Epic Games Store - the console war comes to PC

[Bester]

And remember how you insisted BTC could never go below $6400 or something due to mining costs or something?

They released a new miner, mining cost went down.

 

[Metro]

And you are "Developer"

Humble bundle widget (at least since 5 years ago) - takes 10% and takes cares of hosting, payment, everything, but publicity, awareness (which indeed Steam gives somewhat, so you should talk about that, not payment processing and hosting)
Itchio, Fastspring, BT did these for years since like 2008 (beside itcho) - around 10% same as above

If you want to justify the 30% which is huge (since it takes you another 10% from profits, more or less if you are not from US) so thats a lot in the end, for a hit and miss Visibility it gives you (you wont sell much without your own marketing/pr, but there is a 1% chance to get lucky). A balanced way would be 20%, but hey...and 10-15% for 1 mil + income or so. This is when not talking about companies having between 10k to 100k rabbid fanboys, that drive a release of a game quite well or beeing on codex good side))

I hope you are better at design or programming ))

Are you seriously giving shit to VD who has some pretty successful games whereas you are a fucking mobile 'developer?'

 

[Mustawd]

And you are "Developer"

it’s “a developer” you ESL retard.

 

[abija]

Easy test for any dev thinking steam price is too high: launch on whatever store/combo you want then x months later on steam, compare profits.

I think that if the game doesn't have recognition already, has aaa marketing budget or is a failure, steam profits will trump whatever alternative.

 

[Jarpie]

That steamspy interview makes it sound like they are catering their store to fix developers' concerns with Steam. Seems like a bad idea. Devs will sell on whatever platform makes them money, so Epic needs to focus on what the customers want. I didn't read anything in that interview that makes me want to purchase games on their platform.

Yeah, pretty much every successful webstore I've seen has been consumer-driven, for example big difference between the likes of Amazon and let's say Barnes & Noble, is that Amazon has made buying and returning the faulty products etc easier and much less of a hassle to the consumers. If Epic Store wants to grow to be a big, they have to give a reason for the consumers to come to their store, exclusive games goes only so far, they'll buy those from their store, and rest of the games from Steam.

Another great example is finnish surplus/clothing store Varusteleka, they've made buying and returning the orders as easy as possible for the customers, their webstore has a lot more information about the clothing they sell etc than the other stores, so they've grown a lot in the last 5-6 years. Unless Epic Store gets that, they're doomed IMO, but I'm not holding my breath.

 

[RapineDel]

I don't really care for Steam but the only reason Epic aren't charging 30% right now is because they're trying to build the platform. If they were the monopoly tomorrow they'd be doing the exact same thing.

They can bang on about being in the developers corner but all I'm seeing so far is that they're trying to entice developers with the smaller cut and are probably buying off some of them to be "exclusive" on their store to build interest. That's a scummy practice and a good enough reason not to touch the store nor the indie games excluisve there either.

They're no different then something like Uber (at least here in Australia), they came here and gave drivers great benefits and a great share to build the business. Once it become more popular then taxis they put the prices right up, took a higher share and now they're the worst option for everyone involved (drivers/customers) bar none.

 

[Thane Solus]

in the end i think this one might work, not a lot, but it might give Steam a bit of competition. They probably wont care much, but maybe they will do better one or two things, for prestige. The followup announcement with 10M-25% was it? was actually hilarious, was no need for that.

 

[Thane Solus]

It sounds like not only they won't have forums because of "toxicity it brings", they won't even have reviews.

They have plans for that, from the Eurogamer interview, but...:

How will you handle user reviews / vote brigading?

Tim Sweeney: User reviews are still in development and the store will launch without this feature. When launched, it will be opt-in by developers. We're experimenting with other mechanisms to improve this further.

Thanks for that info. Opt-in reviews sounds like a really, really bad idea. Either a store has product reviews, or it doesn't. But to have reviews only for some products?
This whole Ipic store sounds like something thought out in a bubble.

Oh yeah, this is bad. The only things they need to do better, is what Valve is failing and failing, because they are too big and they dont fucking care.

Review bombing, assets games and hipster games, and how they manage refunds. If they do this well, maybe they take 5-10% max from Steam in one, two years, but they need players.

 

[Alfgart]

At least you can get a decent free game if you install this thing

https://www.pcgamer.com/subnautica-...nd-its-one-of-our-favorite-games-of-the-year/

Subnautica will be free on the Epic Store for a limited time
By Tyler Wilde 9 hours ago

Epic is launching its Steam competitor with a pretty good incentive to try it out.

After building a spectacularly large audience with Fornite, Epic is turning its game launcher into a Steam-like store—though one that offers developers a larger revenue share. The first games it's offering are now visible on the Epic Store .

First of all, Subnautica and Super Meat Boy, both great games, are going to be free for a limited time, starting later in December. Obviously, by creating an account, downloading Epic's launcher, and redeeming your free games, you become another person they can try to sell stuff to in the future. But also: free games. We recommend Subnautica big time, and it's normally $25, so it's an outstanding freebie if you enjoy singleplayer survival or alien squid encounters.

[.....]

Here's the Epic Store's full starting lineup:

• Ashen by A44 and Annapurna Interactive (now available)
• Darksiders III by Gunfire Games and THQ Nordic (available Dec 14)
• Hades by Supergiant Games (now available)
• Hello Neighbor: Hide and Seek by tinyBuild (now available)
• Genesis Alpha One by Radiation Blue and Team17 (coming soon)
• Journey by thatgamecompany and Annapurna Interactive (coming soon)
• Maneater by Tripwire Interactive (coming soon)
• Outer Wilds by Mobius Digital and Annapurna Interactive (coming soon)
• Rebel Galaxy Outlaw by Double Damage Games (coming soon)
• Satisfactory by Coffee Stain Studios (coming soon)
• Subnautica by Unknown Worlds (available for free from Dec 14 - Dec 27)
• Super Meat Boy by Team Meat (available for free from Dec 28 - Jan 10)
• World War Z by Saber Interactive (coming soon)

 

[Solid Snail]

I don't understand why people say the 30% cut is too much, because it isn't, it's in line with the cut taken by other stores like PSN and XBox.
Also Steam lets you generate how many keys you want, for free. And you can sell those keys via Humble (with a 15% cut), your site (so you get all the profit) etc. Steam offers features like could saving, space for screenshots, the Steam api, achievements, the possibility to use your controller (DS4, DS3 etc) in any game etc. If you only offer a smaller cut but you don't provide a service well, good luck. I'm not against competitors, having competitions is good and it always leads to try to improve your service, but pulling games which were on Steam, removing the Steam store page just to sell them on the Epic Store is just shitty. Put your game in every store and let people decide where they want to buy it. If the majority of them will get it on the Epic Store good for you, it means you'll get more money from the Epic Store, but if you force people to purchase a game on a specific store is not more a competition, you are forcing people to create an account and use another service just to purchase your game because it's not available eslewhere. See Ubisoft, they put their games on Uplay, where they get all the money and you can use Uplay point to get a discount, but also on Steam, where the discount is often not on par with the Uplay one, but ehy, this is called having options, and Ubisoft get the money from both parts.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Compared to what? Like I said earlier, payment processing alone will cost you 10% with file hosting (pay and download). To get more than tumbleweed rolling into your store you need marketing.

And you are a "Developer"

Humble bundle widget (at least since 5 years ago) - takes 10% and takes cares of hosting, payment, everything, but publicity, awareness (which indeed Steam gives somewhat, so you should talk about that, not payment processing and hosting)
Itchio, Fastspring, BT did these for years since like 2008 (beside itcho) - around 10% same as above

That's what I said: payment processing and hosting will cost you 10%. Marketing is extra. Steam charges 20% for built-in marketing, which gives you 85-90% of your sales.

If you want to justify the 30% which is huge (since it takes you another 10% from profits, more or less if you are not from US) so thats a lot in the end, for a hit and miss Visibility it gives you (you wont sell much without your own marketing/pr, but there is a 1% chance to get lucky). A balanced way would be 20%, but hey...and 10-15% for 1 mil + income or so. This is when not talking about companies having between 10k to 100k rabbid fanboys, that drive a release of a game quite well or beeing on codex good side))

I'm not trying to justify 30%. Given a choice I'd rather pay less. I'm merely pointing out that as long as Steam vastly outsells the competition, it will remain not just a digital store but the only way for indie developers to sell over 50k copies at a reasonable price.

 

[lophiaspis]

Noted games industry shill Rob Fahey weighs in on the horribly abusive, naive and outdated Web 2.0 practice of letting players discuss and rate games:

Spoiler

For quite a number of years, Valve has perceived one major challenge to the dominance of its Steam platform for digital distribution of PC games - namely the ambition of major publishers, who chafed against the firm's position of power from the outset.

Publishers had, somewhat naïvely, imagined the digital future as one in which retailers would be removed and they would assume command of both the significant profit share once taken by distributors and retailers, and perhaps more lucratively still of the customer relationship itself.

The replacement of a fragmented set of retailers large and small, all of whom could be leaned upon to some degree to a publisher's gain, with a single global retail platform big enough to simply ignore the demands -- or commercial tantrums -- of an individual publisher was a development which prompted more than a decade of wailing and gnashing of teeth. With that came occasional efforts to supplant Steam with publisher-owned services; the likes of EA's Origin opened the floodgates to publishers trying to find a way around Steam's iron grip on the market.

"After watching Steam grow so big and concentrate so much industry power in Valve's hands, they'll be wary before handing Epic enough support to do the same thing all over again"

That's the challenge to Steam which Valve has seen and acknowledged. It's responded to that challenge in ways that primarily appeal to publishers' financial sense - with one hand pointing out the sheer size of the Steam customer base which firms eschew by going to their own platforms, with the other trying to entice them back with sweeter deals on the platform's revenue share. Valve's recent price changes are well documented and discussed, and they're the most clear statement of its priorities imaginable; laser focused on enticing the industry's giants back onto the platform.

What makes Epic Games' new digital store interesting, to my mind, isn't the alternative it offers to those big publishers. It's got a slightly more enticing revenue share, but at present its user-base is, well, zero; granted, Fortnite is about as good a title to use as the foundation for a digital store as Half-Life 2 was all the way back when, but it'll still take Epic a very long time to match Valve's numbers.

Besides, publishers have been around this merry-go-around before; after watching Steam grow so big and concentrate so much industry power in Valve's hands, they'll be wary before handing Epic enough support to do the same thing all over again. (For the same reason, it doesn't matter that much how attractive Valve's revenue split becomes; the big publishers don't want the PC sector to be dominated by a monolithic retail player, no matter how generous its revenue sharing scheme looks.)

No, what makes Epic's store into such a major challenger to Steam is, rather, the fact that it's attacking from a different angle (well, multiple angles at once, as Christopher Dring pointed out earlier this week -- but this, I think, is the most important one). Sure, it'll put pressure on Valve's appeal to big publishers, but more importantly it aims to pull the rug out from underneath Steam's feet by directly appealing to the indie and mid-market developers who are the bread and butter of the PC games market.



That's reflected in the pricing structure, of course -- Epic's structure is clearly designed to be a better deal for small and mid-range developers -- but you can see it even more clearly in the commitments Epic is making about how its platform will deal with store pages, community infrastructure, news feed management and so on. The details aren't entirely nailed down, especially with regard to discovery and curation -- but Epic gives every impression of having listened carefully to years' worth of complaints and problems that Valve has, at best, been high-handed about.


The Epic Games Store launched last night with a telling focus on indies and smaller creators

To some extent that's a function of a cultural mismatch between Valve and the small or mid-sized developers to whom it ended up providing a vital platform; it's also to some degree a consequence of that blinkered focus on keeping the big boys happy, which has made Valve take the indies and mid-sized developers for granted. Those creators, after all, don't have the resources or audience required to strike out and build their own distribution platform; they need Steam's audience. They might complain a lot, and some of those complaints might be very legitimate, but where else would they go?

Well, now there is a 'where else' and Epic is making a very good fist of actually trying to build a service that will work for the indie and mid-size creators in a way that Steam has largely ceased to. To be entirely fair, this isn't just down to a lack of care and attention from Valve; many of the bad decisions made on Steam are the product of the era in which the service was created and it's monumentally harder to roll back those decisions now than it is to launch something new and make better decisions from the outset.

Steam is the product of an era in which Web 2.0 systems were new and exciting, so people thought that literally everything on the Internet could be improved by building community features into its very bones; those communities would in turn provide data which could be mined to make the service better, to make better recommendations and fine-tune the user experience. And if there was a problem within the community itself? Why, given the right algorithm, the data would have the answer to that too; that was the magic of Web 2.0.

"Valve could match Epic's revenue share tomorrow; but [not] the promise of a better place to do business, somewhere not open to the brigading, trolling and hate campaigns that have swept across Steam in recent years"

Put like that with the benefit of many years of hindsight, it all sounds impossibly naïve; how could we not have recognised how those community features would become vectors for abuse of many sorts, that bad-faith actors would figure out how to game the algorithms and twist them to their purposes, that building "community" into the most fundamental functioning of our online services would just make it nigh-on impossible to extricate those features when they turned bad?

This is the rock and hard place situation Valve has found itself in; Steam's community and the problems it has incubated isn't just a matter of forums and comment pages within Valve's control, but a network of infected tissue that spreads throughout the platform, its algorithms, its data, and out to other places beyond the firm's control where brigading, trolling and campaigns of abuse are coordinated. Weeding this out of the platform would be insanely hard work, not just technically but in terms of customer relations; it would make Valve itself into the target of all the bad actors who have spent the past few years targeting indie and mid-range developers on the platform, wrecking the livelihoods of many and the personal lives of quite a few.

Epic has the benefit of starting from a clean slate and being able to avoid those issues from day one. It's building a store in an era where the mistakes made by Web 2.0 approaches have become not only common knowledge within the industry but the topic of newspaper editorials and governmental investigations. More than that, though, it also actually seems to have been listening and to be prepared to take tough decisions which may sacrifice some commercial success in favour of a healthier, more positive ecosystem for creators. That's a big deal for many smaller developers, for whom the wrong word in the wrong place can turn Steam overnight into a vector for attacks on their livelihood and their person - a possibility of which many developers are all too aware, even if they haven't personally experienced it as yet.



Epic isn't making a big song and dance about this aspect of its attack on Steam's business, but it's telling that those decisions are being promoted up front alongside the indie-friendly revenue share. While I don't doubt that Valve's focus will remain on the big industry players for the time being, the reality is that Epic is triangulating on Steam's market in a way that goes far beyond finances.

Valve could, with some pain, match Epic's revenue share tomorrow; but the promise of a better place to do business, somewhere that's not open to the kind of brigading, trolling and hate campaigns that have swept across Steam in recent years... That could genuinely start to change the tide and entice away a whole strata of game creators that Valve has taken for granted for many years.

The indie and mid-range development scene are increasingly the industry's strongest bastion of diversity and demographic growth, which is vital to the future commercial health of gaming as a whole and the PC platform in particular; if Epic's platform becomes the go-to distribution option for those creators, Steam's operators may find themselves longing for the relative simplicity of negotiations with EA and Activision.

So this guy makes vague and unsupported allusions to harassment caused by gamers being allowed to discuss games, but for some reason he never mentions the actual, obvious, serious harassment that is endemic to the industry and a constant threat to everyone involved, namely SJW harassment. One might ask Fahey if he thinks that the CD Projekt community manager really should have been fired for using a Twitter hashtag that was judged to be insufficiently obsequious towards the transgender lobby (!), which consequently inspired an international harassment campaign resulting in the employee's termination, merely the latest in a string of such 'progressive' victories. By all accounts the answer would be something like: "Of course every game industry worker must live in constant terror of having their life and livelihood destroyed for crossing some arbitrary and ever shifting line of disrespect towards minorities - that's social justice, and you are clearly a Nazi that must be purged for even raising this issue. But gamers giving a game a bad review? Now that's harassment!"

God, what a disgusting shill.

 

[Alienman]

Remember gamers are worse than aids...

I have never seen an industry shit so much on their potential consumer base.

 

[Pika-Cthulhu]

Not only that, lack of easily found community noticeboard/discussion really fucks with people that have problems with a game and want a place to ask a question for help, otherwise they have to go to plebbit. Fiddling with the .ini file to unlock a less shit FOV, stuck on a quest and want a little bit of guidance to the solution without major spoilers, game keeps crashing on you? Off to plebbit with you, developers got no time to have a community where you can ask questions. Granted, ive not often ran into a problem, but I have found the steam community forums have had useful answers that a search engine has drawn me to, then I go to the main thread and marvel at how it managed to wade neck deep through that mass of shit and retard to find that useful gem, fix my problem then go about my business.

Of course there is the other side of the coin. Cant have bug reports if theres nowhere to report bugs!

 

[Dexter]

Noted games industry shill Rob Fahey weighs in on the horribly abusive, naive and outdated Web 2.0 practice of letting players discuss and rate games:

Spoiler

For quite a number of years, Valve has perceived one major challenge to the dominance of its Steam platform for digital distribution of PC games - namely the ambition of major publishers, who chafed against the firm's position of power from the outset.

Publishers had, somewhat naïvely, imagined the digital future as one in which retailers would be removed and they would assume command of both the significant profit share once taken by distributors and retailers, and perhaps more lucratively still of the customer relationship itself.

The replacement of a fragmented set of retailers large and small, all of whom could be leaned upon to some degree to a publisher's gain, with a single global retail platform big enough to simply ignore the demands -- or commercial tantrums -- of an individual publisher was a development which prompted more than a decade of wailing and gnashing of teeth. With that came occasional efforts to supplant Steam with publisher-owned services; the likes of EA's Origin opened the floodgates to publishers trying to find a way around Steam's iron grip on the market.

"After watching Steam grow so big and concentrate so much industry power in Valve's hands, they'll be wary before handing Epic enough support to do the same thing all over again"

That's the challenge to Steam which Valve has seen and acknowledged. It's responded to that challenge in ways that primarily appeal to publishers' financial sense - with one hand pointing out the sheer size of the Steam customer base which firms eschew by going to their own platforms, with the other trying to entice them back with sweeter deals on the platform's revenue share. Valve's recent price changes are well documented and discussed, and they're the most clear statement of its priorities imaginable; laser focused on enticing the industry's giants back onto the platform.

What makes Epic Games' new digital store interesting, to my mind, isn't the alternative it offers to those big publishers. It's got a slightly more enticing revenue share, but at present its user-base is, well, zero; granted, Fortnite is about as good a title to use as the foundation for a digital store as Half-Life 2 was all the way back when, but it'll still take Epic a very long time to match Valve's numbers.

Besides, publishers have been around this merry-go-around before; after watching Steam grow so big and concentrate so much industry power in Valve's hands, they'll be wary before handing Epic enough support to do the same thing all over again. (For the same reason, it doesn't matter that much how attractive Valve's revenue split becomes; the big publishers don't want the PC sector to be dominated by a monolithic retail player, no matter how generous its revenue sharing scheme looks.)

No, what makes Epic's store into such a major challenger to Steam is, rather, the fact that it's attacking from a different angle (well, multiple angles at once, as Christopher Dring pointed out earlier this week -- but this, I think, is the most important one). Sure, it'll put pressure on Valve's appeal to big publishers, but more importantly it aims to pull the rug out from underneath Steam's feet by directly appealing to the indie and mid-market developers who are the bread and butter of the PC games market.



That's reflected in the pricing structure, of course -- Epic's structure is clearly designed to be a better deal for small and mid-range developers -- but you can see it even more clearly in the commitments Epic is making about how its platform will deal with store pages, community infrastructure, news feed management and so on. The details aren't entirely nailed down, especially with regard to discovery and curation -- but Epic gives every impression of having listened carefully to years' worth of complaints and problems that Valve has, at best, been high-handed about.


The Epic Games Store launched last night with a telling focus on indies and smaller creators

To some extent that's a function of a cultural mismatch between Valve and the small or mid-sized developers to whom it ended up providing a vital platform; it's also to some degree a consequence of that blinkered focus on keeping the big boys happy, which has made Valve take the indies and mid-sized developers for granted. Those creators, after all, don't have the resources or audience required to strike out and build their own distribution platform; they need Steam's audience. They might complain a lot, and some of those complaints might be very legitimate, but where else would they go?

Well, now there is a 'where else' and Epic is making a very good fist of actually trying to build a service that will work for the indie and mid-size creators in a way that Steam has largely ceased to. To be entirely fair, this isn't just down to a lack of care and attention from Valve; many of the bad decisions made on Steam are the product of the era in which the service was created and it's monumentally harder to roll back those decisions now than it is to launch something new and make better decisions from the outset.

Steam is the product of an era in which Web 2.0 systems were new and exciting, so people thought that literally everything on the Internet could be improved by building community features into its very bones; those communities would in turn provide data which could be mined to make the service better, to make better recommendations and fine-tune the user experience. And if there was a problem within the community itself? Why, given the right algorithm, the data would have the answer to that too; that was the magic of Web 2.0.

"Valve could match Epic's revenue share tomorrow; but [not] the promise of a better place to do business, somewhere not open to the brigading, trolling and hate campaigns that have swept across Steam in recent years"

Put like that with the benefit of many years of hindsight, it all sounds impossibly naïve; how could we not have recognised how those community features would become vectors for abuse of many sorts, that bad-faith actors would figure out how to game the algorithms and twist them to their purposes, that building "community" into the most fundamental functioning of our online services would just make it nigh-on impossible to extricate those features when they turned bad?

This is the rock and hard place situation Valve has found itself in; Steam's community and the problems it has incubated isn't just a matter of forums and comment pages within Valve's control, but a network of infected tissue that spreads throughout the platform, its algorithms, its data, and out to other places beyond the firm's control where brigading, trolling and campaigns of abuse are coordinated. Weeding this out of the platform would be insanely hard work, not just technically but in terms of customer relations; it would make Valve itself into the target of all the bad actors who have spent the past few years targeting indie and mid-range developers on the platform, wrecking the livelihoods of many and the personal lives of quite a few.

Epic has the benefit of starting from a clean slate and being able to avoid those issues from day one. It's building a store in an era where the mistakes made by Web 2.0 approaches have become not only common knowledge within the industry but the topic of newspaper editorials and governmental investigations. More than that, though, it also actually seems to have been listening and to be prepared to take tough decisions which may sacrifice some commercial success in favour of a healthier, more positive ecosystem for creators. That's a big deal for many smaller developers, for whom the wrong word in the wrong place can turn Steam overnight into a vector for attacks on their livelihood and their person - a possibility of which many developers are all too aware, even if they haven't personally experienced it as yet.



Epic isn't making a big song and dance about this aspect of its attack on Steam's business, but it's telling that those decisions are being promoted up front alongside the indie-friendly revenue share. While I don't doubt that Valve's focus will remain on the big industry players for the time being, the reality is that Epic is triangulating on Steam's market in a way that goes far beyond finances.

Valve could, with some pain, match Epic's revenue share tomorrow; but the promise of a better place to do business, somewhere that's not open to the kind of brigading, trolling and hate campaigns that have swept across Steam in recent years... That could genuinely start to change the tide and entice away a whole strata of game creators that Valve has taken for granted for many years.

The indie and mid-range development scene are increasingly the industry's strongest bastion of diversity and demographic growth, which is vital to the future commercial health of gaming as a whole and the PC platform in particular; if Epic's platform becomes the go-to distribution option for those creators, Steam's operators may find themselves longing for the relative simplicity of negotiations with EA and Activision.

So this guy makes vague and unsupported allusions to harassment caused by gamers being allowed to discuss games, but for some reason he never mentions the actual, obvious, serious harassment that is endemic to the industry and a constant threat to everyone involved, namely SJW harassment. One might ask Fahey if he thinks that the CD Projekt community manager really should have been fired for using a Twitter hashtag that was judged to be insufficiently obsequious towards the transgender lobby (!), which consequently inspired an international harassment campaign resulting in the employee's termination, merely the latest in a string of such 'progressive' victories. By all accounts the answer would be something like: "Of course every game industry worker must live in constant terror of having their life and livelihood destroyed for crossing some arbitrary and ever shifting line of disrespect towards minorities - that's social justice, and you are clearly a Nazi that must be purged for even raising this issue. But gamers giving a game a bad review? Now that's harassment!"

God, what a disgusting shill.

This isn't a new phenomenon, I wrote about this back in 2014 in fact (see the long Spoiler): https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...ing-dumping-ground.90469/page-66#post-3450901

The dream "win scenario" of the "games journalist" class is eliminating consumer feedback entirely (who in this piece they refer to as "a network of infected tissue that spreads throughout the platform, its algorithms, its data, and out to other places beyond the firm's control") and them being the only ones that can provide any sort of feedback or opinion in their "professional reviews" and being the only ones that can voice any sort of "concerns" or "suggestions for improvement", establishing themselves as the one and only authorative source on "gaming taste" and what "gamers" supposedly like or dislike or want more/less of.

Obviously this is diametrically opposed to the interest of your typical consumer, who wants to know if a game or other piece of entertainment or other product he pays money for is actually good or if there's anything wrong with it. If it's a buggy, crashing, DRM-infested or otherwise broken piece of shit only being propped up and elevated for any supposed political messages, potential "Hype" or the standing of the "developers".

They started this process long ago by trying to eliminate or heavily moderate comment sections, whining about "MetaCritic review bombings" and then directly whining about Steam having or introducing things like tags, reviews and similar and being uncharacteristically consumer-friendly or orientated. Afaik they even whined when they were obligated by the EU to introduce a refund policy that it "would hurt Indie games that are under 2 hours long", see for instance Polygon: http://archive.is/uH6oN or Kotaku: http://archive.is/9cnZZ

If you think of anything they write as directly antithetical to your interests as a consumer and through their own "ideological lens" where they "want to win the battle", similar to Trump's rhetoric of how they are "the enemy of the people" you will get why they write "pieces" like this. Any kind of change or move that takes power or ability to voice dissent from the consumers and balances it towards them is a win for them, if anything goes the other way around (no matter if it's something as obvious as a refund policy or as little as a tag system) they view it as a loss and potential catastrophy. And any platform that openly follows their dictates should be viewed with similar suspicion.

I think in the end a consumer-oriented platform that provides opportunity for things like reviews, feedback and discussion, an ability to write things like guides, upload Modifications, Videos, Artwork/Fanart or Screenshots and similar will likely win out and can only be countered with power-plays like timed or perpetual exclusivity deals and other similar aggressive business practices aimed at sniping business partners.

 

[Alienman]

EPIC store is basically the safe space store for snowflake devs. I hope it leads to an self-purge from Steam and GOG.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

EPIC store is basically the safe space store for snowflake devs. I hope it leads to an self-purge from Steam and GOG.

Hey, there's a potential positive outcome. Didn't even think of that, god bless you ayy lmao.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Noted games industry shill Rob Fahey weighs in on the horribly abusive, naive and outdated Web 2.0 practice of letting players discuss and rate games:

Spoiler

For quite a number of years, Valve has perceived one major challenge to the dominance of its Steam platform for digital distribution of PC games - namely the ambition of major publishers, who chafed against the firm's position of power from the outset.

Publishers had, somewhat naïvely, imagined the digital future as one in which retailers would be removed and they would assume command of both the significant profit share once taken by distributors and retailers, and perhaps more lucratively still of the customer relationship itself.

The replacement of a fragmented set of retailers large and small, all of whom could be leaned upon to some degree to a publisher's gain, with a single global retail platform big enough to simply ignore the demands -- or commercial tantrums -- of an individual publisher was a development which prompted more than a decade of wailing and gnashing of teeth. With that came occasional efforts to supplant Steam with publisher-owned services; the likes of EA's Origin opened the floodgates to publishers trying to find a way around Steam's iron grip on the market.

"After watching Steam grow so big and concentrate so much industry power in Valve's hands, they'll be wary before handing Epic enough support to do the same thing all over again"

That's the challenge to Steam which Valve has seen and acknowledged. It's responded to that challenge in ways that primarily appeal to publishers' financial sense - with one hand pointing out the sheer size of the Steam customer base which firms eschew by going to their own platforms, with the other trying to entice them back with sweeter deals on the platform's revenue share. Valve's recent price changes are well documented and discussed, and they're the most clear statement of its priorities imaginable; laser focused on enticing the industry's giants back onto the platform.

What makes Epic Games' new digital store interesting, to my mind, isn't the alternative it offers to those big publishers. It's got a slightly more enticing revenue share, but at present its user-base is, well, zero; granted, Fortnite is about as good a title to use as the foundation for a digital store as Half-Life 2 was all the way back when, but it'll still take Epic a very long time to match Valve's numbers.

Besides, publishers have been around this merry-go-around before; after watching Steam grow so big and concentrate so much industry power in Valve's hands, they'll be wary before handing Epic enough support to do the same thing all over again. (For the same reason, it doesn't matter that much how attractive Valve's revenue split becomes; the big publishers don't want the PC sector to be dominated by a monolithic retail player, no matter how generous its revenue sharing scheme looks.)

No, what makes Epic's store into such a major challenger to Steam is, rather, the fact that it's attacking from a different angle (well, multiple angles at once, as Christopher Dring pointed out earlier this week -- but this, I think, is the most important one). Sure, it'll put pressure on Valve's appeal to big publishers, but more importantly it aims to pull the rug out from underneath Steam's feet by directly appealing to the indie and mid-market developers who are the bread and butter of the PC games market.



That's reflected in the pricing structure, of course -- Epic's structure is clearly designed to be a better deal for small and mid-range developers -- but you can see it even more clearly in the commitments Epic is making about how its platform will deal with store pages, community infrastructure, news feed management and so on. The details aren't entirely nailed down, especially with regard to discovery and curation -- but Epic gives every impression of having listened carefully to years' worth of complaints and problems that Valve has, at best, been high-handed about.


The Epic Games Store launched last night with a telling focus on indies and smaller creators

To some extent that's a function of a cultural mismatch between Valve and the small or mid-sized developers to whom it ended up providing a vital platform; it's also to some degree a consequence of that blinkered focus on keeping the big boys happy, which has made Valve take the indies and mid-sized developers for granted. Those creators, after all, don't have the resources or audience required to strike out and build their own distribution platform; they need Steam's audience. They might complain a lot, and some of those complaints might be very legitimate, but where else would they go?

Well, now there is a 'where else' and Epic is making a very good fist of actually trying to build a service that will work for the indie and mid-size creators in a way that Steam has largely ceased to. To be entirely fair, this isn't just down to a lack of care and attention from Valve; many of the bad decisions made on Steam are the product of the era in which the service was created and it's monumentally harder to roll back those decisions now than it is to launch something new and make better decisions from the outset.

Steam is the product of an era in which Web 2.0 systems were new and exciting, so people thought that literally everything on the Internet could be improved by building community features into its very bones; those communities would in turn provide data which could be mined to make the service better, to make better recommendations and fine-tune the user experience. And if there was a problem within the community itself? Why, given the right algorithm, the data would have the answer to that too; that was the magic of Web 2.0.

"Valve could match Epic's revenue share tomorrow; but [not] the promise of a better place to do business, somewhere not open to the brigading, trolling and hate campaigns that have swept across Steam in recent years"

Put like that with the benefit of many years of hindsight, it all sounds impossibly naïve; how could we not have recognised how those community features would become vectors for abuse of many sorts, that bad-faith actors would figure out how to game the algorithms and twist them to their purposes, that building "community" into the most fundamental functioning of our online services would just make it nigh-on impossible to extricate those features when they turned bad?

This is the rock and hard place situation Valve has found itself in; Steam's community and the problems it has incubated isn't just a matter of forums and comment pages within Valve's control, but a network of infected tissue that spreads throughout the platform, its algorithms, its data, and out to other places beyond the firm's control where brigading, trolling and campaigns of abuse are coordinated. Weeding this out of the platform would be insanely hard work, not just technically but in terms of customer relations; it would make Valve itself into the target of all the bad actors who have spent the past few years targeting indie and mid-range developers on the platform, wrecking the livelihoods of many and the personal lives of quite a few.

Epic has the benefit of starting from a clean slate and being able to avoid those issues from day one. It's building a store in an era where the mistakes made by Web 2.0 approaches have become not only common knowledge within the industry but the topic of newspaper editorials and governmental investigations. More than that, though, it also actually seems to have been listening and to be prepared to take tough decisions which may sacrifice some commercial success in favour of a healthier, more positive ecosystem for creators. That's a big deal for many smaller developers, for whom the wrong word in the wrong place can turn Steam overnight into a vector for attacks on their livelihood and their person - a possibility of which many developers are all too aware, even if they haven't personally experienced it as yet.



Epic isn't making a big song and dance about this aspect of its attack on Steam's business, but it's telling that those decisions are being promoted up front alongside the indie-friendly revenue share. While I don't doubt that Valve's focus will remain on the big industry players for the time being, the reality is that Epic is triangulating on Steam's market in a way that goes far beyond finances.

Valve could, with some pain, match Epic's revenue share tomorrow; but the promise of a better place to do business, somewhere that's not open to the kind of brigading, trolling and hate campaigns that have swept across Steam in recent years... That could genuinely start to change the tide and entice away a whole strata of game creators that Valve has taken for granted for many years.

The indie and mid-range development scene are increasingly the industry's strongest bastion of diversity and demographic growth, which is vital to the future commercial health of gaming as a whole and the PC platform in particular; if Epic's platform becomes the go-to distribution option for those creators, Steam's operators may find themselves longing for the relative simplicity of negotiations with EA and Activision.

So this guy makes vague and unsupported allusions to harassment caused by gamers being allowed to discuss games, but for some reason he never mentions the actual, obvious, serious harassment that is endemic to the industry and a constant threat to everyone involved, namely SJW harassment. One might ask Fahey if he thinks that the CD Projekt community manager really should have been fired for using a Twitter hashtag that was judged to be insufficiently obsequious towards the transgender lobby (!), which consequently inspired an international harassment campaign resulting in the employee's termination, merely the latest in a string of such 'progressive' victories. By all accounts the answer would be something like: "Of course every game industry worker must live in constant terror of having their life and livelihood destroyed for crossing some arbitrary and ever shifting line of disrespect towards minorities - that's social justice, and you are clearly a Nazi that must be purged for even raising this issue. But gamers giving a game a bad review? Now that's harassment!"

God, what a disgusting shill.

Customers being able to discuss a product is not "web 2.0"


no surprise that the chinese malware store won't allow its subjects to discuss the products they're buying

 

[Kutulu]

Wtf? People welcoming anti-consumer shit so that developer's earn a bigger share on shitty platforms, are you peeps retarded.


If bethesda was a mercedes dealer he would have gotten shot in the head by a pissed off customer ~10 years ago.

 

[Pika-Cthulhu]

Noted games industry shill Rob Fahey weighs in on the horribly abusive, naive and outdated Web 2.0 practice of letting players discuss and rate games:

Spoiler

For quite a number of years, Valve has perceived one major challenge to the dominance of its Steam platform for digital distribution of PC games - namely the ambition of major publishers, who chafed against the firm's position of power from the outset.

Publishers had, somewhat naïvely, imagined the digital future as one in which retailers would be removed and they would assume command of both the significant profit share once taken by distributors and retailers, and perhaps more lucratively still of the customer relationship itself.

The replacement of a fragmented set of retailers large and small, all of whom could be leaned upon to some degree to a publisher's gain, with a single global retail platform big enough to simply ignore the demands -- or commercial tantrums -- of an individual publisher was a development which prompted more than a decade of wailing and gnashing of teeth. With that came occasional efforts to supplant Steam with publisher-owned services; the likes of EA's Origin opened the floodgates to publishers trying to find a way around Steam's iron grip on the market.

"After watching Steam grow so big and concentrate so much industry power in Valve's hands, they'll be wary before handing Epic enough support to do the same thing all over again"

That's the challenge to Steam which Valve has seen and acknowledged. It's responded to that challenge in ways that primarily appeal to publishers' financial sense - with one hand pointing out the sheer size of the Steam customer base which firms eschew by going to their own platforms, with the other trying to entice them back with sweeter deals on the platform's revenue share. Valve's recent price changes are well documented and discussed, and they're the most clear statement of its priorities imaginable; laser focused on enticing the industry's giants back onto the platform.

What makes Epic Games' new digital store interesting, to my mind, isn't the alternative it offers to those big publishers. It's got a slightly more enticing revenue share, but at present its user-base is, well, zero; granted, Fortnite is about as good a title to use as the foundation for a digital store as Half-Life 2 was all the way back when, but it'll still take Epic a very long time to match Valve's numbers.

Besides, publishers have been around this merry-go-around before; after watching Steam grow so big and concentrate so much industry power in Valve's hands, they'll be wary before handing Epic enough support to do the same thing all over again. (For the same reason, it doesn't matter that much how attractive Valve's revenue split becomes; the big publishers don't want the PC sector to be dominated by a monolithic retail player, no matter how generous its revenue sharing scheme looks.)

No, what makes Epic's store into such a major challenger to Steam is, rather, the fact that it's attacking from a different angle (well, multiple angles at once, as Christopher Dring pointed out earlier this week -- but this, I think, is the most important one). Sure, it'll put pressure on Valve's appeal to big publishers, but more importantly it aims to pull the rug out from underneath Steam's feet by directly appealing to the indie and mid-market developers who are the bread and butter of the PC games market.



That's reflected in the pricing structure, of course -- Epic's structure is clearly designed to be a better deal for small and mid-range developers -- but you can see it even more clearly in the commitments Epic is making about how its platform will deal with store pages, community infrastructure, news feed management and so on. The details aren't entirely nailed down, especially with regard to discovery and curation -- but Epic gives every impression of having listened carefully to years' worth of complaints and problems that Valve has, at best, been high-handed about.


The Epic Games Store launched last night with a telling focus on indies and smaller creators

To some extent that's a function of a cultural mismatch between Valve and the small or mid-sized developers to whom it ended up providing a vital platform; it's also to some degree a consequence of that blinkered focus on keeping the big boys happy, which has made Valve take the indies and mid-sized developers for granted. Those creators, after all, don't have the resources or audience required to strike out and build their own distribution platform; they need Steam's audience. They might complain a lot, and some of those complaints might be very legitimate, but where else would they go?

Well, now there is a 'where else' and Epic is making a very good fist of actually trying to build a service that will work for the indie and mid-size creators in a way that Steam has largely ceased to. To be entirely fair, this isn't just down to a lack of care and attention from Valve; many of the bad decisions made on Steam are the product of the era in which the service was created and it's monumentally harder to roll back those decisions now than it is to launch something new and make better decisions from the outset.

Steam is the product of an era in which Web 2.0 systems were new and exciting, so people thought that literally everything on the Internet could be improved by building community features into its very bones; those communities would in turn provide data which could be mined to make the service better, to make better recommendations and fine-tune the user experience. And if there was a problem within the community itself? Why, given the right algorithm, the data would have the answer to that too; that was the magic of Web 2.0.

"Valve could match Epic's revenue share tomorrow; but [not] the promise of a better place to do business, somewhere not open to the brigading, trolling and hate campaigns that have swept across Steam in recent years"

Put like that with the benefit of many years of hindsight, it all sounds impossibly naïve; how could we not have recognised how those community features would become vectors for abuse of many sorts, that bad-faith actors would figure out how to game the algorithms and twist them to their purposes, that building "community" into the most fundamental functioning of our online services would just make it nigh-on impossible to extricate those features when they turned bad?

This is the rock and hard place situation Valve has found itself in; Steam's community and the problems it has incubated isn't just a matter of forums and comment pages within Valve's control, but a network of infected tissue that spreads throughout the platform, its algorithms, its data, and out to other places beyond the firm's control where brigading, trolling and campaigns of abuse are coordinated. Weeding this out of the platform would be insanely hard work, not just technically but in terms of customer relations; it would make Valve itself into the target of all the bad actors who have spent the past few years targeting indie and mid-range developers on the platform, wrecking the livelihoods of many and the personal lives of quite a few.

Epic has the benefit of starting from a clean slate and being able to avoid those issues from day one. It's building a store in an era where the mistakes made by Web 2.0 approaches have become not only common knowledge within the industry but the topic of newspaper editorials and governmental investigations. More than that, though, it also actually seems to have been listening and to be prepared to take tough decisions which may sacrifice some commercial success in favour of a healthier, more positive ecosystem for creators. That's a big deal for many smaller developers, for whom the wrong word in the wrong place can turn Steam overnight into a vector for attacks on their livelihood and their person - a possibility of which many developers are all too aware, even if they haven't personally experienced it as yet.



Epic isn't making a big song and dance about this aspect of its attack on Steam's business, but it's telling that those decisions are being promoted up front alongside the indie-friendly revenue share. While I don't doubt that Valve's focus will remain on the big industry players for the time being, the reality is that Epic is triangulating on Steam's market in a way that goes far beyond finances.

Valve could, with some pain, match Epic's revenue share tomorrow; but the promise of a better place to do business, somewhere that's not open to the kind of brigading, trolling and hate campaigns that have swept across Steam in recent years... That could genuinely start to change the tide and entice away a whole strata of game creators that Valve has taken for granted for many years.

The indie and mid-range development scene are increasingly the industry's strongest bastion of diversity and demographic growth, which is vital to the future commercial health of gaming as a whole and the PC platform in particular; if Epic's platform becomes the go-to distribution option for those creators, Steam's operators may find themselves longing for the relative simplicity of negotiations with EA and Activision.

So this guy makes vague and unsupported allusions to harassment caused by gamers being allowed to discuss games, but for some reason he never mentions the actual, obvious, serious harassment that is endemic to the industry and a constant threat to everyone involved, namely SJW harassment. One might ask Fahey if he thinks that the CD Projekt community manager really should have been fired for using a Twitter hashtag that was judged to be insufficiently obsequious towards the transgender lobby (!), which consequently inspired an international harassment campaign resulting in the employee's termination, merely the latest in a string of such 'progressive' victories. By all accounts the answer would be something like: "Of course every game industry worker must live in constant terror of having their life and livelihood destroyed for crossing some arbitrary and ever shifting line of disrespect towards minorities - that's social justice, and you are clearly a Nazi that must be purged for even raising this issue. But gamers giving a game a bad review? Now that's harassment!"

God, what a disgusting shill.

Customers being able to discuss a product is not "web 2.0"


no surprise that the chinese malware store won't allow its subjects to discuss the products they're buying

Of course they could roll out that lovely chinese social credit system with some new forums. Get enough downvotes and have access to your games restricted. Pretty sure the Social Justice Propagandists would love that kind of Orwellian horseshit.

 

[Thane Solus]

Mustawd, Metro and Co. get your VD cock out of your mouths, VD can talk for himself and he did noticed i was trolling with 'and you are "a" developer', you guys didn't. Retardo snowflakes, you guys havent changed since 2012 or earlier, the same retards, even when you self eject and come back to show us you haven't learned anything. REEEE!

Well i hoped they will bring some competition, but its no surprise, since the blueprints for Unreal (ay lmao), it seems they will fail miserably from the start, and they could've take a small portion from Steam, but SJW and retards, will forever be incompetents. I do love how all industry shills have no idea how Steam works, or Gog, or anything, spammed with OMG Epic Games Shop! Maybe in time they will change but i doubt it, typical triple A industry practice, shoot urself in the foot, on the product launch day/week.

- reviews are good when there is a good system in place for time played - not 10 minutes for a simulation, rpg or god knows what; for identity, so it wont be spammed by same dude, or group of dudes, review bombing, or positive buyout which large companies do it quite often, etc
- refunds are also great but with some limitations, for example i know for a fact, that after Steam introduced reefunds, triple A companies, started to show the best things in the first 2 hours, but on slow treadmill, to get that juicy shaq meat or shekels, after that it was bugged, or with poor content, so it would be nice to be based on genre, or type of game, but would be mean for Steam to actually work, hahaha
- curation is king, but at the same time bad curation wont get good games on some stores, so its a double edged sword.
- no asset flips from Unity, Unreal, Rpg maker, etc.

Epic only had to all the above better than Steam, give a high publicity to new games on first page, with some moderation, make sure if there is app to make it work flawless, and bang! Competition! But no, reviews are bad, reefunds are w/e, have a free game gays!

Sad, but not unexpected.

 

[Metro]

What a load of shit. Like someone said above: Epic Store is the safe space for 'special' devs. Sadly, now Travis Baldree is hopping on the train with a one-year excloooooooooooooosive for Rebel Galaxy Outlaw. I love the phony reasons he proffers (other than the bag of cash he got for the deal) like 'IT HELPZ STREAMERS AND CONTENT CREATORS!' Fuck streamers. They are nothing more but e-panhandlers who couldn't get a real job. Epic Store has yet to prove it's better than Steam on refunds and in many other areas.

Never mind the fact that Epic is owned, in part, by Tencent.

And I never 'self-ejected' I merely stopped posting for a bit never making any silly goodbye posts because I just got busy in real life... I mean... I know it's hard for a guy who makes phone games for a living to understand that but it happens.

 

[Volrath]

What a load of shit. Like someone said above: Epic Store is the safe space for 'special' devs. Sadly, now Travis Baldree is hopping on the train with a one-year excloooooooooooooosive for Rebel Galaxy Outlaw. I love the phony reasons he proffers (other than the bag of cash he got for the deal) like 'IT HELPZ STREAMERS AND CONTENT CREATORS!' Fuck streamers. They are nothing more but e-panhandlers who couldn't get a real job. Epic Store has yet to prove it's better than Steam on refunds and in many other areas.

Never mind the fact that Epic is owned, in part, by Tencent.

And I never 'self-ejected' I merely stopped posting for a bit never making any silly goodbye posts because I just got busy in real life... I mean... I know it's hard for a guy who makes phone games for a living to understand that but it happens.

What in the actual fuck???

 

[Metro]

Travis' flimsy rationale:

https://rebel-galaxy.com/rebel-galaxy-outlaw-launching-on-epic-games-store-qa/

 

[Alienman]

That FAQ drips of passive aggressiveness too.