Epic Games Store - the console war comes to PC

[ERYFKRAD]

Epic is cringe.

Epic cringe, one might say

How does it feel, to be beaten to the punch by a drunken Bulgarian

 

[Fedora Master]

Epic is cringe.

Epic cringe, one might say

How does it feel, to be beaten to the punch by a drunken Bulgarian

I wouldn't know, like any sane person I put the Mongoloid in the Iggy bin

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Iggy bin

Cringeworthy

 

[Infinitron]

Epic Games Store tries again.

https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-games-store-self-publishing/

Epic launches self-publishing tools, calls out Valve again: 'Steam has created a real problem for the industry'​

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney says Valve's Steamworks API is a "classic lock-in strategy."

The Epic Games Store is now open for self-publishing(opens in new tab). For $100, the same fee Valve charges for Steam submissions, anyone can submit a game for inclusion in the Epic Games Store library. Epic's system is similar to Steam Direct, which Valve introduced in 2018, and will probably result in Epic's library ballooning over the next year.

There are a few notable differences between Steam and Epic's self-publishing rules, however. In some ways, Epic's game submission guidelines(opens in new tab) are more permissive than Steam's, but Epic also has two big rules that Steam doesn't. Paraphrased, they are:

• No pornographic games
• Multiplayer games must have crossplay with other PC stores

The first of those was expected: Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said in 2019 that the Epic Games Store won't sell porn, whereas Valve has allowed adult games on Steam since 2018—one of the store's most wishlisted games right now is an explicit sex game(opens in new tab). Before and even after making the decision to sell adult games, Valve has struggled with where to draw the line (one thing it currently prohibits is "sexually explicit images of real people") and Epic will likely have same issue: Is an erotic text adventure porn? How erotic is too erotic? Epic will have to decide.

The second rule there is a requirement rather than a prohibition: If you release a multiplayer game on the Epic Games Store and Steam (or another PC store), you have to make it possible for everyone to play together, regardless of where they bought it. Epic offers a free solution for cross-launcher multiplayer called Epic Online Services, but says that developers can use their own online system if they prefer.

Steam does not have such a requirement for multiplayer games, and its free multiplayer API, Steamworks, does not work on any store except Steam. Sweeney has a bone to pick with Valve over that. In a call this week, the Epic CEO told me that "Steam has created a real problem for the industry" with Steamworks.

"They have a classic lock-in strategy where they build these services that only work with their store, and they use the fact that they have the majority market share in order to encourage everybody to ship games that have a broken experience in other stores," Sweeney said. "And we were bitten by this early on with a number of multiplayer games coming to the Epic Games Store. Steamworks didn't work on our store, so they had either a reduced set of multiplayer features or none, or they were just limited to a much smaller audience back in the launch days of the Epic Games Store, so you had a lot of multiplayer games that really felt like they were broken. And remember, Call of Duty went through a debacle launching on the Windows Store a while back in which you could only matchmake with other Windows Store players, and that is not how PC should work."

The Epic Online Services API also supports crossplay between PC and consoles—it's the same technology Epic built for Fortnite—but console crossplay isn't a requirement for EGS submissions, just crossplay between PC stores.

A potential consequence for us is that we'll see more multiplayer games use their own friends lists—or Epic's system—rather than fully integrating with Steamworks. That's already a common sight, though: Many multiplayer games on Steam require separate accounts or only partially use Steam's API. Rainbow Six Siege, for instance, requires Ubisoft Connect. And PC multiplayer functionality of course wasn't tied to the store you bought it from in the pre-Steam era (I'm not sure how you would've made me play Command & Conquer: Red Alert exclusively at Fry's Electronics).

Beyond those two rules, Epic may also be pickier during its "quality and functionality" review process. According to Epic Games Store GM Steve Allison, someone will play each submitted game for 20 minutes to determine whether or not it launches properly and is actually the game depicted on the store page. Valve has a similar process, but has said in the past that, for the most part, it doesn't want to make judgment calls about quality or taste. Epic won't get too specific, but it sounds to me like it does plan to make subjective judgments in the review process. When giving an example of a game that might be rejected, Allison used the term "asset flip," which commonly refers to low-effort clones that replace the art from popular games with free or low-quality assets.

On the flip side, Valve has restrictions that Epic doesn't. Unlike Steam, the Epic Games Store has no ban on blockchain games. Epic also allows developers to use their own payment processing for in-game transactions, which bypasses Epic's revenue cut, whereas Steam requires in-game transactions to use the Steam Wallet. And although Steam did lower its revenue cut to 20% for the biggest publishers, it hasn't matched the 12% cut that Epic made so much noise about back when the Epic Games Store launched in late 2018.

Outside of the submission guidelines, a big question for developers and PC gamers is how well the Epic Games Store interface will handle a potential deluge of new games. When it introduced Steam Direct, Valve prioritized the development of Steam features that helped users discover games they might be interested in, such as the Discovery Queue. The Epic Games Store will continue to get interface updates, but as a matter of principle, Allison says that Epic will not track user behavior and use it to algorithmically recommend games. Epic has said in the past(opens in new tab) that it's more interested in supporting the game discovery that already happens outside of stores, such as on Twitch and YouTube.

Epic talks a little about upcoming EGS features in the Epic Games Store 2022 Year in Review blog post(opens in new tab) that went up today—the company says it's most focused on performance improvements this year.

Epic also announced in that post that it will continue its free games program throughout 2023(opens in new tab). Epic has been giving away games on the Epic Games Store for years now, including some big ones like GTA 5 and Death Stranding, which is one of the ways it reached 68 million monthly active users in 2022. Sweeney and Allison also spoke to me about Epic's exclusivity strategy going forward.

https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-isnt-d...tore-exclusives-its-just-focused-on-big-ones/

Epic isn't done with Epic Games Store exclusives, it's just focused on big ones​

Epic-published games like Alan Wake 2 will be EGS exclusives, not that there was much doubt about that.

Epic hasn't been announcing Epic Games Store exclusivity deals at the rate it once was, but if it seemed like one of the least-popular PC gaming business strategies of the past decade was on the way out: it ain't.

In a call about the new Epic Games Store self-publishing tools(opens in new tab) earlier this week, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney told me that the company hasn't changed its philosophy around exclusives, but if it feels like there are fewer lately, that may be because it's going after bigger fish these days.

"We're really honing our strategy based on what we observed worked really well in previous launches, and what didn't work really well," said Sweeney. "A handful of major exclusives really moved the needle … and the smaller games, especially games that had a smaller audience that was typically on Steam, we found that a lot of those players weren't willing to move over."

One of those hit exclusives was Borderlands 3, which "has just crushed, like, well beyond the expectations of the developers and the publishers," Epic Games Store general manager Steve Allison told me on the same call.

Also part of Epic's ongoing exclusivity strategy is its relatively new game publishing wing, which is funding the development of several upcoming games, including Alan Wake 2 from Remedy, a new game from Limbo developer Playdead, and a game from The Last Guardian studio genDesign.

If there were any doubt that these games would be Epic Games Store exclusives on PC, let it be dispelled now. They will be exclusive for "a long time," Allison told me.

Those are just the upcoming Epic-published games we know about. The company has about 14 games in total coming from publishing partners. That includes PC Building Simulator 2, as well as a few games from Fall Guys creator Mediatonic, which Epic bought in 2021 and has a publishing operation of its own. Another Epic-published game from a small studio will be announced at GDC later this month, Allison says, and more will be revealed later this year.

Allison also told me that they've seen publishers run timed Epic Store exclusives without any deal: They just want to take advantage of Epic's better revenue share for their launch sales before later releasing on Steam. That's why Rockstar put Red Dead Redemption 2 on the Epic Games Store a few weeks before Steam, Allison says.

Aside from exclusives, Epic is also continuing a much more popular strategy for bringing in new Epic Games Store users: giving away free games. The company announced today(opens in new tab) that it'll keep up the weekly giveaways it started in 2019 at least through the rest of 2023.

https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-games-...shouldnt-be-hoovering-up-everybodys-art-data/

Epic Games CEO says AI companies shouldn't be 'hoovering up everybody's art data'​

Tim Sweeney doesn't want to get in the way of AI experimentation, but doesn't approve of scraping art without permission, either.

Epic Games recently acquired ArtStation(opens in new tab), which among other things is one of the biggest websites that artists use for sharing their portfolios. That means it's also a target for AI companies looking for lots of categorized visual art to use as free training material for their machine learning algorithms. Although Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney hasn't taken any kind of hard stance against generative AI systems in general, he says he doesn't like that companies are ingesting people's artwork without permission.

"They're scraping the web to find people's artwork and then using it, and not getting their explicit say-so on the thing," Sweeney told PC Gamer in a call earlier this week. "And a company shouldn't do that sort of thing, right? Maybe that's in bounds for research, but when you're selling a commercial product that's used to generate commercial artwork, you shouldn't do that."

Last year, Epic created a "noAI" tag artists can apply to their ArtStation works to explicitly prohibit their use in AI training. A number of users felt the company should've applied that tag to all artwork by default rather than leaving it up to users to add it, but for now, it exists as a way to make a proactive statement.

"Choosing not to use the tag leaves copyright law to govern whether or not the artwork was fairly used," reads ArtStation's AI policy page(opens in new tab), which was last updated in February. "AI's use and its place in copyright law is new and unsettled, leaving open many questions about copyright law's enforceability against use of work in AI. Adding the 'NoAI' tag empowers you to clarify that regardless of the state of copyright law, use of your work in AI is not permitted."

The use of generative AI in the creation of artwork posted to ArtStation is not prohibited by the site's rules, although it has introduced a filter for users who don't want to see AI-generated images, and tells artists: "The works on your portfolio should be work that you created and we encourage you to be transparent in the process."

Image generators like Midjourney and chatbots like ChatGPT are the most public-facing, controversial applications for machine learning models right now, but it's "a much, much larger field," as Sweeney puts it, and one Epic is already involved in.

"For example, our real-world content scanning at Quixel and 3Lateral, that go around and scan real-world objects, is based really fundamentally on using AI and machine learning to produce very high quality 3D imagery from 2D photographs," Sweeney told me. "Everybody's gonna use AI in lots of ways. Most of it will be just to improve the way we do things today."

When it comes to the more "disruptive" uses of AI, like image generators, Sweeney says he intends to strike a balance between protecting creative work and letting artists engage with new technology at their will.

"At Epic, we see ourselves as being on both sides," said Sweeney. "We're creatives ourselves. We have a lot of artists in the family. We're a tool company, too. We support a lot of game developers. Some of them will use AI, some of them will hate AI, and we want to be a trustable neutral intermediary that doesn't get in the way of industry development, but also isn't going off and hoovering up everybody's art data."

As AI tech and copyright law evolve, that in-between stance may feel some strain: If scraping art for AI training were determined to be legal, for instance, the "noAI" ArtStation tag and whether or not it's applied by default would become much more significant.

Beyond just image generators, it's becoming clear that some form of AI is going to touch everything we do on computers, whether we want it to or not. A company I sometimes point to as an interesting but less-sensational example of machine learning tech is using it to automatically rig 3D models for animation. Not long ago, Rocket League cheaters were using a godlike bot that had been trained with a machine learning algorithm. Now Discord's sticking ChatGPT in our servers.

I squeezed in this question about AI during a bigger conversation with Sweeney about the Epic Games Store and its new self-publishing tools, which you can read all about here. I also asked about Epic's exclusivity strategy going forward: The short version is that Epic Games Store exclusives aren't going away, but expect Epic to focus on fewer niche games and more big publishing deals.

 

[ADL]

• No pornographic games
• Multiplayer games must have crossplay with other PC stores

Nice. This will have a trickle down effect on GOG titles which I appreciate since they're too niche to enforce such measures to any degree of success. As for Alan Wake 2's presumed permanent exclusivity, I have no problem with it since they funded the game's production from the very start. I don't view this any differently than Left4Dead or Portal being permanent exclusives to Steam.

 

[Modron]

Nice in theory but dunno if I care for games that have been out for years being changed to run on EG's middleware possibly breaking things like Rising Storm 2's VOIP issues after being switched to EGS and not getting much in the way of further patching.

 

[GhostCow]

Forcing devs to make their online shit work across multiple stores is incline, but how did we get to a point that it wasn't already like this? Do devs not run their own servers anymore? Is all of their networking shit through Steam somehow? I don't get it.

 

[Wunderbar]

Do devs not run their own servers anymore? Is all of their networking shit through Steam somehow?

It was so convenient the devs got lazy and stopped bothering.

 

[Modron]

Forcing devs to make their online shit work across multiple stores is incline, but how did we get to a point that it wasn't already like this? Do devs not run their own servers anymore? Is all of their networking shit through Steam somehow? I don't get it.

This just increases the odd developers won't be making their own online "shit" and just slapping EGS online shit in their games on all storefronts Steam, EA's, Microsoft's, et cetera. Enjoy the ever increasing Chinese spyware presence.

 

[GhostCow]

Forcing devs to make their online shit work across multiple stores is incline, but how did we get to a point that it wasn't already like this? Do devs not run their own servers anymore? Is all of their networking shit through Steam somehow? I don't get it.

This just increases the odd developers won't be making their own online "shit" and just slapping EGS online shit in their games on all storefronts Steam, EA's, Microsoft's, et cetera. Enjoy the ever increasing Chinese spyware presence.

This sounds like concern trolling to me

 

[Modron]

It's already happening. Several games have already switched over to EGS' baked in solution from whatever they were using before so they could get EGS money like Rising Storm 2: Vietnam and other stuff I've forgotten.

 

[GhostCow]

Ok, now show me how it's Chinese spyware

 

[Modron]

Epic Games has already paid a $540 million settlement over collecting data on children, had a big data breach, is 30% owned by Tencent whose ACE DRM is a keylogger probably sending information straight to Beijing since a ton of their funding has been handed directly to them from the central party, and you know it's only going to get worse.

Edit: Next time you do a fresh OS install you should really think about sandboxing your Steam/EGS/Game installs.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

There's EGS files on GOG games like Saint's Row 4, which recently received an "upgrade" (same as Steam, but I think you can rollback to older patches on GOG).
There's also a whole bunch of games that have EGS files on Steam and before their recent push to take some games away and update others. Steam's version of Pathfinder Kingmaker has them for instance. Civ 6 does too.

 

[ADL]

Forcing devs to make their online shit work across multiple stores is incline, but how did we get to a point that it wasn't already like this? Do devs not run their own servers anymore? Is all of their networking shit through Steam somehow? I don't get it.

Steamworks is the de facto standard plug-and-play solution and works extremely well for Steam users exclusively but cross store/cross platform connectivity either requires a proprietary solution (often screwing alternative PC stores in the process) or Epic Online Services which handles everything Steamworks' multiplayer components do in addition to cross store/cross platform support. I can't even get mad about EOS being used in Steam games because they're providing something that Valve doesn't and seems to have no intention of ever doing. That's valid competition.

As mentioned above in regards to Rising Storm 2, you have some weird instances of a publisher patching in EOS five or six years later because they gave their game away for free on the Epic Store and don't fix issues but that's just a shitty publisher doing something dumb long after the developer in question went independent and moved on. Tripwire should be held accountable for that.

I understand that Valve doesn't want to work with the console manufacturers because it's a logistical nightmare and they've been screwed by Microsoft and Sony's walled garden. That being said, until they offer something competitive, this is a massive win in Epic's favor.

 

[what am i doing]

calls out Valve​

That's a really weird way to phrase it.

 

[Viata]

Just pirate games and you can avoid most of those cancers.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Am i the only one who gets all the free stuff but never install anything, just hoping handing out all this free shit will eventually starve them out? Lmao.

They almost had me by giving Nioh complete away, almost, but not quite. Still holding on not installing and playing anything on the Epic store, going strong for two years since a friend of mine tipped me off about all the free games shit, as i had no idea it was even happening.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

They have the Unreal Engine. I don't think they're going to be starved of funds any time soon unless every developer collectively decides to not make or use some variation of Unreal.

 

[Anthedon]

Am i the only one who gets all the free stuff but never install anything, just hoping handing out all this free shit will eventually starve them out? Lmao.

They almost had me by giving Nioh complete away, almost, but not quite. Still holding on not installing and playing anything on the Epic store, going strong for two years since a friend of mine tipped me off about all the free games shit, as i had no idea it was even happening.

I've amassed quite a few titles myself, some even worth trying (probably). Not enough to bankrupt them though.

 

[flyingjohn]

Forcing devs to make their online shit work across multiple stores is incline, but how did we get to a point that it wasn't already like this? Do devs not run their own servers anymore? Is all of their networking shit through Steam somehow? I don't get it.

Most devs don't even implement a proper controller api and rely on steam to do the job.

 

[Dave the Druid]

You all know Tim Sweeney's a dick now but did you know that he was always a dick?

That took a while to find buried in Google Groups' usenet archives, the original's gone completely. I stumbled across a repost by sheer luck.

Take note of the date: 24th of May, 2000. This was written and posted on the literal day Looking Glass went out of business. The staff were still at the office, drinking beers and clearing out their desks as he was writing this.

 

[ADL]

Saw that thread too. Thanks to whoever saved some of this crap because I definitely couldn't find it when I went looking a couple years ago. Former lead designer on Ultima Underworld 2 and Thief/Thief 2 had this to say in response.

 

[Dave the Druid]

Thanks to whoever saved some of this crap because I definitely couldn't find it when I went looking a couple years ago.

That's me lol. I've even got the thread where I got both of those from still open.

RIP Usenet. You were too good for this world

 

[what am i doing]

You all know Tim Sweeney's a dick now but did you know that he was always a dick?

That took a while to find buried in Google Groups' usenet archives, the original's gone completely. I stumbled across a repost by sheer luck.

Take note of the date: 24th of May, 2000. This was written and posted on the literal day Looking Glass went out of business. The staff were still at the office, drinking beers and clearing out their desks as he was writing this.

Reminds me of EA apologists defending the decision to shut down Visceral simply because Dead Space didn't sell as well as EA's sports games (and claiming it "wasn't profitable" when by budget and sales it clearly made back more money than it cost to make, aka there was a net profit).