Epic Games Store - the console war comes to PC

[karoliner]

That's the game with the funny dancing bunny.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

The limited time stipulation is for the "GenshinEpic" in-game code that gives some items. The "GenshinGalaxy" code is for samsung galaxy store, not gog galaxy, btw.

https://www.hoyolab.com/genshin/article/419886

Don't know if you need to be launching the game through epic store to redeem it, but probably not.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

That's the game with the funny dancing bunny.

Check the date.

 

[LESS T_T]

I find it interesting that the lack of Epic exclusive from this year's E3 so far. Probably because Xbox gives devs/pubs better deal with Game Pass without forcing exclusivity. Probably big companies now see that minimum guarantee is not worth for lost visibility by not releasing on Steam. There's reason why Epic is investing in their own publishing label I guess.

To be fair, it's also worth pointing out that there are increasing number of games do release both on Steam and EGS at the same time. (Still, there are more games that do Steam only release than do both I think.)

 

[Tacgnol]

I find it interesting that the lack of Epic exclusive from this year's E3 so far. Probably because Xbox gives devs/pubs better deal with Game Pass without forcing exclusivity. Probably big companies now see that minimum guarantee is not worth for lost visibility by not releasing on Steam. There's reason why Epic is investing in their own publishing label I guess.

To be fair, it's also worth pointing out that there are increasing number of games do release both on Steam and EGS at the same time. (Still, there are more games that do Steam only release than do both I think.)

Also, if the leaked epic trial docs were to be believed, M$ has a good working relationship with Steam and Gabe.

Makes sense considering Gabe is ex M$ himself.

 

[fantadomat]

Well it makes sense,epic is just shit service and their business model is also retarded. There is a good reason why they were going to go bankrupt just before they lucked out and fortnight got popular. That is why the petty faggot in charge wants to destroy steam,he is really butthurt,and that is why their business will fail in the end.

 

[Belegarsson]

They revealed how much they paid for a few games' exclusivity and freebies right? I think that made a lot of devs reconsider the number they want, since Epic clearly overpaid for a few (Borderlands 3) and lowballed others. Going EGS exclusivity is a publicity stunt that creates more hassle than benefit, while getting on Game Pass not only net you big bucks from M$ but also exposure thus increased copy sales. I feel like the only games that go exclusive are the ones that publisher doesn't have much faith in PC audience (like Sonic Colors).

 

[Ravielsk]

The thing that fascinates me about this whole affair is that the more I learn about it the more I grow convinced that Epic just walked into all of this expecting to just buy up the whole market and finito. Even the whole lawsuit with Apple reeks of "oh, shit" desperation like they were expecting to dominate the PC market by 2019 and when that didn't happen they were sort of left with no plan forward. Its just bizarre, they are willing to burn millions for a temporary exclusivity but are unable to even offer a better price than steam, despite bragging about taking a lower cut. The fact that their store did not even have a shopping cart, for... what over a year(?), is just a cherry on top.

Initially I assumed that they hatched some sort of machiavellian scheme to joust steam from the market but as more comes out it just seems like they had a meeting one Tuesday and just randomly decided to take on steam and now they are too far deep into it to just stop.

 

[ultimanecat]

Epic basically won the lottery with Fortnite and got to hold the jar that every kid will be putting their lunch money into for a few years. Now if I won the lottery I’d probably fuck off and never work again, but smart people and companies use that luck and try to turn it into evergreen income.

In principle, putting that wealth toward a new game store could have made sense for Epic, but Epic took their fuck you money and actually decided to say fuck you to many financially and personally invested people with it. The main problem is that the market is saturated and people aren’t going to change where they buy games or apps on a whim. I imagine Epic studied this and realized that most customers will not be leaving Steam without a compelling reason, so they attacked from a different angle: trying to get devs and publishers to abandon Steam. But as I’ve mentioned before, diddling the numbers of your cut vs. Steam’s or Apple’s is still just leaving you with a math problem that any competent college student could figure out, and no number favors Epic when Steam and Apple are already so deeply established.

The minor good news for Epic was that many indie devs and nearly all games journalists indeed are significantly more retarded than a competent college student, so they just saw “12%” and breathlessly told us how Epic was ending capitalism in the game industry and took the bait. The bad news was that the smart money was still on just releasing your shit on any store that will take it, and especially Steam. So Epic’s next option was to simply pay people to avoid Steam - firstly giving customers $10 coupons but then moving to the nuclear option and literally paying developers and publishers to stay away. This second one was the other part of that math problem which they could sort of obliquely control, ie how many potential customers would buy a game no matter where it was sold if they had limited options. This changes from game to game but the shorthand napkin math says it needs to be “nearly fucking all of them” for it to start making sense to avoid Steam, and that’s why Epic had to start cutting checks.

(While very likely not true, I’d like to think that the amount of money Epic paid a dev is directly proportional to how many people were around that could solve a linear programming or optimization problem, because it confirms that indie devs are dumb-dumbs and most were lucky to get six digits, with the exception of the Subnautica people who somehow made off with $1.4 million)

But that generated backlash, and when coupled with EGS’s seeming indifference toward customer-focused features, it turned sentiment around EGS from ambivalence to actively malignant. So Epic is now sitting on tens of billions of dollars of Fortnite revenue and a store people fucking hate. What to do? Well, if you’re that loaded it couldn’t hurt to sue your competitors and try to have the government get them out of the way by stating that even though you’ll be doing the exact same thing as them, your diddled numbers are inherently more fair and less illegal than theirs.

This is all to say, Epic are acting like assholes because Fortnite lets them, and short of burning down the online marketplace industry they’ll never make that Fortnite money again and have to go back to making rocks look really good on the PlayStation forever.

 

[Ravielsk]

Spoiler

In principle, putting that wealth toward a new game store could have made sense for Epic, but Epic took their fuck you money and actually decided to say fuck you to many financially and personally invested people with it. The main problem is that the market is saturated and people aren’t going to change where they buy games or apps on a whim. I imagine Epic studied this and realized that most customers will not be leaving Steam without a compelling reason, so they attacked from a different angle: trying to get devs and publishers to abandon Steam. But as I’ve mentioned before, diddling the numbers of your cut vs. Steam’s or Apple’s is still just leaving you with a math problem that any competent college student could figure out, and no number favors Epic when Steam and Apple are already so deeply established.

The minor good news for Epic was that many indie devs and nearly all games journalists indeed are significantly more retarded than a competent college student, so they just saw “12%” and breathlessly told us how Epic was ending capitalism in the game industry and took the bait. The bad news was that the smart money was still on just releasing your shit on any store that will take it, and especially Steam. So Epic’s next option was to simply pay people to avoid Steam - firstly giving customers $10 coupons but then moving to the nuclear option and literally paying developers and publishers to stay away. This second one was the other part of that math problem which they could sort of obliquely control, ie how many potential customers would buy a game no matter where it was sold if they had limited options. This changes from game to game but the shorthand napkin math says it needs to be “nearly fucking all of them” for it to start making sense to avoid Steam, and that’s why Epic had to start cutting checks.

I would actually argue that Epic probably did very little market research because then they would never try the approach they did. For one when you analyze how people responded to Origin and Uplay it should have immediately become obvious that exclusivity and gated content are dead ends. Not only is it bad PR but it implodes your own expenses as while you are not giving a direct cut to steam you still have to pay for servers and maintenance staff, so if you hit a rough spot it can become less profitable than just dealing with a 20% cut(as became evident recently with EA and Origin only games migrating back to steam). On top of that Uplay and Origin actually sported their own libraries of popular titles and yet it still amounted to them barely being accepted.

I think that Epic simply overestimated the demographic power of Fortnite and forgot that the bulk of their "fandom" is composed of kids under the age of 12. Which is great for selling 10$ skins but not games. They probably operated under the assumption that since so many people already have the epic launcher to play fortnite then switching to it as a all purpose gaming client will be the next logical step towards convenience. Toss in some nice PR about low cuts and free games and voilà steam uprooted. Problem was that the people who make steam relevant are not the same as those 12 year olds that make Fortnite relevant.

If Epic did their homework they would have studied the success of GoG and steam, both of which initially focused themselves on previously unversed section of the market before branching out and becoming big. Steam was propeled in no small part by capturing the eastern European markets that were previously dominated by pirates by simply offering prices that actually reflected the local wages(for perspective imagine as if a regular game costed around 120$ and then someone came in and started selling them for 20$). Gog targeted old games and a DRM free model. Epic instead targeted... what exactly? Peoples concern about the well being of problem-glasses indie developers? Not exactly a great sales pitch if you want people to jump onto your platform.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

tl;dr -> rich people are retarded.

 

[J1M]

Epic had all sorts of market data from Valve's APIs. Steamspy is operated by one of their employees.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Epic summer sale started now. Up until August 5. (edit: no coupons)

Additionally, Defense Grid Awakening and Verdun - Western Front are free until july 29.

https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/sales-and-specials/summer-sale

https://gg.deals/deals/epic-games-store-deals/

Also, the free event character for Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms reminds me of Alfie.

 

[Uncreation]

Didn't they have a summer sale already or am i crazy?

 

[Clockwork Knight]

They called it something else.

https://www.gamewatcher.com/news/epic-games-store-sale-2020-schedule

Epic Games Store Sale 2021 Schedule

• Epic Games Store Spring Sale 2021 - March 25 - April 8
  
  
• Epic Games Store Mega Sale 2021 - May 20 - June 17
  
  
• Epic Games Store Summer Sale 2021 - July 22 - August 5
  
  
• Epic Games Store Halloween Sale 2021 - October 21 - November 4
  
  
• Epic Games Store Black Friday Sale 2021 - November 26 - December 3
  
  
• Epic Games Store + The Game Awards Flash Sale 2021 - Early or mid December
  
  
• Epic Games Store Holiday Sale 2021 - December 16 - January 6, 2022

 

[hajro]

Epic summer sale started now. Up until August 5. (edit: no coupons)

Additionally, Defense Grid Awakening and Verdun - Western Front are free until july 29.

https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/sales-and-specials/summer-sale

https://gg.deals/deals/epic-games-store-deals/

Also, the free event character for Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms reminds me of Alfie.

The human fucker alfie? right

 

[Nikanuur]

I've deleted my Epic acc a year ago even with some AAA games. Chinese spyware with a haughty CEO and a stupid idea about how exlusivity is good for its sheeps players.

 

[Mazisky]

I've deleted my Epic acc a year ago even with some AAA games. Chinese spyware with a haughty CEO and a stupid idea about how exlusivity is good for its sheeps players.

Hate on Epic is not trend anymore, didn't they update you?

Here is an updated list of the lastest hate trends:

-Blizzard
-White men

Good luck

 

[Silentstorm]

Wait, what happened to Blizzard, last i heard they released an awful Warcraft 3 remaster and i think some BS with online gaming...let me check...wow, i really do not check gaming news that much, wow, that is a bad look, and it's not some accusation from one employee, it's literally the result of a two year investigation with some employees confirming it, holy crap, this is the least ambiguous "Developer genuinely is a pervert harasser" kind of entity i think i have ever seen in gaming.

Oh well, not that i care much, it's been years since i played any Blizzard game and wasn't paying much attention to them anyways.

 

[Volrath]

How's the shopping cart coming along?

 

[Ravielsk]

How's the shopping cart coming along?

Fuck me, I just checked it. They still dont have one, they only announced that its coming this year, at some point. Holy shit and here I thought they already had this smoothed over. Hell, according to trello they dont even have a trending tab, achievements or profiles.

FFS, indie gala launcher is positively giving them a run for their money. Absolute clown show.

https://trello.com/b/GXLc34hk/epic-games-store-roadmap

 

[NJClaw]

How's the shopping cart coming along?

They don't need it because nobody will ever buy a game on their store.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

I've deleted my Epic acc a year ago even with some AAA games. Chinese spyware with a haughty CEO and a stupid idea about how exlusivity is good for its sheeps players.

Hopefully the spyware guys honored your request for deleting your data.

 

[Tyrr]

How's the shopping cart coming along?

Fuck me, I just checked it. They still dont have one, they only announced that its coming this year, at some point. Holy shit and here I thought they already had this smoothed over. Hell, according to trello they dont even have a trending tab, achievements or profiles.

FFS, indie gala launcher is positively giving them a run for their money. Absolute clown show.

https://trello.com/b/GXLc34hk/epic-games-store-roadmap

Even the web shop I made as a college project had a shopping cart.

 

[Archibald]

Even the web shop I made as a college project had a shopping cart.

I don't think that you'd get a passing grade if you made one without a shopping cart.