Epic Games Store Has Some Epic Faults

Trevor Poole writes: "For all the ways Epic says it is developer friendly, they don’t seem to care about advertising a developer’s games or have an actual plan of doing so on the store at this moment. As they have said, the front page of the store will be handpicked by Epic Games. What’s to say if you don’t opt into their program they will choose to feature your game at all? And if they don’t, what other way will developers have a way for marketing their game than by self-promoting, which is an incredibly heavy task, especially for a small or possibly one-person development team."

[Rachel_Alucard]

"Some people believe money was given under the table to jump ship from Steam, but there is no confirmation to those rumors."

https://puu.sh/CI0m5/af21ec...

from https://www.gameinformer.co...

[IndieRanger]

Good catch on that! I'll run it by the author to get that corrected :)

[rainslacker]

Steam wasn't perfect on it's release. I recall some people being negative towards it for many reasons. Epic's store is still pretty new, and while I think it needs to improve, and people should say what they don't like about it, going after them with so much vitriol, instead of from the viewpoint of them hoping the service gets better, seems the wrong way to go.

With Epic, you have a company that could give real competition to Steam. Epic is generally pretty good to their consumer base, and more often than not actually sides with the consumer on industry issues....even though they sometimes still do things the consumer may not like. Good competition could be good to make Steam improve. If Steam improves, Epic may improve.

I don't really like this exlcusive thing, and I hope it doesn't become the norm. Epic has their lower cut for the store, which should be enough to get them attention from devs, because storefront cuts are pretty high on other store fronts. To date though, other services which offer lower cuts aren't able to take notice away from Steam, because they've become too entrenched in the market. MS takes a large cut on their store, so they don't have that advantage. But, right now, the best way to compete with Steam, and get the content, is to build the service to be as good or comparable to Steam....as that's the expectation that's been set in the PC market....and then work on not trying to milk the devs of their share.

[Rachel_Alucard]

Tim's entire mindset revolves around naivety about how digital storefronts operate. He says 10 years ago the 70/30 cut was revolutionary, and he thinks that because the industry has grown bigger that somehow this means storefronts should lower the cut. He forgets 2 things, one being that his audience on Fortnite now wasn't around back then on mobile and his market share was marginally smaller, it's only grown since then. Everyone is making more money then 10 years ago collectively. Two, Steam as a storefront has grown tremendously since 2008, it's other competitors have not, in this entire time Steam has not upped it's cut and instead built around it. Removing this norm will only hurt consumers. He thinks that Steams many services only cost .1% of the cut while he operates a bare minimal store that only hosts 25 games total and nothing else.

His attempts are not going to benefit consumers in any capacity, since as long as retail copies exist costs will never lower and even then publishers will have grown accustom to charging buyers the $60 price point. The whole thing with timed exclusivity only helps smaller indie devs who don't sell too much, but Epic doesn't pay for those type of games, they'd rather put even more money in fat publishers bank accounts like Koch Media and Ubisoft, the ones who need this deal the least. Based on his tweets, it seems like he hasn't done any research on what he's trying to fight for and the interview on Gameinformer is a bunch of question dodging and pretty much tells you that this wasn't a fully thought out plan. He's a good developer just a terrible businessman.

One example of his question dodging https://puu.sh/CI0no/6a0b95...

Thanks Tim, I guess I'll shop at your store since it benefits big publishers even more then Steam, while providing nothing for the consumer end. Good plan. The competition people are wanting with Steam is not going to help anyone if Valve falls for it. I think they are smarter then Tim in that they never pulled some shady exclusivity deals to get where they're at. So I don't expect any retaliation outside of stopping devs/publishers/ from abusing the Steam storefront for marketing and pulling their page right before launch.

[rainslacker]

70/30 is a fairly recent increase. It used to be 80/20.

If steam is still at 20% of the cut, then it's still higher than it needs to be. Steam brings in billions of dollars. In most games, Steam makes more money off the games, than the devs do, because devs have to pay back investors, or sometimes publishers. It's estimated that almost 60% of all games, don't return a income for the developer itself. This is a failing of the industry, because of how things are funded, and even Epic taking only 12% isn't going to remedy it.

Retail copies not existing won't lower the costs on the store fronts. Publsihers know people will buy the game for more, so they will charge more.

People complain about timed exclusivity, but Valve has had full on exclusivity for digital distribution on games through it's life time as well.

Epic Store right now is new. It may get better, it may not, but people are expecting it to be like Steam out of the gate. No new store front has done that, and people were hating on the Epic store long before they got that exclusive deal. People want to hate on it, because apparently, having another installer is too much trouble for them. But people will happily say how GOG or having UPlay or Origin is no biggie. Who cares if there is another store. It's competition, and over time, Epic's store will either get better, worse, or cease to exist.

[Rachel_Alucard]

According to Tim he says 70/30 was a breakthrough 10 years ago. https://puu.sh/CIriM/b50cb1...

Yes even when developers and publishers are saving money with Epic and a boxed copy doesn't exist, they will never pass those savings onto consumers without someone else making it a condition. Steam doesn't even set the prices you see on the store, that's entirely the publisher. Tim however thinks... https://puu.sh/CIrms/2d47d9... and he bases this off part of Steam's Getting started in partner key selling https://puu.sh/CIrtI/aadb66...

Valve did not force any exclusivity outside of their own developed games, they can't help it if devs feel like their forced to use them because apparently nobody else can outmatch them in the service. It's not like Valve started out their service by pulling illegal consumer practices. When boxed copies came with a Steam code, that was not Valve that was the publisher doing that. With Metro Epic forces them in the contract to only release on EGS. Sure Deep silver signed it but now they have to play by what Epic says. Valve doesn't do this and that's why people respect them better. If Tim is trying to get people to appreciate Valve more, he's doing an amazing job.