Epic Games Store

Please do explain to me why they would give screen space to a random indie game? I mean there are thousands of indie games out there, what makes this one special?
How does that benefit epic? How does it impact their other games which have exclusive deals and are now having to share a more crowded store page?
Is this indie game going to bring cutomers to EGS? Why would they since they just buy it on steam?
You can hate on Epic, but don't harp on them for not doing things that makes no business sense.

If they had any business sense they would have built a decent store and still done exclusives.

If they were really for developers, they would let darq and others sell on egs. At least the ones they reach out to, not necessarily everyone out there

Everything is simple when you only have a few thousand customers and you can do your hosting on AWS. When you have millions though and you have to guarantee 100% server uptime then any changes, even the slightest changes are non-trivial and have to be evaluated for potential to break things before being implemented. So yeah, preload is available for some games but not borderlands. shopping carts lead to potential security exploits. And other shit.

Newbie_52 said:

If they were really for developers, they would let darq and others sell on egs. At least the ones they reach out to, not necessarily everyone out there

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This is what makes Tim's "all about the developers" and "helping Indies" statements so laughably disingenuous.

The game was good enough for EGS to contact the developer and ask if he'd accept a bribe to delete it from Steam. But then it suddenly wasn't good enough for EGS when developer said he'd love to sell it on EGS, but only in addition to Steam on GoG since he had already promised fans -- he wanted his word to mean something.

UnknownSouljer said:

Read the rest of my post. Steam has increased their bottom lines by giving them access to more endusers with cash than a physical store could ever provide AND they still get a bigger chunk of the pie than they would with physical copies. Even at 30% Steam is a better deal than any retail store for developers.
Some developers are saying no to Steam's economy of scale and opting for "the sure thing" with Epic's timed buyouts. It's only a matter of time before we see if that gamble is even worth it or if they'd simply make more money being on all platforms regardless of cut. Eventually the consumer will benefit, but for now the free market can't even decide.

(Also, you can feel free to tell me how much it costs in electricity, hardware, salary, and money on bandwidth it costs to distribute a single game. Games these days are 15GB on the "small" side. If a game that size sells 500k copies via Steam, that's 7,500GB. If it's a 30GB game that's 15,000GB. How many managed servers and lines do you figure it takes to do that? I'm not saying Steam doesn't make a healthy profit, but indeed they should for their business acumen. However, it's a fallacy to just think it takes nothing and costs nothing to develop the desktop software, website, and backend for such a marketplace. It took years and 1000s of man hours for Steam to become what it is. But here on the internet you can sit in an armchair and take that for granted. Only by leveraging economies of scale does that 30% begin to mean something, but it took massive economies of scale of the hardware backend to get there.)

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Steam used to provide marketing of games. Right now marketing for smaller games is pretty much 0. You might see a popup window announcing games when you first launch steam. and now with "personalized" stores that pretty much ensures many people will never ever see a lot of games. Steam has too many games to market anyway. It is all just a mass of shit, with good games mixed in with asset flips and no effective way to tell the difference.

How much does it cost to host files? No need to wonder, you can check with amazon webservices, which netflix uses. Monthly storage is $0.023 per GB, data transfer is $0.02/GB. So that 80GB game costs <$2 to distribute. This includes profit for AWS. Steam can probably do it for much less.

And do understand, steam has done a lot of great things for the game industry. They brought back a lot of games that were dead and made them revenue streams. In that process they were richly rewarded. Gaben is a billionaire and steam is a multi-billion dollar company.

The big secret steam figured out is that it is better to make 30% of all games then it is to make 100% of a single game. Epic has realized the same thing, only they are content to get 12%. Even that is a lot. Realtors work their ass off and only get 1.5%. So its a joke that companies do pretty much nothing and get 12% or 30%.

jiminator said:

Steam used to provide marketing of games. Right now marketing for smaller games is pretty much 0. You might see a popup window announcing games when you first launch steam. and now with "personalized" stores that pretty much ensures many people will never ever see a lot of games. Steam has too many games to market anyway. It is all just a mass of shit, with good games mixed in with asset flips and no effective way to tell the difference.

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They are a platform provider. It isn't their responsibility to market other people stuff. Do you also complain about this same phenomenon on Amazon? Amazon has made it possible for pretty much anyone to sell anything whether they are a massive corporation or a small one (or heck, a person just trying to sell random used wares). In either case the platform creator doesn't see a cent unless the seller also does. There is incentive for them to sell things. But expecting Steam to go through on every game and market everything make just as much sense as expecting Amazon or any other platform provider to do the same.

I do agree that Steam does need to curate their content more. Obviously it's to their advantage to simply have more stuff on their platform. Whatever sells is money they make so they're more or less indiscriminate. This has allowed garbage to show up on their site. I mostly feel the same about Amazon, to continue drawing this comparison. I just don't think it's likely that either will change their business model unless something catastrophic changes that. However, just because this is an issue, doesn't mean that either Steam or Amazon don't continue to be the best platform for a majority to shop.

If you're going to complain about that, honestly there isn't another platform doing more for indie titles. It would be equally fair to take it up with GOG, Epic, Origin and on down the line about what they're doing to make indie developers money. But the truth is, they aren't doing anything either.

jiminator said:

How much does it cost to host files? No need to wonder, you can check with amazon webservices, which netflix uses. Monthly storage is $0.023 per GB, data transfer is $0.02/GB. So that 80GB game costs <$2 to distribute. This includes profit for AWS. Steam can probably do it for much less.

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$2 is enough to kill Steam. People don't download files once. They do it over and over again. A lot of users on this forum as an example will download every major game they have with every major build they do. I'm sure certain major titles over the years (like say iD Software titles or heck, just the entire Valve library of games) have been downloaded dozens of times by individual users. At $2 it makes it incredibly easy to go negative money on any given buyer. In fact that is a direct issue that digital distribution has to combat that was and never be an issue with physical media.

The margins have to be thick enough on a single sale for the lifetime of that product to stay in the green. Otherwise it makes zero sense to have all that investment in all that backend. This is still also ignoring the 1000s of programming hours for Steam as software (I get updates constantly), all the admin stuff that has to happen (games don't magically appear on it, people have to push it through), or any of the other major overhead.

jiminator said:

And do understand, steam has done a lot of great things for the game industry. They brought back a lot of games that were dead and made them revenue streams. In that process they were richly rewarded. Gaben is a billionaire and steam is a multi-billion dollar company.

The big secret steam figured out is that it is better to make 30% of all games then it is to make 100% of a single game. Epic has realized the same thing, only they are content to get 12%. Even that is a lot. Realtors work their ass off and only get 1.5%. So its a joke that companies do pretty much nothing and get 12% or 30%.

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Correct. But in truth Steam is able to do what they do because they have the first mover advantage. Other platforms have to take less of a percent in order to make them more attractive. In reality, for a store like Epic to combat Steam it will take far more than just year long buy outs. They likely would have more long term success by not only taking 12%, but by using that 18% difference to discount the title and pass that along to the consumers. That doesn't help the developer, but money is the only deciding factor to customers in a market where the goods are literally the same. That and in this case, maturity of platform and how willing people are to save money versus have all their games in the same place. It definitely can't be fought on even ground, as "even" always will favor the current giant, in this case Steam.

amazon sells physical goods. they have a cost associated in the production, movement, storage and shipping. Steam sells electrons. Although conceptually they are the same in terms of actual costs they are nothing similar. As for the 80GB game - that is a single game that I know of. Most others are going to be 20-40GB. Indie games are going to be like nothing. The $2 is what AWS would charge and allows them to make a profit. Steam will likely just by enough circuits to meet reasonable demands, making the total cost some fixed number per month which probably is vastly lower than $2. All in all the concept is ludicrous that someone can work 6 years on a game and then hand in 30% of all their income from that game to another company who just provides hosting anad sales services to them. The only real justification for it is "because they can". Which is fine for now but will not make for a future-proof business model. Take a look at steams upcoming games vs epics upcoming games. Again, 12% is a pretty decent cut of money. If EGS is losing any money it is not because of the 12% but because of the free games they are handing out.

So I hadn't looked into EGS at all because nothing I wanted to play really badly had gone exclusive there, but recently something did (WRC 8) so I went to check it out. EGS has no review system at all... What the actual fuck is this? That is so anti-consumer that I thought for sure I was just not looking in the right place for the reviews. I mean I know there are other ways to find out if games are good, but it's just the general idea irks me really fucking badly.

UnknownSouljer said:

In reality, for a store like Epic to combat Steam it will take far more than just year long buy outs. They likely would have more long term success by not only taking 12%, but by using that 18% difference to discount the title and pass that along to the consumers. That doesn't help the developer, but money is the only deciding factor to customers in a market where the goods are literally the same.

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This x100. Cannot be said better.

UnknownSouljer said: ↑
In reality, for a store like Epic to combat Steam it will take far more than just year long buy outs. They likely would have more long term success by not only taking 12%, but by using that 18% difference to discount the title and pass that along to the consumers. That doesn't help the developer, but money is the only deciding factor to customers in a market where the goods are literally the same.

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ScYcS said:

This x100. Cannot be said better.

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there is no 18% difference for EGS to use. The game developers can always choose to sell for less, and this did happen with Metro, but the suggestion seems like you want EGS to raise their rates charged to the developer and then give that discount back to the customer.
That being said they did give $10 off per game for every game $15+, costs that they ate and not the developers. That is massively more generous than steam had ever done, although with the grand prix thingy people figured out a way to game steam system. Unsure as to who ate the costs on that.
Typically a steam "sale" is actually just marketing, the developers do the discount, steam split never changes.

As for reviews, I'd not expect any for a LONG time. Because it is just going to be steam users shitting on EGS and not about the game. So they will have to be heavily curated and people will then cry censorship.

You are right of course. They (Epic) do not have 18% more in their pockets to reduce the price of the games by that margin. And you are also right that the developers COULD do that instead. But they do not. Why? Because they are in for the money. It's that simple.

My suggestion would rather be for Epic to not take 12% Share but maybe 20%. It would still be 10% less than Steam takes and then you could use the 8% difference (from 12% to 20%) to reduce the price of the game. 8% from a $60 game would be almost $5 cheaper compared to Steam. And then people would think about buying from Epic more because, as stated above, money rules the decision of the consumer the most.

Everybody is in it for the money. Companies that ignore the money get shut down and sold. That happens continually. Games that already make a lot of money have to figure out how to make MORE money, usually that comes DLC, microtransactions, loot boxes and now gambling machines.
Epic is an easy way for developers to make more money without engaging in other shitty practices. You can talk about game launchers, etc, but a developer did not spend 5 years developing a game launcher, they made a game and that is what they are selling.

"HEY REMEDY, I HEARD YOU MADE A GREAT GAME. TO REWARD YOU I'M GUNNA WAIT A YEAR SO GABEN CAN GET HIS 30% CUT"

I wonder if the average Fornite player is buying any of these games. A majority of them are really young PC players.

Comixbooks said:

I wonder if the average Fornite player is buying any of these games. A majority of them are really young PC players.

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Why would they buy anything there or anywhere for that matter? They give games away for free every week orso on EGS and there are plenty of free to play games around, there is more free stuff to play then there are hours to play them all.

Youth these days think everything on the internet is free, games like fortnite and apex legends, path of exile and the lot is not doing much to change that perception.

By the time they are my age all the games I paid for will probably be free.

UnknownSouljer said:

In reality, for a store like Epic to combat Steam it will take far more than just year long buy outs. They likely would have more long term success by not only taking 12%, but by using that 18% difference to discount the title and pass that along to the consumers. That doesn't help the developer, but money is the only deciding factor to customers in a market where the goods are literally the same. That and in this case, maturity of platform and how willing people are to save money versus have all their games in the same place. It definitely can't be fought on even ground, as "even" always will favor the current giant, in this case Steam.

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ScYcS said:

This x100. Cannot be said better.

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If you're going to propose something that includes "that doesn't help the developer" then it absolutely could be better said. These deals are the result of Epic convincing developers to go with EGS - how would they do that while saying "this won't help you in any way"?

Denpepe said:

Why would they buy anything there or anywhere for that matter? They give games away for free every week orso on EGS and there are plenty of free to play games around, there is more free stuff to play then there are hours to play them all.

Youth these days think everything on the internet is free, games like fortnite and apex legends, path of exile and the lot is not doing much to change that perception.

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There are now multiple generations of people that have grown up playing video games, and there are people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s+ all with money to spend on their gaming hobbies.

Even if the average Fortnite player is 10 years old (I have no idea what the average actually is), eventually those kids are going to start earning and spending money on their hobbies too, and if the EGS is a place that they play games then there's a chance they'll be spending it there. As it is, those kids are probably spending their parent's money. Games like Fortnite, Apex, and PoE allow you to play the entire game and monetize at your leisure - I'd have killed for that growing up instead of having to rent games.

jiminator said:

amazon sells physical goods. they have a cost associated in the production, movement, storage and shipping. Steam sells electrons. Although conceptually they are the same in terms of actual costs they are nothing similar. As for the 80GB game - that is a single game that I know of. Most others are going to be 20-40GB. Indie games are going to be like nothing. The $2 is what AWS would charge and allows them to make a profit. Steam will likely just by enough circuits to meet reasonable demands, making the total cost some fixed number per month which probably is vastly lower than $2. All in all the concept is ludicrous that someone can work 6 years on a game and then hand in 30% of all their income from that game to another company who just provides hosting anad sales services to them. The only real justification for it is "because they can". Which is fine for now but will not make for a future-proof business model. Take a look at steams upcoming games vs epics upcoming games. Again, 12% is a pretty decent cut of money. If EGS is losing any money it is not because of the 12% but because of the free games they are handing out.

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Steam sells platform. You keep overlooking this like it's meaningless. If it was meaningless, developers would simply not sell on Steam even if Epic Games store and their buyout didn't exist.
Developers continue to use Steam of their own volition, which they could obviously choose not to do. No one is twisting their arms. Because guess who is giving them the most money? Who is adding the most to their bottom lines?
The truth is it doesn't matter how many 1000s of hours you spend developing a game or how much effort you put into it, or even if it's the best game of all time: if you have no good way of distribution then your game literally cannot sell.

They could instead sell physical copies on Amazon as an example (another bustling marketplace). But as we've been over (and you refuse to give any credence to), physical copies cost far more than the 30% cut that they give to Steam. Steam is ALREADY a discount from what they were paying before with physical distribution.
"Because they can" encompasses a lot. A lot of things you've glossed over more than once.

There isn't much more to say to you on this topic (even as I reply again below). Suffice it to say, two people arguing on the internet are going to literally chance zero about how this operates. The impetus for me is more about talking about the business aspect of it. But your position is more about the poor developers and a 30% vs 12% cut, which is a very narrow view of the situation.

jiminator said:

there is no 18% difference for EGS to use. The game developers can always choose to sell for less, and this did happen with Metro, but the suggestion seems like you want EGS to raise their rates charged to the developer and then give that discount back to the customer.
That being said they did give $10 off per game for every game $15+, costs that they ate and not the developers. That is massively more generous than steam had ever done, although with the grand prix thingy people figured out a way to game steam system. Unsure as to who ate the costs on that.
Typically a steam "sale" is actually just marketing, the developers do the discount, steam split never changes.

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And also...

Aix. said:

If you're going to propose something that includes "that doesn't help the developer" then it absolutely could be better said. These deals are the result of Epic convincing developers to go with EGS - how would they do that while saying "this won't help you in any way"?

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Correct, there isn't an amount that is there for Epic to use, 18% or otherwise. Their incentive would be to attract people to use marketplaces that aren't Steam for the eventual goal of being able to use Epic's platform for leverage. Until there is critical mass, that isn't possible. Epic's platform doesn't sell like Steam's platform.
I mentioned this earlier, the goods are literally identical. But Steam will be chosen virtually every time if everything is the same (except by some outliers like you who might state: "well, I want to pay the devs more", but that position is in the vast minority). You won't acknowledge that platform matters even though it's the "invisible hand" that is directing buyers to one store and not another. It's just that Steam gets their "ridiculous" cut "because they can".

If you want money to be diverted away from Steam then there has to be a meaningful difference between Steam's and Epic's platforms. And that difference for digital goods mostly is price. Passing off a $10 discount on every game to the consumer is enough to attract a lot of people over. If Epic's games are consistently $50 and Steams are consistently $60, that's a meaningful change to actually make buyers want to use their marketplace in a more sustained way than a timed buyout. To that end as well, Steam's other major differentiator versus every other platform is maturity. They have things like user reviews, community hubs, community chat, forums, and diversity that no other platforms has. $10 goes a long way to help sell on other platforms, but Steam hasn't been idly sitting around for 10 years, they've created a platform that can't be rivaled any other way other than huge amounts of dev time. And these things are massive. Like I said, $10 goes a long way, but there are more than a few that would choose paying $10 more for access to those features.

Devs want more money because they want more money. But I don't buy their false tears that they're impoverished. They're in a better position than they ever have been before. There are more of them than has ever been in the history of gaming. Within my lifetime, being a game dev has become not only a job you could get but also a college degree. This isn't a diversion from the point. It is the point. Money drives all this and it's absurd to think that the platform that is essentially feeding them is now the oppressive overlord when literally nothing has changed. If it was possible to give the option of Steam versus go back to physical distribution for everything and go back to "the way it used to be", any dev with a brain in their head would choose Steam. Which is quite literally what they're choosing now.
The free market will decide. If EGS is even a platform in 2 years and people actually buy on it then maybe the devs will have other options, but until then they don't.


EDIT: Only grammar/spelling and adding another quote.

A lot of the ire is because as a marketing strategy, Epic chose to demonize Steam (and insult potential customers as toxic gamers etc.) as the stereotypical evil middleman taking too big of a cut of the pie. Much like they used to complain about brick n' mortar retailers who took more than the 30% Steam does. They get a far better service from Steam than they ever did from retailers selling CD/DVD copies. If Epic was even trying to compete with a basic competent store software and exclusives I could give them some credit but at this point its all about creating their own monopoly of access and price.

Ranulfo said:

Epic chose to demonize Steam (and insult potential customers as toxic gamers etc.) as the stereotypical evil middleman taking too big of a cut of the pie

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Long, long before EGS was even a thing other game developers and publishers were questioning Steam's cut, some even publicly. I remember it was a common discussion on gaming communities about 9 years ago when it was announced that BF3 would not be on Steam but be an Origin exclusive.

Even Steam's (past) employees are not so kind speaking about it. Former Valve employee (employed at Valve for 6 years (09-14)) speaks up on EGS, a small sample of his posts:

"Steam was killing PC gaming. It was a 30% tax on an entire industry. It was unsustainable. You have no idea how profitable Steam was for Valve. It was a virtual printing press. It distorted the entire company. Epic is fixing this for all gamers."
"I worked for Valve and believe me they gather huge amounts of data about virtually everything you do with the Steam client. Yet no one calls Steam spyware."
"If it wasn’t for Epic the entire industry would still be crunching away to support Valve’s 30% revshare. Most of these profits went to a tiny handful of people who could care less about the industry or working conditions. Thank the gaming gods for Epic."
"Pubs and devs have had enough of funding this insanity. It didn’t need to happen - Valve could have dropped its revshare to 12% and still stayed very profitable. But they got lazy and greedy as we all know they did. If Epic didn’t come around somebody else would."

Source: https://twitter.com/richgel999

Drexion said:

Long, long before EGS was even a thing other game developers and publishers were questioning Steam's cut, some even publicly. I remember it was a common discussion on gaming communities about 9 years ago when it was announced that BF3 would not be on Steam but be an Origin exclusive.

Even Steam's (past) employees are not so kind speaking about it. Former Valve employee (employed at Valve for 6 years (09-14)) speaks up on EGS, a small sample of his posts:

"Steam was killing PC gaming. It was a 30% tax on an entire industry. It was unsustainable. You have no idea how profitable Steam was for Valve. It was a virtual printing press. It distorted the entire company. Epic is fixing this for all gamers."
"I worked for Valve and believe me they gather huge amounts of data about virtually everything you do with the Steam client. Yet no one calls Steam spyware."
"If it wasn’t for Epic the entire industry would still be crunching away to support Valve’s 30% revshare. Most of these profits went to a tiny handful of people who could care less about the industry or working conditions. Thank the gaming gods for Epic."
"Pubs and devs have had enough of funding this insanity. It didn’t need to happen - Valve could have dropped its revshare to 12% and still stayed very profitable. But they got lazy and greedy as we all know they did. If Epic didn’t come around somebody else would."

Source: https://twitter.com/richgel999

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This is definitely not a direct link. Not seeing this series of quotes, but then I would very much like to see the direct attribution of each individual quote to truly "know the source".

This definitely feels very slanted towards Epic. Especially because what companies do with the money they make from any distribution has literally ZERO to do with the distribution platform. Attributing that to them is like blaming a movie theater chain for what people did on a movie set. Those two organizations aren't even remotely related in terms of structure.
If you want to find someone to blame for working conditions, blame the devs themselves. That's more of an Activision, Ubisoft, AAA Game publisher problem. They're making billions, the general worker sees none of it, they work overtime and then get fired. If devs got more of the profit it would literally do ZERO to help the common workers or programmers. All of that instead gets used to "boost profit" and impress shareholders (pump the stock price), which once again has nothing to do with the distribution platforms. You want a current working place example of that? Just read up on Blizzard. Battle.net is in house, they make 100% of the profit, and Blizzard employees are under some of the worst conditions in gaming. Again, Steam has ZERO to do with how devs treat their employees or their compensation. Making 100% profit instead of 70% profit wouldn't change that. Let alone "how much better 88%" is.

Some of this is straight up false, like claiming if Epic didn't do it, no one would is fallacious. Multiple gaming companies have their own launchers and platforms to varying degrees of success. That's like literally ignoring GOG or Origin, or any one else that came along before Epic.

Steam saved them all from B&M, now "everyone needs saving from Steam". If 30% is "unsustainable" then all of these companies would get flattened under their own weight. Last time I checked, again, they're making record profits and the industry is bigger than ever. In fact profit in the gaming industry outstrips Hollywood, yet they're "beleaguered". I don't buy any of this.

Epic is not the savior. Their intention isn't to give the customer greater value or help devs. They just want to be the people getting the cut of everyone's pie instead of Steam and they're willing to make that cut less than half in order to do it. If you believe anything else then you've bought into their propaganda. They're in it for the money, same as Valve.

The arguments are pointless. My view is that developers should be able to sell their games wherever they find it most beneficial to do so without being demonized by gamers or being called greedy or profit hungry. Almost all jobs in life have a purpose of making money, rewarding employees and owners with part of that money and using the rest to fund future products. So people jumping at "epic money" is not an inherently bad thing. It is just a deal and the business world is full of them.

All those big companies... have nothing to do with Epic. Not sure why you keep bringing them up in this thread. Sure, UBI sells some of their games there, but Epic is not a big distribution platform for them.

And yeah, Epic is in it for the money. 12% of a multibillion dollar industry is a vast amount of money for essentially a file hosting service. Bandwidth today is cheaper than ever as customers and business migrate away from landlines, and it is going to continue to get cheaper as is happening with everything related to technology.

jiminator said:

The arguments are pointless. My view is that developers should be able to sell their games wherever they find it most beneficial to do so without being demonized by gamers or being called greedy or profit hungry. Almost all jobs in life have a purpose of making money, rewarding employees and owners with part of that money and using the rest to fund future products. So people jumping at "epic money" is not an inherently bad thing. It is just a deal and the business world is full of them.

All those big companies... have nothing to do with Epic. Not sure why you keep bringing them up in this thread. Sure, UBI sells some of their games there, but Epic is not a big distribution platform for them.

And yeah, Epic is in it for the money. 12% of a multibillion dollar industry is a vast amount of money for essentially a file hosting service. Bandwidth today is cheaper than ever as customers and business migrate away from landlines, and it is going to continue to get cheaper as is happening with everything related to technology.

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Which will only make more companies do it themselves then, like EA, beth, UBI and others have done d4 them, 100% is better then 88%.

jiminator said:

The arguments are pointless.

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We agree on something. It's good to find common ground.

jiminator said:

My view is that developers should be able to sell their games wherever they find it most beneficial to do so without being demonized by gamers or being called greedy or profit hungry.

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There are so many parts to this. Suffice it to say: not all devs are the same. There are some indies out there that aren't greedy, but there is not even one AAA publisher that isn't greedy. I'll take any evidence to the contrary into consideration, but they're all terrible. The closest you can get are devs that are offshoots that either got fired or quit from AAA publishers to do their own work. Those are incredibly few and far between though. Off the top of my head I can think of only Kojima Productions and inXile.
Indie producers are an entirely different entity. And it's true they are most affected. But Steam is the one that has even given them a chance to exist. As in the B&M days, it was unlikely for an unknown company to even get shelf space or have the money to distribute to the entire country without signing onto a much bigger publisher. Which once again points to the publishers as being a much bigger problem than the distribution system (Steam).

The truth that you don't want to admit and is covered below is that: corporate game devs are greedy and they are profit hungry. Because the people you care so much about (the programmers, artists, designers, etc) see none of that profit. The dev gets more money, and the common worker sees none of it. It all goes to the top. It all goes to increasing the share price. It all goes to corporate bonuses for people in upper management.

jiminator said:

Almost all jobs in life have a purpose of making money, rewarding employees and owners with part of that money and using the rest to fund future products. So people jumping at "epic money" is not an inherently bad thing. It is just a deal and the business world is full of them.

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Correct. It isn't inherently good or bad. But I can also state with 100% certainty that the "sure thing" doesn't necessarily benefit the common workers of any of these companies that choose to take it. The dev chooses what happens to all the money that comes in. So blaming Steam (or in fairness Epic) in this case is literally blaming the wrong entity.

jiminator said:

All those big companies... have nothing to do with Epic. Not sure why you keep bringing them up in this thread. Sure, UBI sells some of their games there, but Epic is not a big distribution platform for them.

And yeah, Epic is in it for the money. 12% of a multibillion dollar industry is a vast amount of money for essentially a file hosting service. Bandwidth today is cheaper than ever as customers and business migrate away from landlines, and it is going to continue to get cheaper as is happening with everything related to technology.

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You're kidding right? Everything I brought up was to show this very basic argumentative structure using comparison. First, I have only brought up Ubisoft exactly one time, so it's not repeated. I also brought up Blizzard also as another basis of comparison, a provider that literally is on only one platform: their own. And second each of those companies shows where the problem is: themselves. That couldn't have been more clearly stated than in my previous post. To reiterate: getting 100% of the money versus 70% does little for the common worker. If you want to fight for their rights then we should probably have an entire discussion about unionization for game devs. Because that 30% or 18% isn't going to them even if their parent company makes it. Blizzard has shown this. Ubisoft has shown this. Activision has shown this. It goes to the top. You're obsessed with the dev getting more but like I've repeated now for at least 3 times: the common worker sees none of that. They are all salaried and work overtime with zero increase in pay. They don't get any form of dividend, they do not have any form of profit sharing.

If you are concerned about these people getting more money then the issue has, once again, ZERO to do with Steam or any platform provider. It has 100% to do with themselves. This is the part you aren't getting.

To me it is simple. If I am spending money, then having that money go to the people that finance and create games... I see that as providing more potential future benefit to me personally vs padding some billionaires pocket.
There is nobody saving the world here. These are games. If someone hands you a big ass wad of money, sure, you may keep it all for yourself. Randy Pitchford did exactly that with Borderlands 2.
But then again you may spread the wealth, to reward and retain talent for a job well done. That is going to depend on the company and the structure of the deals they have with publishers.
Its not relevant to me. STEAM NO LONGER PRODUCES ANY GAMES. Money spent there does not go to the creation of new IPs. That model is just not profitable compared to 30% of everything they sell.
More power to them.

Lets be clear. Epic is not the jesus platorm. They are not putting indies on their platform except in cases where the indies can bring traffic to their website. Nobody is going to buy indie games from epic when they are on steam.
Epic fucked up their launch everywhich way possible. Every time they tweet it is something stupid. That being said I still see them as a net positive for the gaming industry.

UnknownSouljer said:

This is not a direct link. Not seeing this series of quotes

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It's definitely legit, there were even articles about it (eg link link2 link3) including even more quotes.

"Valve's revshare was ridiculus and oppressive to game developers. Valve became abusive to its partners and employees. It took them for granted"

UnknownSouljer said:

Epic is not the savior.

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Correct, but one company having an effective monopoly with no real competition is not a status quo that should be supported in any way, especially if we look throughout human history to see how many companies abused their monopolies, even if they started out as the 'good guy'.

Many are supportive of Epic's attempt at gaining some marketshare not because they are specifically 'epic fanboys' but because they would be supportive of any other company creating competition against an effective monopoly.

Valve Dota 2 goes unoticed but they released a game recently forget what its called.

Dota underlords using the source engine developed and published by valve.

jiminator said:

As for the 80GB game - that is a single game that I know of. Most others are going to be 20-40GB.

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I just did a quick SpaceSniffer look, I have at least 20 installed games that are over 70GB, multiple games that are over 120GB. I, quite honestly, got tired of even trying to count the games between 40-70GB, but its definitely 100+.
This is just my own game hard drive, and purely what I have installed.
(Disregard that blue section. >_>)

Anyway, this was a tangent. You may continue your arguing.

Here's what will happen: Fortnight will take a crap within three years and Epic's disposable income will dry up (they'll still not have half the store features of Steam), Valve will still be doing the same thing because of Valve Time and life will go on. Twenty-three years later, Gabe is on his death bed and hands control of Valve over to John Carmack, Half-Life 3 is released and we all hate it because it'll be created in the style of a David Cage game where you're forced to make politically-correct decisions and none of them matter.

It used to be that 30-50GB was the high end with GTA5 the king topping out at 60GB in 2015 or so. WoW is up to 70GB these days, ElderScrollsOnline is 80GB, and most ubi games are 40-50GB. BlackOps 4 was 100GB, Destiny2 is up to 90GB now. Of course there are many games that have decent compact installers so an nice 25GB download ends up being 100GB install (Atlas). The last 3 Battlefield games have been 80-100GB.

RedDead2 on PS4 was 80GB install. That took 1.5 hrs via disc so probably slightly faster than digital download given my internet download speeds.

jiminator said:

The arguments are pointless. My view is that developers should be able to sell their games wherever they find it most beneficial to do so without being demonized by gamers or being called greedy or profit hungry. Almost all jobs in life have a purpose of making money, rewarding employees and owners with part of that money and using the rest to fund future products. So people jumping at "epic money" is not an inherently bad thing. It is just a deal and the business world is full of them.

All those big companies... have nothing to do with Epic. Not sure why you keep bringing them up in this thread. Sure, UBI sells some of their games there, but Epic is not a big distribution platform for them.

And yeah, Epic is in it for the money. 12% of a multibillion dollar industry is a vast amount of money for essentially a file hosting service. Bandwidth today is cheaper than ever as customers and business migrate away from landlines, and it is going to continue to get cheaper as is happening with everything related to technology.

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Developers and publishers do have a right to sell their product wherever they want, but customers also have the right to shop where they want, and said developers/publishers don't get to cry about it. It always amazes me how the people who ultimately allow these companies to make money in the first place, the customer, is always left out of these conversations. No company has a right to your money.

Armenius said:

Developers and publishers do have a right to sell their product wherever they want, but customers also have the right to shop where they want, and said developers/publishers don't get to cry about it. It always amazes me how the people who ultimately allow these companies to make money in the first place, the customer, is always left out of these conversations. No company has a right to your money.

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I think you missed a couple of points to bring it all full circle:

1. Developers and publishers have a right to sell their product wherever they want.
2. Customers have the right to shop where they want.
3. Said developers/publishers don't get to cry about customers shopping where they want.
4. Companies do not have a right to your money.
5. Customers do not have a right to a developer/publisher's product.
6. Said customers don't get to cry about developers/publishers selling products where they want.

Without 3 and 6 it's basically just your normal buyer/seller relationship, and both 3 and 6 are totally just opinion: both can cry if they want, but doing so won't change 1, 2, 4, & 5.

1. If customers don't buy their games, devs/pubs will go out of business!
2. If customers don't buy games, customers won't have games to play!

This is the showdown, and videogame customers have generally shown that they will crack if forced to choose between game and no game...and while there wasn't a pun intended there, the people claiming they will simply pirate the games to make some sort of stand are effectively undermining the pro-consumer discussion by making these arguments:

1. Customers have the right to shop wherever they want.
2. Developers do not have the right to sell their product wherever they want.
   
3. Customers have the right to the developer's product.
4. Customers are therefore justified in stealing the product of the developers if they can't shop for it wherever they want.

In this case, there is more desire to consume the product then there is conviction to punish the developer for their sales practices - in which case we get two new points:

1. The developer was right to feel confident that their product was desirable and that they could sell the product on their terms; and
   
2. Some consumers will resort to thievery of non-essential things if they are given any opportunity to rationalize it.

Or players will play some other games (backlog you know) until said game comes to the store of their choice and at a pricepoint of their liking.

So for some games in my particular case, I might buy it on Xbox if it supports KB&M at launch price for games that I prefer that control method, wait 6 months/year or even longer to get the game which is now no longer "new" at a probably discounted rate.
if the game in question would launch on one of the stores of my choice they will probably get a day 1 sale at full price.

Now I know I'm probably in the minority but I will buy the games where I want to buy them if at all possible or not play the game, there is plenty of games to go around.

For Epic to get my money they are going ot have to make it worth my while not theirs or the publishers

Why is the discussion about Epic and not the games?
"X" sucks because of "lists things having nothing to do with X".

"The developers wanted a better split". Ok, that is like saying "I hate X because he went to a better paying job".
If you have no options, then you do whatever you have to do.
If you have options, you calculate which one will give you the greatest about of financial stability and that is what you choose.
And if you are a big company you make your own store and pack your game full of microtransactions and DLCs and make various price point package options.

And if you are waiting for discounts when games hit steam... you probably won't see any. During a sale, sure, or maybe as a launch event.
Otherwise prices will remain exactly the same. That the is the current trend.

Problem: Epic not implementing anything on their roadmap and continually missing deadlines.
Solution: Remove deadlines.

https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-revamped-the-epic-games-store-roadmap-to-remove-target-months/

This is a smart move for them - gotta hide the chart that outlines your incompetence. The only deadline that counts is whether they destroy Steam's co-operative, consumer-friendly business model and replace it with a locked-down corporate dystopia before the Fortnite cash runs out.

There is no way Epic is ready for Borderlands 3 launch no way in hell their servers go down with Free game weekend. Not having pre-load is a big mistake....
If Tim Sweeny wants to win anyone over he should make some changes on the order of things.
I bet the servers will crash for two weeks into Borderlands 3 launch.

not to worry, I imagine most people are going to wait for it to hit steam, or so they claim

jiminator said:

not to worry, I imagine most people are going to wait for it to hit steam, or so they claim

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Yep. How on Earth will the servers crash when no one is buying on EGS anyways?

GoldenTiger said:

Yep. How on Earth will the servers crash when no one is buying on EGS anyways?

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Where there is a will, there is a way. They were having issues with making people download and install Uplay games twice. Nothing would surprise me at this point.

I may buy it on Epic, with enough peer pressure. But I won't be doing it at launch, too many variables.

I'm not concerned about the store handling it, I'm sure that the standard traffic from Fortnight is greater than BL3 will be. I just want to make sure that cloud saves and such work.

I've bought a few games off Epic, mainly Hades, Tetris Effect, Journey, and I will likely buy them again on steam because it's... Just easier for me.

Gonna ditch the Xbox Live thing PC gaming pass once I get bored of Forza Horizon 4, but for $2, it's been a good month.