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this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2023
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Games
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Maybe less investment in trying to monopolise the market and more investment in developing their shopping platform so it’s not a smouldering turd.
This is the most asinine approach IMO.
"Let's release a worse product. Hey, no one likes it. Okay, let's spend money on games so THEY can essentially force people to use our software. Hey, still, no one really likes it. Okay, let's try to give away stuff for free. Hey, people use our thing for the free stuff but still no one likes it for any other reason."
They just keep spending money to up their numbers and their product is still missing features and inferior to competition. They spend big money on exclusivity, but that is only temporary - if that's how you're getting your customers, you're going to have to keep doing it forever to retain them. If people only use you for free stuff, you're just going to have to keep giving stuff away at a loss to retain them.
This model is not sustainable. You're not doing anything that aligns value with your customers besides just throwing free stuff at them. That's not a business.
What's especially sad to me is they could literally have just spent that same money to improve their launcher and have an actual product. Instead they've invested in temporary stats. They're essentially bankrolling other devs on games with temporary popularity instead of in their lifelong product.
Using other games exclusivity as sway into your ecosystem only works when you have a good product the person would be interested in but they haven't seen it yet. EGS is currently something people are essentially coerced into using but no one really gets any real value out of it other than "well I couldn't buy this game anywhere else"
Plus it's not like there wasn't room for a good shopping client, if you go smart about it.
Steam had at the time - and still has - tons of bad UI design, stemming for its very old layouts wrangling with newer client additions and changes. Plus Steam for the longest time until the new client solved it had serious issues with late boots and hanging closures. GOG had just tried to bring out their own client a few years before, but in the move to GOG Galaxy had gotten a lot of ire and fucked a lot of things up. All the per-developer clients were berated constantly.
There was room there. But Epic, hell, this is so not it. Your client is so much worse than even the bad competitors...
Steam may suck at extra goodies like streaming but they sure as hell don't suck at selling games. Constant sales, cloud saves, pre-downloads, a solid friend system for co-op games. They nail all the important shit and that's really all that matters to most people.
I think it just depends on how long they can do this. I think they are banking on getting the fortnite kiddies hooked on the store. They typically have far less disposable income (yet they still charge kids for 20$ skins), they will most likely not have a super large steam library (probably due to the aformentioned skins) so they are banking on the store being that kids default to Epic rather than steam. Its not terribly odd since Steam basically did the same thing, when it used to have those mega sales with the flash sales and the such. That is when the love for Steam basically exploded and its been cruising on that hypetrain for a while.
We made the shittiest thing and nobody likes it. We’re all out of ideas.
Yeah, if I'm reading that right they're complaining that they're stuck at phase one of enshitification - lose money on aquiring users. The reason behind that is they're not able to monopolize the market for their games. "These damn mobile stores won't let us turn the corner and put the clamps on our users. Fix it please."
If you count all of Steam’s features (Steam Input, Big Picture Mode, Proton etc), then Epic has decades of catching up to do. The problem is that usually executives will choose the “easy way out” of problems, so let’s just give free games instead of making a good platform.
Well not to discourage them but I like Epic games because every Thursday they give me a free game sometimes two. Hell all the 100 games I own on their platform I gotten for free. So maybe that's why it's not profitable?
Beyond that I see no monopoly every game on their I can find on Steam and so far have had no issues with it.
They literally pay for exclusivity. It's weird that people seem to selectively ignore that every time someone brings up their desire to get free games from them.
This is the main reason why I never made an account, despite the free games.
Epic still has to pay the developers even if they give away the game for free. I'm happy to help bleed Epic dry by taking their free games. But I will never ever spend a single cent on their platform.
You're lying to yourself. They pay a fixed amount for the giveaway and it doesn't matter if the games are claimed. If anything, you owning a game on Epic means you're more likely to mention it to your friends and possibly get them to use the platform and spend on it.
This. Active usernumbers are more worth to them than the small fee they pay the Devs. Everyone who "just redeems the free games" is helping them actively.
They pay a fixed amount based on expected/average number of units given away. If that number is higher, devs can get more money.
Can you provide any evidence for this? The documents from the Apple trial showed fixed and round figures for every single giveaway.
Yes, but those buyout prices aren't negotiated in a vacuum. When the number of entitlements goes up, studios will demand higher buyout prices. There's a reason free game quality has been lackluster lately. Studios demand a higher buyouts and Epic doesn't want to spend too much money, so they go with smaller titles.
I'm pretty sure the prices are based on the projected sales using industry knowledge and tools like SteamSpy, created by Epic's head of the publishing strategy at the time. It's not common that a publisher participating in a giveaway would get to use their own figures from a prior giveaway to change the price offered by Epic, while the others' figures are available only for the games in those leaks. In other words, claiming many copies in the present is extremely unlikely to have any effect on the future buyout prices.
Same If I buy a game it will be either directly from the maker or Steam. Epic strictly for the free games.
I mean, I get why people hate this, but some games would literally not exist if not for that exclusivity funding. For example, the newly released Alan Wake 2 is completely funded by Epic. I'd say at that point, the exclusivity is fair game.
Epic funding games development was only a recent thing. For the most part, they were buying exclusivity for games that were already set to be released or were already in active development. The other reason why this was hated was because they bought exclusivity for games that were crowd-funded back when the store was newly opened.
After Control's success, I'd imagine AW2 still would've been made even without Epic's exclusivity/publishing deal. If anything, Control's timed EGS exclusivity hurt their numbers until they eventually hit Steam.
So your theory is that Control wasn't a major success on Epic, so Remedy decided to do the same thing with their next game? Sounds legit.
Epic funding games just makes them a publisher, nothing groundbreaking.
I have not bought a single game from their store. I have over 300.
I also haven't played any of the games I got for free. Maybe one day I will, but today is not that day.
I started playing a few and they play well and so far are fun. Have had no issues with the platform.
Oh yeah? Find these:
3 out of 10
A Knight's Quest
Alan Wake Remastered
Alan Wake 2
Assassin's Creed Mirage
Battle Breakers
Binary Smoke
Castle Storm 2
Core
Corruption 2029
Crime Boss: Rockay City
Dangerous Driving
Dauntless
Dead Island 2
Diabotical
Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed
Goat Simulator 3
Grit
Infinitesimals
John Carpenter's Toxic Commando
Kid A Mnesia Exhibition
Kingdom Hearts series
The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria
Ooblets
PC Building Simulator 2
ReadySet Heroes
Rocket League
RollerCoaster Tycoon Adventures
Salt and Sacrifice
Saturnalia
The Settlers: New Allies
Shoulders of Giants
Sins of a Solar Empire II
Space Punks
Star Trek: Resurgence
Tchia
The Crew Motorfest
The Expanse: A Telltale Series
Tortuga - A Pirate’s Tale
Touch Type Tale
Witchfire
The Wolf Among Us 2
I don't know about any of the others, but at least Rocket League and Fall Guys are great examples here.
Both games already existed and were extremely successful on Steam.
Both games got bought by Epic and we were told they were going to get continued support.
Both games were then REMOVED from Steam.
Both games then started suddenly having objectively worse monetization. Both communities grew a pretty negative opinion of the changes.
Both games are objectively less popular now, though at least some of this is just age/fads.
But both games are just objectively in a worse spot than they were before. All Epic did was make them objectively worse.
This list is just another argument against epic... artificial exclusives. For a FUCKING LAUNCHER. Even fucking Playstation, EA and Ubisoft opened up.
Fuck Epic.
Fucking Playstation is not better than Epic with handling exclusives lmfao come on now
They are literally releasing their games on another platform that actually requires them to put money into the project again to develop a port. So yeah, even PS atm is better than Epic.
So Playstation releasing some of their games literally years later as often sub-par ports is better than being able to play a game day 1 native on PC? I'd love to hear to the logic for that lol
It's better than keeping them artificially locked behind a launcher for no reason whatsoever, yes.
Lmao
So just let me get that straight.
You also don't like exclusives and want ppl to be able to play the way they want.
...and somehow Playstation - actively releasing their games on PC, investing time, money & effort - are worse than Epic who just want to lure ppl to their store/launcher and actively taking away the choice of playing method?
Alrighty then...
Epic also releases their games on PC lol
And they release them day 1, without the multiple year wait from console release, and not as shitty ports. Fuck yes that's better than PlayStation, it's a no-brainer.
I'm truly baffled that anyone could have this take seriously. PC =/= Steam.
Wow... Seriously? No they release it for their launcher exclusively not for pc.
If you're talking platforms Sony is WAY MORE OPEN than Epic ever will be, we can just pray they fail hard and this practice doesn't become the norm (again)
So anything that only releases on Steam is also an exclusive and "not for pc"?
Because Epic Games Launcher is only PC? Then Sony is also better than any company that releases only on Steam for PC?
Yes. If it's paid to ONLY be on Steam.
If we follow your "logic" yes.
Okay I'll give up after that one.
Sony & Xbox once used to have exclusives for their platforms. Xbox opened up completely and releases everything to PC as well. Sony opened up later and now brings their games to PC as well. Sometimes a year later, sometimes a month. So they're multi Plattform now and you can choose where and how to play it.
EA and Ubisoft decided to open up their LAUNCHERS and give you the choice where to buy& play - it's not completely open, because often you'll still need their browsers but it's a step in the right direction.
So the trend seems to be to open up more to reach more people and sell more games that way.
EPIC on the other hand is completely closed, buying exclusives for their launcher or for a certain time. It's a shitty approach to force people to their store and they still aren't profitable - that's the only good thing about epic proofing that this approach doesn't work anymore.
Are Sony/Xbox/EA/Ubisoft perfect? No. - but they all get that being more open is the way to go. They don't do it because they're nice or want us to be happy with games - They do it because it's profitable, but coincidentally that's a good trend that's worthy of support.
They bought fall guys and removed the possibility of buying it on steam. And timed exclusives like borderlands 3.
This is a bad example to put down, can't find that on the epic store either.
https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/epic-is-turning-off-online-services-and-servers-for-some-older-games
Okay, fair, there are some exclusives. But reading through these, wow, nothing of value is lost.
Most importantly because for the newest ones like AW2, they're just on a 1 year Early Access release in a lot of ways. Every time someone I know bought a game there, I was grateful they did the paid (as in, they pay, not get paid) bug testing work for the poor devs. And then once it releases on other stores, you can buy a somewhat patched-up version, and usually for 25%-50% off.