowed to sell on Steam and EA didn't want to revise their games or DLC model. So EA stopped selling on Steam because they weren't going to backtrack for their upcoming games. This would've happened regardless as Battlefield 3 gave them the big push for Origin exclusivity and it was their killer app.

Free Steam key generation is great, but only a small number of people buy from 3rd party sites. Likewise I doubt Steam would allow a company to generate free keys and not sell the game directly on Steam because they would be providing a service with no way to get money.
 
does anyone play a game since all of the launchers are nothing but scumbags trying to screw each other over?
There's really only one trying to screw the others over. The rest are pretty much 'live and let live', competing on the strengths of their features and firstparty offerings, and slowly building trust with customers over time rather than antagonizing them on Twitter.
 
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There's really only one trying to screw the others over. The rest are pretty much 'live and let live', competing on the strengths of their features and firstparty offerings, and slowly building trust with customers over time rather than antagonizing them on Twitter.

anyone is free to compete in the open market. the competition in this case is getting games to sell in their store. the strength of their offerings is the games that they have available for sale. I get that you want something different as a consumer, but your typical "my steam game backlog is so huge I never buy games except when they are on deep deep sales" - there just is not that much appeal in catering to that customer base, so it is not exactly a huge loss.
 
No, they cut it out to avoid paying fees, especially for DLC. Essentially Valve required all DLC to be sold on Steam and not exclusively within the games themselves. This way by forcing all the DLC onto the Steam store page Valve gets a cut of the profits of each bit of DLC. As such Valve told EA they were no longer allowed to sell on Steam and EA didn't want to revise their games or DLC model. So EA stopped selling on Steam because they weren't going to backtrack for their upcoming games. This would've happened regardless as Battlefield 3 gave them the big push for Origin exclusivity and it was their killer app.

Free Steam key generation is great, but only a small number of people buy from 3rd party sites. Likewise I doubt Steam would allow a company to generate free keys and not sell the game directly on Steam because they would be providing a service with no way to get money.

That happened because EA got greedy and forced people to buy ME DLC using the scammy Bioware Points, Valve came out of that smelling like roses even if everyone knew why they actually did it.
 
All I know is I'm tired of all these launchers cluttering my desktop, it's ridiculous!

launchers.jpg
 
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