Epic Games Store - the console war comes to PC

[Thane Solus]

As indie developer if you are one, without much back/investments, you will hate Steam and their incompetence (lack of curation, adding algorithms without proper tests, that can cut your income by 70% for some months, etc).

I don't know, Vault Dweller sure has remained adamant in not shitting on Steam.

V started a few good years ago, built up a community, has a lots of rpgcodex fanbois;p, has a few decent games to get income from. I doubt it that he was hurt, but i am sure on the less popular games, he lost traffic just like the rest.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I have over 15k games on Steam on ignore now(which is apparently roughly half of the entire Steam catalogue.) I'd imagine I'm probably in the top .1% — if not even higher — of most games viewed by users on Steam.
From going through all those games I've realized one thing: Most games are awful. I'm not skipping over your game from a lack of exposure, I'm skipping it because something about it sucks. There is no algorithm in the world that can fix most games being complete shit.
This especially applies to games that possibly don't actually suck but I'm tired of seeing rehashes of. 2D "souls-like", metroidvanias, etc., There's so god damn many of them and they all look bland as hell.

 

[fantadomat]

I have over 15k games on Steam on ignore now(which is apparently roughly half of the entire Steam catalogue.) I'd imagine I'm probably in the top .1% — if not even higher — of most games viewed by users on Steam.
From going through all those games I've realized one thing: Most games are awful. I'm not skipping over your game from a lack of exposure, I'm skipping it because something about it sucks. There is no algorithm in the world that can fix most games being complete shit.
This especially applies to games that possibly don't actually suck but I'm tired of seeing rehashes of. 2D "souls-like", metroidvanias, etc., There's so god damn many of them and they all look bland as hell.

Calling them games is pretty generous of you mate.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Steam gives u some traffic on launch, but without huge PR ans/or a 30-50k wish lists, low chance to get anything out of it, and now with the latest algorithm, it basically killed indies, that are under 10k to 30k copies sold. So why give 30% then? Well cause fuck you!

It gives you access to the biggest gaming market on the planet (90 mil monthly users who can buy a game with a click). It's worth 30% and then some.

Like I said before, we sold more in the first month of Early Access than we sold in a year taking preorders with that same access to new content. AoD is still selling fairly well, 4 years after release, we'll probably sell a bit more this year than we sold in 2018 despite having no exposure in the last 3 years. So I can't speak for everyone but for us Steam is a fantastic platform. Anyone who thinks that Steam offers nothing of value should set up their own store and compare.

So these days instead of adding proper curation, they added an algorithm with the title "helping indies!" ay lmao ! that basically destroyed the sales, wishlists by 70-90% for almost all indie games without huge marketing under 10k-30k sales. Steam is great!

Year to date we added twice as many wishlists that were deleted and converted 31% into sales.

The future for a few indies that will survive, is either sell big on steam by luck/skill and PR, or build slowly and smartly a community on your site, and use these stupid stores as secondary or tertiary income.

How can one succeed *without* building a community and marketing the game?

 

[Thane Solus]

It gives you access to the biggest gaming market on the planet (90 mil monthly users who can buy a game with a click). It's worth 30% and then some.

It gives you access to that if you have a medium budget, and enough hype behind it. On smaller scale not so much. Remember you haven't released a game since 2016. And while i am sure the next one its gonna be a success (due to the former players, prestige from former games, and it looks pretty good in terms of graphics and mechanics), its would much harder to start in 2018 or 2019 - due to lack of curation, and now weird algorithms.

Like I said before, we sold more in the first month of Early Access than we sold in a year taking preorders with that same access to new content. AoD is still selling fairly well, 4 years after release, we'll probably sell a bit more this year than we sold in 2018 despite having no exposure in the last 3 years. So I can't speak for everyone but for us Steam is a fantastic platform. Anyone who thinks that Steam offers nothing of value should set up their own store and compare.

Check the sales and wish lists and sales from 12th September 2019 to this day, compared to lets say August 2019. For AOD, it should be probably be the same or more, for Rats there is a chance that you lost a lot of sales and wish lists during this period (compared to Aug), since its not a big/popular game.

Year to date we added twice as many wishlists that were deleted and converted 31% into sales.

Same in my case and friends, but once sep 12th hit, everything went to shit by 70%.

How can one succeed *without* building a community and marketing the game?.

I was talking about building up your store on your site and market it to there (which incredible hard) , not primarly market on steam, like Starsector does, and Rimworld did in the first years, and others.

 

[JarlFrank]

Sweeny does math:

30% is larger than 70%

 

[Steamboat Willie]

"While you bear all the costs."

Today I learned from Tim Sweeney that retailers and storefronts have no operating costs.

 

[ultimanecat]

"While you bear all the costs."

Today I learned from Tim Sweeney that retailers and storefronts have no operating costs.

Well they don’t when you can just spend the lunch money of 100 million 12-year-olds anytime it might operate at a loss.

 

[Vault Dweller]

On smaller scale not so much. Remember you haven't released a game since 2016...

Encased seems to be doing pretty well. Disco Elysium will definitely do well. Stygian was brought down by bugs, otherwise it would have done well too. I know you're talking about smaller games, possibly non-RPGs, but I don't know that market at all.

Check the sales and wish lists and sales from 12th September 2019 to this day, compared to lets say August 2019. For AOD, it should be probably be the same or more, for Rats there is a chance that you lost a lot of sales and wish lists during this period (compared to Aug), since its not a big/popular game.

I was talking about building up your store on your site and market it to there (which incredible hard)...

No, that's a dead end. I did my best to promote AoD and in the pre-Kickstarter days we had good media coverage but it amounted to next to nothing compared to Steam.

 

[Alienman]

Tim the savior of devs while paying millions to big publishers.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

If Epic takes a smaller cut then how come consumers don't pay less?
rly makes u think…

 

[Galdred]

Sweeny does math:

30% is larger than 70%

He talks about profit. Most video games turn a deficit, so yes, Steam makes more profit than the developr in this case, but given that games have a duplication cost of 0, it really depends on how many you sell, and how much it costed to get the game done.

 

[Dexter]

Sweeny does math:

30% is larger than 70%

To be fair, he didn't say that "30% is larger than 70%", he said "a company that had nothing to do with creating your game make more profit from it than you" and that is very much possible. For instance consider someone is making an Indie game and worked on it for several years, let's say it cost $50.000 to develop with the man hours put into it, art/sound assets and whatnot and it sells only 3600 copies at $25 for a total of $90.000. After making back the development costs, the developers are left with ~$13.000 in profit, while Valve made $27.000 profit from selling all those copies and taking their cut (30%) while they have very little overhead on listing and providing services for that specific game.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Sweeny does math:

30% is larger than 70%

To be fair, he didn't say that "30% is larger than 70%", he said "a company that had nothing to do with creating your game make more profit from it than you" and that is very much possible. For instance consider someone is making an Indie game and worked on it for several years, let's say it cost $50.000 to develop with the man hours put into it, art/sound assets and whatnot and it sells only 3600 copies at $25 for a total of $90.000. After making back the development costs, the developers are left with ~$13.000 in profit, while Valve made $27.000 profit from selling all those copies and taking their cut (30%) while they have very little overhead on listing and providing services for that specific game.

Alternatively, the same game sells 500 copies at $25 on the developer's own store. The developer earns $12,500-$1,250 payment processing fee. Thus as always it comes to the biggest question of them all: is 90-100% of a very small pie better than 70% of a much, much bigger pie?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Sweeny does math:

30% is larger than 70%

To be fair, he didn't say that "30% is larger than 70%", he said "a company that had nothing to do with creating your game make more profit from it than you" and that is very much possible. For instance consider someone is making an Indie game and worked on it for several years, let's say it cost $50.000 to develop with the man hours put into it, art/sound assets and whatnot and it sells only 3600 copies at $25 for a total of $90.000. After making back the development costs, the developers are left with ~$13.000 in profit, while Valve made $27.000 profit from selling all those copies and taking their cut (30%) while they have very little overhead on listing and providing services for that specific game.

Alternatively, the same game sells 500 copies at $25 on the developer's own store. The developer earns $12,500-$1,250 payment processing fee. Thus as always it comes to the biggest question of them all: is 90-100% of a very small pie better than 70% of a much, much bigger pie?

What % of the pie would I get if I enable the chinese supercorporation to destroy all competition and therefore no longer have a reason to buy games off of competing stores?

 

[Vault Dweller]

What % of the pie would I get if I enable the chinese supercorporation to destroy all competition and therefore no longer have a reason to buy games off of competing stores?

THQ Nordic says “absolute majority” of Metro Exodus copies were sold on console

 

[The Fish]

If Epic takes a smaller cut then how come consumers don't pay less?
rly makes u think…

I was under the impression that steam doesn't allow you to list games if they're being sold for cheaper elsewhere.

 

[ultimanecat]

If Epic takes a smaller cut then how come consumers don't pay less?
rly makes u think…

I was under the impression that steam doesn't allow you to list games if they're being sold for cheaper elsewhere.

Steam definitely doesn’t let you list games that are exclusive to the EGS, but somehow those games still seem to cost $60.

It’s ultimately a silly question, because at no point has anybody argued that the EGS is good for customers. Tim Sweeney, a handful of devs, and journalists have all argued it’s good for devs and publishers, but nobody’s going to tell you that you’re going to get anything positive out of the deal as a consumer. Remember:

 

[rusty_shackleford]

If Epic takes a smaller cut then how come consumers don't pay less?
rly makes u think…

I was under the impression that steam doesn't allow you to list games if they're being sold for cheaper elsewhere.

Steam definitely doesn’t let you list games that are exclusive to the EGS, but somehow those games still seem to cost $60.

It’s ultimately a silly question, because at no point has anybody argued that the EGS is good for customers. Tim Sweeney, a handful of devs, and journalists have all argued it’s good for devs and publishers, but nobody’s going to tell you that you’re going to get anything positive out of the deal as a consumer. Remember:

That's the kind of statement I'd expect from a person licking the boots of a publisher.
Which describes Schreier perfectly.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

It’s ultimately a silly question, because at no point has anybody argued that the EGS is good for customers.

You want to tell me it only happened on the codex!? Damn, at least our retards are really special.

 

[ultimanecat]

It’s ultimately a silly question, because at no point has anybody argued that the EGS is good for customers.

You want to tell me it only happened on the codex!? Damn, at least our retards are really special.

Well, you will get the occasional “By giving McDonald’s more money, you’re helping McDonald’s give you more of the garbage food you love in the future!” kind of shilling. Or the “I don’t care who had the opportunity to spit on my hamburger while it was made, I just like hamburgers and don’t care how they end up in my mouth!” kind. But those people are, indeed, either shills or retarded.

 

[mediocrepoet]

I've never been able to figure out why in gaming in particular, people like to whine about entitled gamers expecting x, y, z. Like at what point do any of these shitty companies deserve my money? Either give me something I want or eat a dick and go broke. That's business.

So in this case, Steam provides a large catalogue, friends lists, forums, etc., etc. EGS provides... Charity to devs? I still can't figure out why I'm supposed to care about that, especially when I wouldn't buy half the crap on there in the first place.

 

[J_C]

while Valve made $27.000 profit from selling all those copies and taking their cut (30%) while they have very little overhead on listing and providing services for that specific game.

Where do people get this notion of Valve spending almost nothing on Steam? Staff, servers, R&D is not free. I know it is hard for Epic to grasp that, since they literally only provide a server and a basic storefront, but I think there is much more work on Valve's part.

 

[deuxhero]

J_C
Calling EGS's storefront "basic" is overselling its features a tad don't you think?

 

[Clockwork Knight]

I've never been able to figure out why in gaming in particular, people like to whine about entitled gamers expecting x, y, z. Like at what point do any of these shitty companies deserve my money? Either give me something I want or eat a dick and go broke. That's business.

So in this case, Steam provides a large catalogue, friends lists, forums, etc., etc. EGS provides... Charity to devs? I still can't figure out why I'm supposed to care about that, especially when I wouldn't buy half the crap on there in the first place.

Gamers carry guilt for liking electronic toys so they compensate by shaming those who act in an immature manner (making demands, complaining about not getting exactly what you wanted or being selfish). The dissonance comes from how those are also normal consumer behavior, which leads to situations like Schreier's quote above. But that's just a theory