Epic Games Store - the console war comes to PC

[passerby]

Agree on everything you said except two things:
1) All of it would be still not enough without exclusives.
2) Lower prices for new releases would defeat the whole point from publishers pov. Paradox and 2K even refused Epic subsidized sale discount on preorder games.

Otherwise, not doing everything else you've mentioned will contribute to their failure.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Retailer Margin + Distribution, Production cost = 19$, 19/60 = 32%, more, or less same as Steam cut, especially for smaller games. If you'd want to count returns for some reason, you should also count steam refunds.

The difference between a digital refund and unsold boxes shipped back to the publisher is that the former costs the publisher/developer absolutely nothing. No physical goods were produced and shipped to the store.

It's also 2010, I suspect that retailer margin is smaller by now, there was an article a year ago, based on data provided by Ubisoft where retail Margin was 20% and logistics/manufacturing was 5%

I doubt it but it's irrelevant. My point is that Steam was a far better deal for the publishers and not just because they could save 5 bucks by switching from physical to digital.

 

[vonAchdorf]

It's the only thing that has any chance of working though.

If I was Sweeney I would have spent longer in development of the store and threw actual resources on it so that things like a shopping cart wouldn't take a year to implement. I would have launched it with at least the most crucial features already implemented (forums, cloud saves, reviews, achievements, playtime tracking, profiles, overlay..). I would have paid some companies money to bring more games from console to EGS (they did it apparently with some quantic dream games, but there could be more) that never would have gotten PC version otherwise. I would have funded some games from scratch for the store. I would have come up with some interesting features steam (or any competitors) do not have (because Steam as feature packed as it is, doesn't have everything imaginable quite yet). Throw much nicer interface at it and offer better pricing on games compared to Steam. Voila. People would use the store voluntarily.

Bribing third party developers for exclusives is far from the only thing that could work. Cheaper games and actual value provided to gamers would work wonders.

It's counter-productive, given the state the store is in. Even if I grudgingly accept that the game's only available there, the user experience is so bad, that it does only reinforce the negativity. The store had to be in a state of "hey this ain't as bad as I thought, it's actually a nicer experience than Steam".

 

[Zombra]

I'm confused by complaints about the transaction interface. You click the button, you enter cc info, hit submit payment and the game appears in your library.


Sure, it's different from Steam but what exactly is so ȟ̷̢̢̨̳̖͔̩̼̯̇̓͊́̉͐͊̿͞ó̶̧̼̠̼͉́̊̃̽͋͆̚͜͟͝r̶̛̬̙͇͍̱̜͓͇̋̍̐͆͐́ͅr̨̨̨̩͈̤̫̞͓͈̅̈́̀͌ị̶̥̩͍̺̆̾̎̄̕b̷͖̲̘̪͎̲̤̹̖͑̑̒̍̓ļ̜̲͈̎͂̈̿̈͟e̡̧̹̻̙͕͆̇͛̈́̿́͌ about it?

 

[passerby]

I doubt it but it's irrelevant. My point is that Steam was a far better deal for the publishers and not just because they could save 5 bucks by switching from physical to digital.

Of course it is, but I wasn't talking about that. I was responding to people that don't believe that Steam cut is close to physical retail cut.

 

[Black Angel]

Retailer Margin + Distribution, Production cost = 19$, 19/60 = 32%, more, or less same as Steam cut, especially for smaller games.

All that, and those smaller games won't likely even show up in a third world country like mine. And if they did, I bet the cut would be much higher that I doubt indie devs would consider worth the trouble.

 

[Mustawd]

I doubt it but it's irrelevant. My point is that Steam was a far better deal for the publishers and not just because they could save 5 bucks by switching from physical to digital.

Of course it is, but I wasn't talking about that. I was responding to people that don't believe that Steam cut is close to physical retail cut.

It’s not based on that 2010 chart. Steam is clearly better.

 

[Black_Willow]

I remember the time when indie RPGs realeses, such as Eschalon or KotC, were a big thing. Why? Because there was so few of them. With Steam opening it's gates for indies we had huge number of indies released, much more than before. Even Jeff Vogel, a guy who has been selling his games since the 90s, said that selling his games on steam increased his income substantialy.

 

[Perkel]

Epic keeps impressing me, they made Microsoft, the guys behind Games For Windows Live and the Windows Store

It has nothing to do with Epic. MS is going into netfix of gaming. They want to combine every platform there is and then use gamepass.
Their gamepass basically is every game they make released on day one for subscription fee monthly + other games they sign deals on.
For example you could pay 70$ for Forza Horizon or you could just buy gamepass for 10$ (or 1$ on pc) and play it there. This goes for every of their exclusive game from FH4.

500k sales on such a short notice for such a game would mean it is a mega one hit wonder and yet theres no real buzz for this game anywhere (no on reddit, no on any actual forum, not on twitch, not even on youtube).

That is normal. Steam people buy games but not play them. Epic store is probably 75% fortine kids who don't know what Steam even is so they probably don't know that you can buy game and don't play it.

Pretty weird watching Valve and Kickstarter let Epic ravage their customers' anuses like this

Well it is not like they are used to competition.

This is pretty illegal in most countries LoL,do hope they get their assess sued.

It would be illegal if Epic was in Steam place but they are not. It requires first huge share on market.

strange how "people" on twitter saying shit like "STEAM SHOULD LOWER THEIR PERCENTAGE" never mention Xbox or Sony, which has the same percentage.

Sony, Apple, MS, GOG and almost everyone who deals with digital entertainment set 30% cut precisely because they watched Steam.
Steam itself chose 30% not because of costs but because it was way better than usual 50% of physical good market.

If you would have any brain you would notice that if whole industry have exact same cut it means this is racket to fuck you out of money. I know no other industry that has same cut across whole market. Epic doing 12% actually forced Steam to change at least for AAA to 20% while they still charge indies 30%. Let me repeat. Epic forced steam to actually compete in market. Discrod now i think charges even 11% less than Epic.

Just want to pop in to this sidebar for a moment to say that Discord is garbage as a substantial communication tool.

Agreed. It's Reddit 2.0.

"I just want to say that paper is mistake"

What a colossal load of shit.
No. And quit claiming this is for gamer benefit, the transparent cash grab is transparent.

Welcome to capitalism comrade. In capitalism companies want to fuck each other out competing and the winner is called consumer. Sometimes though they talk to each other or behave like they work together and agree that they should not compete with each other. How about we set up 30% cut for games across industry ? DA !

I still remember in my country when there were 3 telecoms offering mobiles and charged 0.20$ per SMS then suddenly Play joined market. Not only they signed deals for 3G phones they even gave them away for just signing deal with them. Suddenly market start to churn because due to Play giving away new awesome phones for nothing people started to use their services. That gave them enough push and suprise suprise after 4 years SMS went down to 0$ and plans went from minutes of free talk to hours in the end reaching free sms and free conversations all you want for standard price.

 

[Mustawd]

Welcome to capitalism comrade. In capitalism companies want to fuck each other out competing and the winner is called consumer. Sometimes though they talk to each other or behave like they work together and agree that they should not compete with each other. How about we set up 30% cut for games across industry ? DA !

This has nothing to do with Capitalism.

Capitalism is a system where private citizens can own portions of a company (aka capital) and share in the profits of the company proportionately to their ownership share (in general).

What you seem to alluding to is the concept of free markets. Of which Capitalism doesn’t have to apply at all. You can have Capitalism combined with anti-market laws that set prices, price floors, price ceilings, etc. You can have Socialism with free markets as well.

Again, it has nothing to do with Capitalism, specifically.

EDIT: In addition, what you’re alluding to is price fixing, which is illegal in the US and has nothing to do with Capitalism and everything to do with anti-market practices.

Also, just because companies imitate each other doesn’t mean they are colluding. It does happen from time to time, but seeing how competitive the game space is I’d be shocked if that was the case. So maybe take off that tinfoil hat?

 

[Belegarsson]

Steam people buy games but not play them. Epic store is probably 75% fortine kids who don't know what Steam even is so they probably don't know that you can buy game and don't play it.

I honestly can't tell if you're trolling or not.

 

[Volrath]

Steam people buy games but not play them. Epic store is probably 75% fortine kids who don't know what Steam even is so they probably don't know that you can buy game and don't play it.

I honestly can't tell if you're trolling or not.

It's Perkel, he really is that retarded.

 

[Reinhardt]

Epic store is probably 75% fortine kids who don't know what Steam even is so they probably don't know that you can buy game

true

 

[Kutulu]

I will say it again: I, and 99% of normal people, will not install another launcher unless it's a real banger of a game, and then I will promptly uninstall it again once I am done with that game.

The only way you can defeat Steam is by somehow permitting Valve to transfer all your games from there to the other thing - without needing to reinstall them. As that will never happen, any development on gay launchers will only increase piracy.

"I love monopolies, I am a retard".

It's true, 99% people are retarded, so maybe you're right that this launcher will fail.

Why use a launcher that lets devs earn more of your money that you paid them? I see no reason, yep. Let's throw a tantrum instead.

Nobody wanted a single fucking launcher.... ever.

People prefered being able to lend games to their friends and maybe even sell them.
People also really like boxes just like on Vinyl (the covers), and Manuals... they liked manuals as well.


But no, now i have to use launchers, pay the same price like back in the day (even though i dont get a box, manual or physical media) & dont even actually own the fucking game.

EA cant get people to use origin even though they give away AAA games for free every other week, i dont want anymore bloatware by anyone for any reason...

To quote myself from 118 pages ago...

I dont love steam, i hated it, i just accepted it because there was little choice & over time they did improve.
I dont want steams competition to be as good them, i require them to be as good or better.

Epic isnt, epic shat on consumers.


At this point the Epic fairy would have to fly through my window, land on my dick, install epic & grant me free games for enternity.

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

I wanted to register on Epic just to check it myself but apparently to my surprise my e-mail has already in their system. To my surprise I've found out that I'm really a Chinese

. It's the same e-mail that I use for Steam/GOG. I feel really confident about their platform. This is an outrage! I'm a potato guai lo, not a Foxconn ant worker .

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

I like how the lizardman epic guy talks about exclusives and potentially lower prices at the same time. These things are not contradictory at all.

 

[Perkel]

Steam people buy games but not play them. Epic store is probably 75% fortine kids who don't know what Steam even is so they probably don't know that you can buy game and don't play it.

I honestly can't tell if you're trolling or not.

It's Perkel, he really is that retarded.

I have like 100 games on steam and played only like 20% of them with other 10% maybe like 15 minutes.
People who buy games but don't play them is running meme on Steam for at least decade. There are litearally people who buy every single game out there. This was the reason why there were so much outrage when Steam allowed any game to come in to platform.

Also anyone who supports in any way Steam is fucking retard. I am old enough to remember this piece of shit was attached to Half Life 2 as DRM at times when people were still running modems and it barely worked and after almost decade they removed ability to stop patching certain games which effectively brakes mods every update to game.

I hope there will be 20 more Epic like stores opening this year for maximum butthurt everyone with 20 more exclusive deals. The more stores the better. Soon we will be back to 2005 and running your game from .exe

 

[Mustawd]

Soon we will be back to 2005 and running your game from .exe

That is one weird ass leap of logic.

 

[Perkel]

I like how the lizardman epic guy talks about exclusives and potentially lower prices at the same time. These things are not contradictory at all.

Here is the problem.
Epic tried to with their own cash to make every epic store game cheaper about 15-20%
Meaning developer gets 60$ and Epic charges 45$ client and they cover 15$

What happened ? Developers freaked out that they were effectively selling their games below market price which would brake Steam TOS and few other shops (like probably PSN and other) and pulled their games from presale/sale for a while.

So tell me now who is at fault here now ?

edit:

So not only developer would get 12% cut but also gamer would get his cut.
IT was first real shot at changing AAA games price point. Because we all know 60$ is just random price point.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Nobody wanted a single fucking launcher.... ever.

And yet now they love them.

Galaxy exists because of popular demand. The supposed monocled GOG audience couldn't deal with launching exes. Which means that:

Soon we will be back to 2005 and running your game from .exe

Will never happen. People love them because of "convenience" and all that retarded shit. Even the mega-monocled Codexers couldn't figure out how to buy KOTC on their own and were asking to pay 30% to Steam instead to do that. And of course "to have all the games in one place". Stupidity can't be defeated.

 

[Perkel]

Will never happen. People love them because of "convenience" and all that retarded shit. Even the mega-monocled Codexers couldn't figure out how to buy KOTC on their own and were asking to pay 30% to Steam instead to do that. And of course "to have all the games in one place". Stupidity can't be defeated.

IT will be either one GOGgalaxy2.0 like launcher or exe.
I don't see anyone having 40 different launchers for every game they play.

Once something like GOGG2.0 will eat into Steam/Origin/MS etc. "community" they will quickly remove rights for it to use their API.

Which leaves us .exe. I don't see any other logical option.

 

[Paul_cz]

I mean, it sure as fuck IS convenient to have patches download automatically in the background without having to hunt for them manually like in the prehistoric days. Even if that was the only feature Steam/Galaxy/Et al had, it would still be worth it.
But Steam in particular offers much more than that which is why it is so valuable to many.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Will never happen. People love them because of "convenience" all that retarded shit. Even the mega-monocled Codexers couldn't figure out how to buy KOTC on their own and were asking to pay 30% to Steam instead to do that. And of course "to have all the games in one place". Stupidity can't be defeated.

People wanted to see KOTC on Steam because it would have sold 100 times more and thus funded KOTC2.

What happened ? Developers freaked out that they were effectively selling their games below market price which would brake Steam TOS and few other shops (like probably PSN and other) and pulled their games from presale/sale for a while.

If selling games cheaper bothered Steam, they'd never hand out tens of thousands of keys to sell in bundles.

 

[Perkel]

I mean, it sure as fuck IS convenient to have patches download automatically in the background without having to hunt for them manually like in the prehistoric days. Even if that was the only feature Steam/Galaxy/Et al had, it would still be worth it.
But Steam in particular offers much more than that which is why it is so valuable to many.

IDK mate if free DS4Windows or MSI Afterburner can patch itself to latest version i don't see how a multi-million game can't.

 

[Perkel]

People wanted to see KOTC on Steam because it would have sold 100 times more and thus funded KOTC2.

If selling games cheaper bothered Steam, they'd never hand out tens of thousands of keys to sell in bundles.

Can you scoop up your TOS and see that stuff, you are on steam so you should get pretty much the same TOS as everyone else. Though i know Steam now has split for AAA games (20%) which could have different TOS (though this also should be available to you to read it)

What happened was true though. A lot of developers freaked out about Epic selling their games 15-20% cheaper than market price despite covering that money from their own bank.

https://www.gameinformer.com/2019/0...pers-to-raise-prices-temporarily-delist-games