The Epic First Run programme allows developers of any size to claim 100% of revenue if they agree to make their game exclusive on the Epic Games Store for six months.
After the six months are up, the game will revert to the standard Epic Games Store revenue split of 88% for the developer and 12% for Epic Games.
I think they should double their offer and keep the duration adjustable:
Be one week exclusive, get 100% for two weeks,
Be one month exclusive, get 100% for two months.
Then, it becomes a game for the publisher. Launch on Epic and if there are no transactions, abort after one day. But if there are sales, hold on a bit to pocket the 100%.
Publishers will gamble and stay on Epic a bit longer to get better percentages from the strongest fans but they have to end exclusivity to capture the entire market.
Man epic games store is actual industry aids. We don’t buy games on steam because we have no other choice. We buy them because it’s by far and large the best platform. I don’t want 10 different apps for different games. I want my collection in one spot. Epic games sucks. I’ve never given them a single cent and never will. I’ve claimed many a free game on there but the irony is I just buy them on sale through steam and never actually play them on epic. I want playtimes, achievements and the games themselves in one fucking spot. If steam becomes wildly anti consumer I would absolutely change my stance. But valve and it’s customers have a pretty good relationship imo.
I wish more companies were like Valve. They are following that old style of making a great product and/or providing a great service to make consumers happy to spend their money there. The only mixed feelings I have about spending money on steam is “do I really need more games when there’s a ton in my library that I still haven’t even installed let alone played?”
I hope they stay private and that Gabe has or finds an heir that follows his mindset rather than decides to go for a quick payout.
Even when those other companies embrace shitty business practices to make more money and it works for them, they are just setting the stage for a better company to come along and replace them.
Dude, we are so fucking boned if Gaben ever retires/dies/does not become GLaDOS. Valve is one of the only companies I can think of that hasn’t squandered goodwill completely and generally maintains a tight ship (aside from maybe Costco).
Can guarantee some random, unkempt, 38 year old asshole from the pharmaceutical industry will make Steam subscription only, throw it on the stock market, and have it tank due to some hedge fund mindset within 5 years if they hire a new CEO.
Not to mention valve making a device that proliferates Linux game support more than anything else… ever.
God I hate Epic. I hate them with every fiber of my being. The fact that I have to have their crappy, insecure game store bloatware just to try to learn Unreal for personal projects is dumb. Hence why I am learning Unity and Godot.
Ouf, crazy how many people are actually pushing for valve to have a complete monopoly. Ya it’s a good product but so was chrome. Diversity is important for consumers.
There is a lot more history to Epic than just a monopoly; that company and ceo dug their grave and they can sit in it.
Not disagreeing with you, but I’m not responsible for Epic being successful. Steam has always been my only place for games, and a few months ago I even deleted my Epic account with a few free games (CIV 6, GTA V) and purchased them on Steam summer sale.
I can’t be arsed to make new accounts, set up friends, payments, install a bunch of shit again and again for any storefront that pops up. Steam is reliable, has good sales, and hasn’t pissed its users off to make them leave.
I’m not even sure luring devs with 6 months of exclusivity is a bad thing for steam users. Games come out in such bad states nowadays that probably sticking with steam and getting a functional game later is better than being a beta tester on Epic.
Valve has won me over with Steam Deck too. It’s more stream lined to install a game and get going on Linux compared to the setup for other launchers. Maybe other competitors should pay attention to Linux more. If they are supposedly for open platforms then why not actually invest in making the experience better on Linux as opposed to being so stubborn in only supporting the windows ecosystem. You’d think Epic would jump on it with how they’ve constantly complained about Apple’s ecosystem and Android even though that at least allows side loading.
Epic complain because it doesnt benefit them. If they were the one with a large ecosystem, you bet it would be closed down as much as possible. Fuck Epic games, shitty company.
Just because the competition fucking sucks ass doesn’t mean the best one has a monopoly. 🤦♂️ There is still competition… It’s just weak as shit.
Maybe if the competition stepped up and offered similar services and functions, they wouldn’t need to pull bullshit like Epic is with exclusivity deals, and actually take some market share.
GOG Galaxy is a decent one. It actually offers a lot of what makes Steam so strong. It’s still not as good, but they also deal with a certain niche area of gaming, making even their store more relevant than EGS, Origin, etc.
GOG is wonderful! You don’t even need to use a launcher if you don’t want to, DRM free is my jam.
That said, I wish they would improve their launcher, especially when it comes to updating games: I shouldn’t need hundreds of gigs of free space to patch a big game.
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games_on_Epic_Games_Store
Pretty much all their free games are on the list.
You don’t need the launcher to play them?
There is also a lot of games on steam that you can launch without steam. It seems developers have finaly realized there is nonpoint fighting piracy for their drm to be broken in a day or two.
Glad to hear it, DRM sucks.
Funny how most of us are also just fine with GoG, green man gaming, humble bundle, and the like. Just because a lot of people don’t like one particular store front and practices doesn’t mean we’re cheering on monopolization.
I don’t mind competition but I hate superfluous launchers that launch when you launch a game from another launcher.
I’d love to see competing game stores that were all genuinely good, but let’s be honest: Most of them are mediocre-to-shit.
Epic have more than enough fortnite money to make a launcher that’s not shit
Reading the posts… everyone seems pretty cool with GoG… Value and GoG sitting in a tree, not being assholes yippeeee
“Monopoly”, and yet when a game is on Steam I can buy it wherever I want. What stores can I buy Epic exclusives exactly?
They have key resellers now, but hey, you guys don’t care if they improve their shit, your opinion was made even before they released
Doesn’t matter if they have key resellers now, they were bitching and complaining about the Steam monopoly before they did so that image will hold true for all of time, forever. And I’m going to hate that stupid company for any reason I want, if that makes you mad then that’s a you problem for being a free bootlicker to a faceless multibillion dollar corpo who doesn’t give a fuck who you are.
I mean… You’re accusing me of being something you also are for another company, can’t believe you don’t realize that…
Are you not reading your own comments? They all boil down to “WHY DON’T YOU GUYS LIKE EPIC?? PLEASE LIKE EPIC, PLEASE!”. You come off as a serious fanboy that gets high off Tim Sweeney’s farts, it’s embarrassing. Even if Epic was paying you this isn’t the kind of PR they’d appreciate my dude.
Do you work for Epic or something? I’ve never seen someone defending such a shoddy and unneeded product so vehemently.
You guys work for valve of something? I point out falsehood and hypocrisy, you guys attack a product based on bullshit, who’s more likely to work for one of the two exactly?
But I remember you guys…
Back in 2003 you guys were pissed at Valve for releasing Steam and you said it would kill PC gaming. I was there to see people you doing exactly that. Valve made Steam necessary to play Half-Life 2, remember that? Oh man you guys were mad…
But now? Steam is the best thing ever! Can’t have enough can you? If they had a monopoly that would be even better! Heck, they had one for years and you didn’t mind the fact that games were de facto exclusives for a long ass time! Valve just didn’t have to sign a contract to confirm it!
I was actually on board with Steam since the inception. I grew up in the sticks; being able to buy my games online and download them super easily was fucking dope since I could not easily find many in stores.
It’s not so dope now. If that’s the only thing you have to offer: Why the fuck would I use it? Because you gnab shit and hold it hostage specifically so I will use you inferior platform?
If an actual competitor arises sure, but why support scummy anti-consumer practices?
Fair point, I guess I was ready to disregard it because of the money going to devs and epic already taking less of a cut then valve. Exclusives do suck.
Valve do take a larger cut, but that money is going into some incredible services both for consumers and developers with Steamworks. Much larger audience too, which makes up for the larger cut anyway.
Epic just want a slice of the revenue while putting in minimal effort, so they just buy exclusives and free game promos, so as far as I am concerned they can fuck off.
They need to make a better product to compete. I’m not rooting for valve but epic can eat a bag of dicks too.
That’s like Walmart showing up to a town that didn’t have any and claiming it’s diversity because it isn’t Costco. Options are good, but there needs to actually be a better reason for customers to use it than just use it even though it sucks for the sake of competition. Especially if this competitor is taking the approach of buying out the competition to remove availability, which doesn’t give the impression they are a company with goals of being benevolent should they get bigger.
Hey maybe you should make a launcher that isn’t shit?
I mean, good on you for paying the developers well but Steam became very popular because they kept improving it.
They’ll get 100% of my zero dollars that way.
Reeks of desperation, Tim’s hate boner for Valve seem to drive a lot of Epic’s policies
i doubt it’s a hate boner tbh, it just needs to be communicated that way if he wants the slightest chance of success here. their real game is that they saw the 30% cut steam makes from most games and decided it’s free real estate, that it is the way they’ll keep themselves rich after fortnite’s hype cycle runs out. the problem is, they haven’t put in the decade of work to everything gamers want that would justify that cut – it’s actually exceedingly hard to beat steam in their own game, so instead epic tries to breed hatred for steam to take their cut through duplicitous marketing as opposed to genuinely just outcompeting them.
i’m not defending tim sweeney here (in fact i’m calling him a lying fuck), but i think he’s just a lying fuck, not a hater. the hate is just a marketing strategy. but who knows, maybe he got in his own head and started actually hating valve after he couldn’t beat them this way
This is a fair point, Valve has earned that 30% cut imo, the amount of stuff they offer to devs is pretty impressive, meanwhile Epic is still playing catch-up. I guess they’re still trying to establish a good user base that they can point to as consistent income outside of Fortnite, and this is an option they’re going for.
You mean the publisher?
Steam has proton, Epic games does nkt even have a linux launcher, its obvious who I’m sticking with
Heroic Game Launcher works well enough for that. Although I do need to install MSVC shit thru Winetricks sometimes. Wish HGL did that automatically.
I mean, I’ve been able to get epic games working on my deck through the heroic launcher. I’ve still not given them one thing dime but I’ve got a fair sized collection of giveaway games that are nice to have around
Effectively no percent of the market uses Linux
That percent of the market really changes for some indie titles who have noted a substantial amount of their purchases were from Steam Decks.
100% of me uses Linux so epic can get fucked as far as I’m concerned
Linux users are the vegans of lemmy.
I’m sure all couple hundred of you are really excited about it but you are also no percent of the market
Shit I only have epic installed to get free games I forget to play because I never use the launcher. It’s just nothing to do with who is using Linux.
I don’t really give a crap what you think of linux users. But it’s not true that “no percent” uses it. Seems a little ironic that you say “nobody uses it” on one hand and also complain about the number of people who talk about it…
The large number of people talking bout it exists pretty much just on this social media.
Not sure why you are so personally invested, hence the vegan comment.
The point is no one really develops with Linux in mind because the consumer base is tiny
“Let us offer you 100% of the money from a marketplace 0.0001% as large! Did we mention you get all the money that neither of us are making? We will throw in all the good will with gamers we’ve earned too.”
If the game is in demand, people will go there if it’s the only option. It’s not a great option for some obscure indie game, but it is for mid-budget projects that have already gotten interest.
That’s fair. I personally just skip those. But maybe few enough people skip to make the lower fees worth it.
For the majority of game studios this seems like a terrible deal though.
I feel like zero fees vs 30% fees is a pretty big difference. But you have to be able to sell at least enough to make up for the difference either way. It also very well could just attract devs who think they’re going to sell more than they will.
Well 0% fee for a store that has zero added features vs 30% for a launcher with cloud saves, overlay, online couch play, tradeable in-game items, gifting, community, profiles, wishlist, notifications, etc.
Someone has to pay for the server time and storage.
Oh and Steam has way bigger userbase.
Call me old fashioned, but I don’t play a game for the trading cards. I also don’t hang out there, I have used Discord for years. Overlay is less important now that I have 2 monitors. I just want a game on my computer that updates itself so it’s ready when I want to play it, and then gets out of the way.
Gifting and a better cart experience I definitely agree with, those are so much better. But not 30 percent better.
As far as the user base, it may be changing. There are 132 million active steam users vs 230 million epic pc users. Though I imagine the number that actually buys software is strongly in Steams favor, as they are going to be older and more used to spending where I suspect you see a lot of F2P players in epic. Does that demographic start changing as they age out of fortnight? Hard to say. Don’t have any stats on that though, just guessing.
Steam Workshop, communities, screenshot and video sharing, pretty solid game searching, game awards, reviews, streaming, guides, achievements - just what I remembered.
Yes, there are people who so not use any of those features. Yes, there are people like you who don’t care about trading / cards / anything but the game and updates.
So when you start comparing just that a launcher can launch a game and keep it up to dáte - these two launchers are identical. When you add the store to it, then it’s in Epics favor. But as soon as you start comparing them as a whole, it’s clear Steam has a lead.
Why did people ditch IRC in favor of Skype? They both had chat. TeamSpeak in favor of Discord? They both had voice calling.
It’s about the UX as a whole. Some people might not use Steam Workshop ever, but then one day it comes on handy.
Also, fuck Epic exclusivity deals. They are as anti consumer as it can be, without really giving anything in return. They literally P2W’d the game market. Or at least tried to. Last straw, Epic is partially owned by Tencent, a Chinese money hungry game company that’s not ashamed to put P2W features in games.
How about you improve your goddamn service instead of holding my games hostage on your shitty launcher?
So is it just me or does every game that becomes a epic exclusive never do as well as they should. i think most game developers realize this, which is why epic is desperate to get developers on their failing launcher. maybe they should try offering all the things steam does. regardless i cant switch because i own too many games on steam, im locked in.
What was wild to me is when Kingdom Hearts dropped on Epic and no one cared. Should have been the hot topic for at least a few days but… nothing.
Kingdom Hearts was a double whammy of poor decision making on Squeenix’s part. Not only did they launch on EGS, where most PC players aren’t going to care about it, they launched it at an absurd price. They were selling the HD collection for $50 when you could walk over to GameStop or Target and get the PS4 version for $20.
That’s probably also partially due to how crazy overpriced it is though
When you finally make a game like KH available to a new audience, and no one gives a shit… You’ve done something horribly wrong.
I 100000% believe your comment on the pre-existing library is why they give free games away weekly. They want you to build a library that you then won’t want to move from which is exactly why I too don’t like being forced to buy things on another game store. I don’t like exclusives no matter where they are, it’s anticompetitive bullshit.
Steam has a really loyal base that for some reason think buying from a different store is akin to buying a whole new platform
I’ll avoid games on Steam as much as I can to foster competition but breaking into that user base is difficult
the reason for that is because steam isn’t just a launcher. if you don’t use steam you might think so, because giving you a play button, managing downloads, and maybe tracking achievements is all other platforms do. steam, on the other hand, is an entire toolkit built to simplify everything in gaming – whether what you seek is community spaces, a workshop to easily install mods and other community content, one-click linux compatibility, in-home streaming, easy game invites and in-game chat with your friends, or a plethora of other features, buying on steam vs non-steam is usually a massive difference.
i bought gta v on disk back when it released, as opposed to my friends who only joined a few years later and had the bandwidth to just buy the steam version and download it, and whenever we played together they just had so much of an easier experience.
the reason steam’s user base is so loyal is because steam provides things that actually matter to them, and valve spent decades ensuring that they provide the best damn experience possible. epic games, on the other hand, had one surprise success with fortnite, and decided they want the game store market to turn it into a long-term revenue stream, but what they forgot to consider is to give people the same experience steam provides. egs has a fundamentally selfish design, it literally only caters to epic and only does the bare minimum for anyone else.
so if your proposition is that people should ditch that platform that goes out of its way to provide for them and instead be content with the bare minimum because the company behind that platform is evil because *checks notes* it’s too popular and makes it hard for other corporations to act as middlemen and collect the game store tax themselves instead, i don’t think you’ll be able to convince too many people.
Yeah, I dislike that about it too
It’s a store, it shouldn’t be anything else
But AFAIK GoG is the only one like that, even then some of their games aren’t
so do you think the other features in steam shouldn’t exist, or that they should be split off from the store into a different service?
I would prefer split up
The problem is that none of these other launchers offer features like Steam Input, Proton, or the Workshop. Steam competes by making their platform the most attractive to customers. EGS competes by making their platform the most attractive to publishers. At the end of the day though, the publishers have to go where the customers are.
I’ll avoid games on Steam as much as I can to foster competition
Cool. I’m going to open my own store that costs twice as much as Steam and has none of the features. I’ll let you know when it’s ready so you can purchase from me in order to “foster competition”.
I’ll hold you to it
Its is buying a new platform, rather than have my games in 1 platform, they would be in 2. also steam offers much more (at a greater cost to developers) then epic. i also only use linux, which is a not hard at all with steam.
I also only use Linux; I don’t need to change my device at all to switch between Steam, Lutris, or Heoric
Due to advancements pushed by Valve, these days I’m actually surprised when a game doesn’t run under Linux.
Even when he worked for Microsoft, Gabe Newell was literally the person that made PC gaming viable.
i dont know what lutris or heoric are. i wish i had more time to figure that stuff out. maybe one day.
i hope you realize the only reason you can actually game on linux is because valve decided microsoft has to not have a monopoly, because they got spooked by the windows store. i tried gaming on linux in the pre-proton days, it was a hot mess, the advent of proton and dxvk was a massive jump in terms of compatibility. and nowadays valve is ensuring that people do in fact give a shit about proton with the steamdeck, its 1.5-2 million users give a pretty strong reason for devs to keep their games compatible, and anything that runs on a steamdeck runs on linux in general as well.
it doesn’t matter whether you run non-steam games through lutris or heroic, you’re still running on the translation layers built by valve to keep linux gaming viable
I am aware, I can still use other stores
I wouldn’t want Valve to have a monopoly on Linux anymore than on Windows
I buy from valve mostly for the Linux bit… they’ve played a major role in lifting the Linux desktop graphics drivers to the point where they’re actually not just usable but good.
I had a few games on Impulse but my account vanished when it got sold to Gamestop so I can understand people being worried about buying games on other platforms. One reason I like GoG due to offline installers
Hades
I didn’t see anyone talking about Hades until it released on Steam
It spent it’s early access there but it was definitely talked about at least in the places I lurked. It’s Supergiant games tho, they do nothing but bangers.
It’s because PC gamers overwhelmingly will just ignore the game until it comes to steam, but by the time it comes to steam it’s been 6 months - 1 year and all the hype around the game has died.
People have been voting with their wallets and not rewarding anti-competitive behavior for once
Only buying on Steam is anti-competitive
not what that means
it’s not. choosing to buy on steam because it’s a better experience to you than egs is exactly the result we want from competition. they competed for your favor, steam won, and egs lost. personally, sometimes i buy on gog because i like its features better, especially the offline installer and lack of drm, but even if steam won all rounds that would still be competition, they’re just good at it.
anti-competitive measures are the ones that try to abuse an existing market position to take that choice away from you and force you to go one way or another. if you really wanted a grasp on valve, you could argue for example that the steamdeck is anti-competitive on the market of game stores, because it makes using competing game stores inconvenient (even though you absolutely can do it, i have played uplay games on my steamdeck, and could probably easily install egs as well, i just don’t have any reason to try). exclusivity is also a very clear-cut anti-competitive measure, because it just cleanly takes choice away from the end user and forces them to go with a specific launcher, or worse, specific hardware in some cases. but just being better than everyone, or as a consumer choosing to go with the best option is not anti-competitive, it’s just winning the competition
Not really. Steam is not forcing exclusives on their platform. Them providing a better service doesn’t mean the users are anti-competitive.
EGS explicitly pays developers to not release on other platforms. That’s anti-competitive
Exclusive is the medium not the store
A pc game on epic is still a pc game. I haven’t heard of epic preventing devs from releasing on Xbox
EGS is a platform, Steam is a platform. They are both stores and their own ecosystems.
They are paying for forced exclusives to their platform. I’m not going to use a different platform even on my same device because it’s anti-competitive for pc gaming.
You aren’t going to promote competition because it’s anti competitive
If a game was offered on both platforms do you think people are more likely to get it on Epic than Steam? If not then they have to be exclusive to their store
That’s not my problem. That’s still being anti-competitive. If one platform is significantly better (eg steam) then the competition needs to offer a reason to buy from them. The problem is that EGS has decided that the only way to give users a reason to use their store has been to make sure the game isn’t available anywhere else.
The users are able to make the choice to not support poor business tactics and they have. People do not buy from EGS, due to a plethora of reasons, one of which is likely that they are extremely anti-competitive and buy out games.
You aren’t going to promote competition because it’s anti competitive
A store doesn’t have the right to my business just because it exists. If I started a PC game store and charged twice as much as Steam or Epic would you purchase from me just to support competition?
A business needs to give me a reason to purchase from them. If the best reason to purchase from Epic is to give them a participation award then no thank you.
So only buying coffee from the store I like is anti competitive?
thats what i was hinting at. and im not totally happy about epic ruining launches over trying to be a replacement for a, in my opinion, much better system which offers much more ever if they developers don’t use all the features. i do wish steam would add a lower tier which takes less of the profit from indie developers that hardly use any of these features.
Why choose one over the other when you can use something like Playnite or similar to track all your collections across multiple services?
i work too much to spend time looking into systems like this. also i don’t use windows.
Then Heroic
Fuck Epic and any store who tries to remove games from others.
I’d expect EGS exclusivity to be the norm then. People who will buy the game eventually will buy the game eventually. Those are fixed sales since they’d get the same revenue from them either way. It’s just a breakdown of the sales lost from people refusing to buy the game ever outweighs the 30% you gain. Which at this point it seems like a ridiculous proposal since every game seems to launch to bigger and bigger numbers regardless of what bullshit the game pulls. People who wait for sales would barely matter since a steam sale is like a year after release and they weren’t making bank on them anyways.
But at face value, getting 70% of one Steam sale is only 10% more than you’d make off two copies sold at 100%. So one “never buy” looses you 2.3 sales of a game in revenue. Cool but any converted sale from someone who wouldve bought on Steam but can’t wait and buys on EGS offset that in favor of EGS. I guarantee more people will buy from EGS compared to never buying the game. 2.3x more? Yeah, for sure, lol. I’m sure someone could do some clown math for a break even point per 1 million sales at that point. But considering a bulk of a games purchase is at launch it’s just skewed so heavily toward EGS exclusivity makes more financial sense.
There’s also the percentage that just don’t buy on PC and buy on console instead, but again that’s the same cut you’d get just launching it on Steam
I’d love to see the actual sales numbers of recent, big titles on EGS vs Steam. I absolutely hate using EGS, and with the awesomely high game game density these days, I just don’t mind missing the few exclusives until they get on steam, and even then it is only if I remember them, since usually the hype has died out by then, and other games are out. I have no idea what percentage of users are similar to me.
And so the enshitification of epic begins.
How?
Lure in devs with an unsustainably good deal -> try to lock them in to semi-exclusivity -> use this to pull customers away from valve and other marketplaces -> monopolize the market -> turn around and sell out to shareholders by milking as much money and data as they can from players and developers -> profit
Do you believe there’s a future where Epic games could actually have a monopoly on the video game market?
Do you believe there’s a present where Epic’s games’ management could actually have a mindset that there’s a future where Epic games could actually have a monopoly on the video game market?
From our generation, no. We’re all locked in on Steam (and I hope some of you are supporting GOG too).
But the Fortnite generation? Who once they get tired of the game and has been gathering every free game on EGS? Guess what? All their games are in on place! On Epic. Just exactly how steam users are now.
It’s the long long plan and I can see EGS being the Zoomer and (whatever gen is next in line) platform of choice.
I wouldn’t bet money on it but I can see the logic.
This just sounds like competition. A way to keep steam putting in effort.
Begins? Wasn’t that by original design?
