Gearbox Boss Analyzes Epic Games Store Benefits,Is Really Happy of Borderlands 3's Short Exclusivity

Gearbox's Randy Pitchford analyzed the long-term benefits of Epic Games Store and concluded it's likely to come out on top of the store war with Steam, though he's also happy Borderlands 3 has limited time exclusivity so that everyone can play it.

[codelyoko]

All this fuss for another launcher.

[Eonjay]

Silly isn't it. Gabe is a billionaire off the sales of other devs. Epic stands to make money albeit less because they charge a lower platform fee. I think it's silly for folks not to realize that more and more publishers are going to give Epic exclusivity until Steam becomes competitive again.

[Teflon02]

You guys want to ignore the issue. The issue isn't another launcher. Origin and uplay are fine and ppl don't complain. We'll pretend the actual issue isn't a issue though

[Cmv38]

@teflon what's the actual issue. I don't PC game, so I'm just trying to understand myself.

[Wolffenblitz]

It's not fucking competition if you literally PAY to have the other runners not even run the race.
It's not just about another launcher.. even though that is a small issue.

People go on about it being about Steam. There's Steam, Origin, Uplay, Battle.Net, GOG, Bethesda, and now Epic games.

People don't care if a company wants to keep their 1st party games exclusive. It makes sense.
Holding 3rd party games HOSTAGE by PAYING OUT publishers and what not is NOT good for anyone.

[Hungryalpaca]

Yea. A launcher. That’s the only issue if you don’t bother looking into why people don’t like it.

[KaiPow]

Well, I'm sure their shareholders are happy for the extra profit % for being on EGS at launch.

[Alexious]

That plus Epic's payoff. It's kind of a no-brainer.

[Lighter9]

*Gearbox Boss Analyzes Epic Games Store Benefits, Is Really Happy With All of the Money He's Getting Out of It

[Ricegum]

It's for 2K's benefit, not Gearbox.

[WombBat]

You're right! Gearbox doesn't deserve money for the game they made. The right thing is for Steam to keep 30% of the profits!

[Wolffenblitz]

idiot. Go read up on the issue instead of going on about percentages.

[WombBat]

@Wolffenblitz
Enlighten me

[Rachel_Alucard]

He's delusional and out of touch when he says the store will be fully featured by Spetember when it takes them 6+ months to add a shopping cart function. Something that was on amazon in 1998

[rob-GP]

Do you fancy going back in time and seeing how long it took stream to add those features since it first came out as a download to play half life 2?

No? Is that because you're judging a fairly new store with one that's been around for years?

On the flip side, the xbox store only got a shopping cart last year, after about 10 years of being live...

[Rachel_Alucard]

Steam wasn't a digital store 15 years ago. You're also comparing modern standards to 15 years ago which isn't correct. If you wanna compare console environments which use their own infrastructure, PS4 has had a shopping cart since launch. Even Windows store had a shopping cart at launch. You don't launch a platform this early without developing it first some. All they did was add some listings in their current launcher and said "we're a store now!"

[Hungryalpaca]

So you’re going to go back in time to try and defend a product out today? That’s makes 0 sense. Steam have been around for over a decade.

Might as well not put any online functionality in the next multiplayer shooter. After all the original halo didn’t have it.

[rob-GP]

Rachel_Alucard -Steam launched in 2003 and was operating as a digital store a few years later. Xbox and the xbox store didn't launch with a cart, it was added last year...

Also, are you seriously getting worked up about having to buy games individually on a platform you clearly won't use anyway? Sounds more like you're looking for the small differences so you can hold it against it and moan. We get it, you and the other vocal minority don't like the store. That won't change the fact the game is on there. People don't like Uplay and Origin yet they're doing just fine as well.

Also, the whole 'you don't just add a store...' blah blah - what do you think steam did when it started, and Uplay, and Origins? They were all launchers then they turned into a store by adding things sequencially. If you add it all at once, when it's already a released product, it's more prone to having issues or incompatibilities.

However, you and the rest of the moaners on here won't admit to that, it's all about hating on something just for the sake of it because it's the 'cool' thing to do. Ah well, just like with crossplay, the quiet majority don't really care.

[Rachel_Alucard]

@rob

"Vocal minority"
Check the r/pcgaming subreddit with 1.4 million subscribers. Look up the pax attendee reactions, look at youtube comments, social media comments, etc. Definitley not a vocal minority. Nice narrative though.

You also aren't looking at long term problems and just dismissing it all as "hating" for no reason. What do you think happens if Valve implements curation or lowers their cut?

First, they stopped curating so hard because if they say your game isn't fit for Steam then that's them dictating a good game or a bad game.

https://venturebeat.com/201...

Nobody else will sell it that matters if Steam says no. Besides, curation is worse for the end consumer since instead of buying things based on your own tastes it's now you can only buy based on what the Store operators think is good. GoG rejects 9/10 indie games and reject games just for being too niche or small in scale. Even rejected Undertale until fan outcry happened. Valve are fully aware some bad games will come through but they were prepared for that caveat, hence the needed tools and the continuing improvements on the store discoverability. It's something Amazon and many other massive sites couldn't even get down. It takes time and the fact everyone paints them as being complacent, when they have a massive store and library UI overhaul, VR launching next month with more non-VR games all coming soon is just being ignorant and adding fuel to the fire.

Second, lowering their cut pressures other 3rd party sites to also lower theirs even if they don't make that kind of money that Steam does, all that does is push sites like GoG to shut down quicker. The other thing is lowering their cut passes the regional fees on to the customer rather then allow Steam to make up the cost. Epic charges processing fees in many other countries due to their low percent. Tim already stated to absorb processing fees they would need to raise their cut to 25%. So it hurts everyone except NA and EU.

Third, part of the reason people are going to keep talking about this is because of how dismissive people like you are about this and judge everything on a personal scale, like we all are only just being inconvenienced and being babies about it. There are some people like that yes, but if you stopped writing "blah blah blah" and filling in the blanks with whatever you think as fact and actually read actual quotes by people, you would see this has nothing to do with some personal inconvenience, China spyware meme, or whatever feature parity non-sense. I don't care about if the store is good feature wise tbh, since I've went out and bought a switch which lacks even the most basic console features. I just see a company trying to push a movement that just gives consumers, store operators, and developers worse end results. Keep in mind these same developers complaining about curation were complaining the opposite years ago when Steam accepted next to nobody. It's a joke when I read the dismissal and defensive comments since they all parrot the same meme responses.

[jeki]

I hope it never has all the features Steam does.

[Hydrazinezz]

Epic games and their store blows. Hell fortnite sucked, paragon sucked. Fortnite only got big after they copied pubgs exact br formula. Lololol. Now they’re copying things from apex legends? Why? Because they suck. Horrible developer. They are a shadow of their gears of war days.

[WombBat]

LOL. If you think Fortnite is big because it is a Battle Royale, you know nothing of game design.

[Wolffenblitz]

and you know nothing about any of this.

[MIDNIITE_Z3RO]

Yeah, people totally don't wanna mess with EGS because it's another launcher, lol. It's definitely not the lack of a cloud save feature, or lack of account security, or their terrible track record with refunds, or copious amounts of other issues that come with EGS. I'll never touch a game that has any kind of exclusivity with EGS. It's the only way I know how to have my voice heard, speak with my wallet. I've been using Steam for years, and I won't stop now.

[WombBat]

I agree. Steam should keep 30% of every developer's profits. Its only right! I don't care that games take 300 people and millions of dollars to make. I don't care that the dollars worth has been declining and the price of games has remained steady. I don't care that game studios close down all the time. I don't care that the AA game has essentially gone extinct.

[SoulClaw]

I have Steam since day 1, and I welcome the competition and I am more then willed to get my games with the EGS.

Sorry Steam...but you ...I mean Valve...don´t produce any new games....Counter-Strike exists to sell skins only....Left 4 Dead is dead and left, Portal is gone too and Half Life....nobody wants to wait another half life for the next Chapter.....or will it even ever come?

Steam - Gabe Newell....they became ignorant as developer, greedy and don´t even deserve that much money anymore.

[Wolffenblitz]

Grunt from Kotaku.com.au made good points: "Its not the Steam monopoly thing. They are the dominant player, to be sure, but they arent the only one. And they are dominant because they give the customer what they want, not by denying others the chance.

At the moment, my launchers include Steam, GoG, Origin, Uplay, Blizzard, , Bethesda, and now Epic. I've missed a couple, and it doesnt cover things like NC Soft. Steam has the bulk of my games, but each of the others has anything from 1 to a dozen that I play, or played.

Trying to remember whats on each gets increasingly hard, to the point I have several games where I have two installs, or even two accounts, because I've simply seen it on Steam, bought it, and installed it. I think I have Shadowrun three times...

So, theres convenience. As for the physical shops comparison, personally I dont. I have JB Hifi one level above EB, and on the same level as Target. They are all in the same location, so theres no travel. Its convenient. I dont go to Target much, so its really just two stores that I can shuffle between in 20 seconds.

Out of all that, I have choice. If I dont like EB prices I can go up and look at JB. I dont like that, I have other choices, like online. Even though the real choice is whether I buy it at JB today, or tomorrow, theres still a choice.

Exclusiveness takes that choice away. Completely. It hides behind a timeframe of 6 or 12 months, but in reality its taken away. You either have to buy that fresh game from them or buyu a year old game. How is that competition?

Steam never took choice away. You could still go and buy a game physically, and you could still go to another online platform, such as GoG, and buy there. Its never been locked away for any other reason than publisher choice. That IS competition at work.

This isnt about competition. If it was, the games would be on both platforms at the middle of this, and Epic would be competing. Thats kind of what competition means - competing. And they could do so easily by differentiating them from the opposition.

Instead, they've bought the ball, locked out the best player, and only invited the cool kids to play. Again, not competition. Its elitism and something society has been trying to get rid of for decades.

Remember the movie Avatar? I hope you do, its the biggest movie of all time. Remember its push for 3D, and how amazing it looked? When it came out on blu ray, they had a choice. And their choice was terrible. They partnered up with a TV manufactuer, and the ONLY way to get a 3D copy was to buy one of those TV's. Or wait until they changed their minds, or pirate.

At a time when they were trying to get 3D going, they locked away the highest profile option to something so limited to be pointless. To me that played a large part in why 3D never got traction - the biggest potential selling point couldnt become the Must Have reason.

Exclusivity killed competition.

Epic can work. But how its going about it is pissing off enough of its customer base that its basically running on Hard Difficulty. They've put barriers in front of themselves while trying to take on the near monopoly Steam has. And in a way thats reminiscent of various anti-trust cases thrown against Microsoft over the years."

[spektical]

im all for competition as it will drive prices down, and epic seems more dev friendly in fees. However, epic game store is trash.

[thexmanone]

Steam has been around since 2004, Epic for 1 year. Epic store will get better.