The Epic First Run programme allows developers of any size to claim 100% of revenue if they agree to make their game exclusive on the Epic Games Store for six months.
After the six months are up, the game will revert to the standard Epic Games Store revenue split of 88% for the developer and 12% for Epic Games.
They can try all they want, but I’ll just wait until the game comes to steam. No game is worth using that dumpster fire of a launcher.
Elite Dangerous was their free game for the month awhile back. I made extra accounts and snagged free copies for people that wanted to try it, because I adore that game and love having people to fly with.
You know, oddly enough, no one wants it, even for free, expressly because they don’t want to deal with the dog’s anus EGS launcher.
Yep, I used to pick up the free games, then realized I’d never play any of them because I expressly do not want to deal with the EGS launcher.
It sucks, because it really is better for the devs, but steam is just so much better
it really is better for the devs
This is said a lot but… Is it really? And if so why should I, the customer, care?
I can’t think of any other good or service in my life that I would go out of my way to buy from an alternative store so that the manufacturer makes more money. I don’t choose between Aldi and Whole Foods based on whether the manufacturer of my chicken bullion cubes makes more margin with one or the other. It’s just fuckin weird.
not in the long term it’s not
Same with GTA when it was free. Only got one person to use one of the many and they only used it like twice.
Dude I have purchased Elite 4 times now, 1 for me and 3 for my mates
I wish they would do SOMETHING with the game to make it more accessible, all my friends gave up after realising how much grinding they had to do
That game is a ruined orgasm. So much build up and anticipation for fucking nothing.
Once you trick out an Anaconda you “beat the game”.
Which is kind of weird since Elite has its own stand alone launcher, right?
All my stuff on Epic I just install and either run direct on the PC or add to steam as a non-steam game on my deck.
How much does steam charge for allowing the games on its platform?
Steam takes a 30% cut of all sales iirc, but does not enforce exclusivity agreements to their platform
Geez, 30% is a lot.
30% is standard in industry. Apple/Google/Xbox/Sony all take 30% from their marketplaces as well
They’re winning me over steam. I pick up their free games each month and my library is getting good enough that I’m spending more time on it.
Say what you will about epic, but this is compelling as hell for Devs. Hopefully this puts more pressure on Steam to reduce their cut. Competition is good.
If you’re so against epic, have a little patience and wait until it comes to steam 6 months later. That’s what I’ll be doing. But don’t just mindlessly shit in epic because you (as a consumer) don’t like their business model intended to attract devs. You can dislike something while also recognising the good in it.
My view is that it incentiveses exclusives in the PC space, as opposed to lowering Steam’s charge for their services. My biggest concern for gaming is that we end up just like streaming services. A bunch of exclusives and a marketplace that is such a mess you can barely find what service has what you want.
It’s a fair concern, but I don’t think anything has remained exclusive on epic, they all come to Steam eventually. If that changes and epic starts incentivising permanent exclusivity, then I’ll be upset. But as it is right now, I have no issues with epic.
I know so many people call those situations a “mess”, but I’m still in favor of it: Each potential service option keeps the other in check through competition. I only get to use so many streaming services for so cheap because they’re lowering their prices in a bid to seem more appealing than the others. When it comes to game stores, their unique features (like say, Xbox’s game pass) can make them more compelling.
Granted, 90% of that last argument has just been “Steam has Xfeature, and YStore doesn’t…so I prefer Steam”
I’m not so sure, this seems like a less compelling deal than what Epic was offering before, which didn’t seem to be working out so well for devs.
Before, they were outright paying for exclusivity, offering studios and publishers huge sums of money to make up for the revenue they lose by not being on Steam, and then some. And they often paid for 12+ months of exclusivity. You were guaranteed profitability regardless of whether or not your game actually succeeded.
In order to break even in the new program, your game needs to retain 70% of the customers that would have bought it day 1 on Steam instead. That seems an impossibly high target to hit, given how much Epic has struggled to make EGS succeed even when they were thowing a lot more money around.
I never truly understood the hate for epic. They’ve made some of the best games of all time, give away 1-2 games for free every single week, and they ensure that most annoying kids are in fortnite and not games that adults want to play. Oh noooo. You have to open a separate launcher to play your video game! The horror!
No review system for games, no return policy, no community tabs or markets, no appear offline mode, they allow shitcoins and nfts on their platform, forcing their launcher onto games they own (Rocket League that launches through Epic but I bought it on Steam), collecting a metric fuckton of user data and input, and finally very close connections with Tencent. Sure i’m missing a bunch more.
One more thing - really annoying how if you click a game in the sidebar it launches it instead of going to the game in your library. It’d be fine to have a smaller launch button in the same space, but having the whole thing do it is not very intuitive.
Did they ever add a shopping cart? That was the reason I never bought games from them.
There is shopping cart.
…I only use it to add two free games to cart and “buying” them with one click 🤷
Origin and Ubisoft launchers are starting as well on their games
In your comment you admit you don’t know, and then end your comment with an out of touch assumption. Good job.
The first few months of a game release are absolutely critical, no matter the size of the studio. I won’t buy anything on Epic just out of principle, and I’m sure there are countless other people who share the mindset. A 100% share, vs a 70% one, is definitely appealing at first glance, but it’ll butcher your numbers for short-term gain
It’s that upfront money they give that’s the big thing for some of these devs I can’t blame them for taking that upfront influx of development capital.
Still not buying it from Epic, I hate console exclusivity, including Nintendo, and I’m not going to support it on PC.
Yeah same, but I also won’t touch anything that goes Epic Games exclusive even when it comes to Steam.
A game that sells 10,000 copies on Epic may sell 20,000 or more on Steam since Steam is so popular. If the game sold for $20 they would get $200,000 from Epic or $280,000 from Steam in that scenario.
That’s an awfully generous ratio. I don’t recall all the specifics, but a year or so ago an indie game dev posted the sales stats of his game and left out the Epic Store numbers. When asked, he said that EGS accounted for less than 1% of his sales. Now, I’m not saying that’s going to be the case for all games, but considering EGS’s status as the “black hole of videogame marketing” I would say a 10-1 Steam/EGS ratio wouldn’t be surprising.
As a gamer living in eastern Asia, Epic’s exclusives that could only be bought in certain countries due to payment processors pissed me off enough to boycott. I generally don’t touch any games that started as exclusives there, either. The couple of exceptions I have, I waited until they were a couple of years old and > 50% off on Steam or GoG
you guys can pay developers all you want but nobody is gonna stick if your launcher is still shit
Just use playnite or one of the alternatives, it’s so much easier launching every game from the one place.
I only open epic launcher once a week to get the free game I’ll never play and that’s it.
playnite is phenomenal!! I use it as well but have to occasionally still jumpscare myself opening the epic launcher to update stuff
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I’m not fully sure the steam comparison works only because that was a different time.
With that said I still think epic has staying power if for no other reason than anyone mildly interested has a massive epic library sitting there. I don’t spend a ton of time thinking about epic, but I do want to keep my account because of all those games.
Making it seem like Steam’s problems for the first ten years were some software bugs inherent to all software.
It required you login every 48 hrs to two weeks to play most games for DRM purposes, they had no return policy, app’s buttons barely worked, overlay made games run considerably worse, it frequently took up a shitton of resources. The 48 hr thing meant that if you were offline for a bit and Steam was down or slowed (any time a bit sale happened or a big game was launched) most games were unplayable.
Steam came out in 2003 and tons of people complained about Steam DRM hearkening the end of actually owning videogames until at least 2012. GoG came out in 2008, didn’t require a launcher at all, sidestepped everything wrong with Steam.
There’s been non-buggy, not anti-consumer software as long as there’s been computers, Steam prior to like 2016 was not that. There’s been an alternative, buying physical games (until they all started using Steam DRM or worse) and GoG.
Yeah Epic Launcher is barebones. Both Steam and Epic are anti-consumer because of DRM, and making users beholden to any buggy software update to play software they purchase. At least Epic pays devs.
Yeah I mean I hope my comment doesn’t seem like it’s blindly defending Steam or anything. I think steam today is a good platform. Not talking about their 30% cut, I just mean from the perspective of gamers.
But its launch was anything but smooth. I HATED steam when it launched as a requirement for HL2. I had dialup and the experience was utter shit. I recall being so upset at what a pain it was.
Nothing about epic has ever been as frustrating as the early life of steam.
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What was the alternative for the first ten years? Nothing better for sure.
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God I hate Epic. I hate them with every fiber of my being. The fact that I have to have their crappy, insecure game store bloatware just to try to learn Unreal for personal projects is dumb. Hence why I am learning Unity and Godot.
Same. They killed unreal tournament as well. Mutual funds and corporate entities need not exist.
As a long time Unity user, Unity sucks ass. All of the good things about unity are the things they bought like cinemachine and textmesh pro.
Unity technologies can’t for the life of them make a damn decision and stick with it. As a result, Unity has a decade plus of technical bloat and debt that can never be fully paid because of the need for backwards compatibility.
Oh, I know. I headed a major project which involved usurping the root level of geometry in the Unity engine and injecting massive amounts of data into it and we actually found some major flaws in their underlying logic which only would come up when you hit the levels of throughput that we were dealing with. Getting them to admit to the fault was pulling teeth, but they did fix it once they were confronted live with the issue. So that’s good on them at least. But that aside, the project went well and the tool at the other end is nothing short of incredible. I’d still rather work in Unity than Unreal for most of the types of projects I tend to do.
I played a game for like 2 hours and 30ish minutes, 30 minutes longer than their allowed refund window because I forgot to close it when I went to the bathroom after deciding I didn’t want to keep playing, and my buddy who played with me had like 2 hours and 14 minutes.
They accepted his refund request no problem and denied mine even after I got a supervisor involved.
I will never ever use their service again, they can keep my $70 but they’ll never get another dime. Fuck em and their bribery of game developers.
So, you don’t like Epic because they didn’t offer a refund beyond the refund window? Idk man, I don’t like them for many reasons but this seems a bit off
I don’t like that they inconsistently enforce the 2 hour window. The reasons I don’t like Epic include a lot more than just this one situation, but it sure enforced my opinion of them. I see how you can boil down my anecdote to your version, though.
Steam has proton, Epic games does nkt even have a linux launcher, its obvious who I’m sticking with
Heroic Game Launcher works well enough for that. Although I do need to install MSVC shit thru Winetricks sometimes. Wish HGL did that automatically.
I mean, I’ve been able to get epic games working on my deck through the heroic launcher. I’ve still not given them one thing dime but I’ve got a fair sized collection of giveaway games that are nice to have around
Effectively no percent of the market uses Linux
That percent of the market really changes for some indie titles who have noted a substantial amount of their purchases were from Steam Decks.
100% of me uses Linux so epic can get fucked as far as I’m concerned
Linux users are the vegans of lemmy.
I’m sure all couple hundred of you are really excited about it but you are also no percent of the market
Shit I only have epic installed to get free games I forget to play because I never use the launcher. It’s just nothing to do with who is using Linux.
I don’t really give a crap what you think of linux users. But it’s not true that “no percent” uses it. Seems a little ironic that you say “nobody uses it” on one hand and also complain about the number of people who talk about it…
The large number of people talking bout it exists pretty much just on this social media.
Not sure why you are so personally invested, hence the vegan comment.
The point is no one really develops with Linux in mind because the consumer base is tiny
So is it just me or does every game that becomes a epic exclusive never do as well as they should. i think most game developers realize this, which is why epic is desperate to get developers on their failing launcher. maybe they should try offering all the things steam does. regardless i cant switch because i own too many games on steam, im locked in.
It’s because PC gamers overwhelmingly will just ignore the game until it comes to steam, but by the time it comes to steam it’s been 6 months - 1 year and all the hype around the game has died.
People have been voting with their wallets and not rewarding anti-competitive behavior for once
thats what i was hinting at. and im not totally happy about epic ruining launches over trying to be a replacement for a, in my opinion, much better system which offers much more ever if they developers don’t use all the features. i do wish steam would add a lower tier which takes less of the profit from indie developers that hardly use any of these features.
Only buying on Steam is anti-competitive
Not really. Steam is not forcing exclusives on their platform. Them providing a better service doesn’t mean the users are anti-competitive.
EGS explicitly pays developers to not release on other platforms. That’s anti-competitive
Exclusive is the medium not the store
A pc game on epic is still a pc game. I haven’t heard of epic preventing devs from releasing on Xbox
EGS is a platform, Steam is a platform. They are both stores and their own ecosystems.
They are paying for forced exclusives to their platform. I’m not going to use a different platform even on my same device because it’s anti-competitive for pc gaming.
You aren’t going to promote competition because it’s anti competitive
If a game was offered on both platforms do you think people are more likely to get it on Epic than Steam? If not then they have to be exclusive to their store
That’s not my problem. That’s still being anti-competitive. If one platform is significantly better (eg steam) then the competition needs to offer a reason to buy from them. The problem is that EGS has decided that the only way to give users a reason to use their store has been to make sure the game isn’t available anywhere else.
The users are able to make the choice to not support poor business tactics and they have. People do not buy from EGS, due to a plethora of reasons, one of which is likely that they are extremely anti-competitive and buy out games.
You aren’t going to promote competition because it’s anti competitive
A store doesn’t have the right to my business just because it exists. If I started a PC game store and charged twice as much as Steam or Epic would you purchase from me just to support competition?
A business needs to give me a reason to purchase from them. If the best reason to purchase from Epic is to give them a participation award then no thank you.
not what that means
What was wild to me is when Kingdom Hearts dropped on Epic and no one cared. Should have been the hot topic for at least a few days but… nothing.
Kingdom Hearts was a double whammy of poor decision making on Squeenix’s part. Not only did they launch on EGS, where most PC players aren’t going to care about it, they launched it at an absurd price. They were selling the HD collection for $50 when you could walk over to GameStop or Target and get the PS4 version for $20.
When you finally make a game like KH available to a new audience, and no one gives a shit… You’ve done something horribly wrong.
Hades
I didn’t see anyone talking about Hades until it released on Steam
It spent it’s early access there but it was definitely talked about at least in the places I lurked. It’s Supergiant games tho, they do nothing but bangers.
Why choose one over the other when you can use something like Playnite or similar to track all your collections across multiple services?
i work too much to spend time looking into systems like this. also i don’t use windows.
Then Heroic
Steam has a really loyal base that for some reason think buying from a different store is akin to buying a whole new platform
I’ll avoid games on Steam as much as I can to foster competition but breaking into that user base is difficult
I’ll avoid games on Steam as much as I can to foster competition
Cool. I’m going to open my own store that costs twice as much as Steam and has none of the features. I’ll let you know when it’s ready so you can purchase from me in order to “foster competition”.
I’ll hold you to it
Its is buying a new platform, rather than have my games in 1 platform, they would be in 2. also steam offers much more (at a greater cost to developers) then epic. i also only use linux, which is a not hard at all with steam.
I also only use Linux; I don’t need to change my device at all to switch between Steam, Lutris, or Heoric
Due to advancements pushed by Valve, these days I’m actually surprised when a game doesn’t run under Linux.
Even when he worked for Microsoft, Gabe Newell was literally the person that made PC gaming viable.
i dont know what lutris or heoric are. i wish i had more time to figure that stuff out. maybe one day.
I had a few games on Impulse but my account vanished when it got sold to Gamestop so I can understand people being worried about buying games on other platforms. One reason I like GoG due to offline installers
The problem is that none of these other launchers offer features like Steam Input, Proton, in-home streaming, a good overlay, and the Workshop. Steam competes by making their platform the most attractive to customers.
Alternatives to Steam need to find their own niche. GOG is doing well in their niche of fixing up older games and selling them DRM-free. The only “killer feature” EGS has is that they take a smaller cut from publishers. But end users don’t care about that, because it doesn’t translate to lower prices. I can chose between spending $60 for the same game on Steam or EGS, but the EGS version comes without all the extra features I listed above.
Never forget that GOG is also an option!
Huh? GOG still seems to be online. Did anything get announced?
Oh no, sorry if I scared anyone. I just wanted to remind people to buy games from GOG
I don’t think GOG is going anywhere, perhaps the poster above you just used weird phrasing (English might not be their first language)
I should’ve just added “Never forget [buying games from] GOG!” already 😅
“Let us offer you 100% of the money from a marketplace 0.0001% as large! Did we mention you get all the money that neither of us are making? We will throw in all the good will with gamers we’ve earned too.”
Man epic games store is actual industry aids. We don’t buy games on steam because we have no other choice. We buy them because it’s by far and large the best platform. I don’t want 10 different apps for different games. I want my collection in one spot. Epic games sucks. I’ve never given them a single cent and never will. I’ve claimed many a free game on there but the irony is I just buy them on sale through steam and never actually play them on epic. I want playtimes, achievements and the games themselves in one fucking spot. If steam becomes wildly anti consumer I would absolutely change my stance. But valve and it’s customers have a pretty good relationship imo.
I wish more companies were like Valve. They are following that old style of making a great product and/or providing a great service to make consumers happy to spend their money there. The only mixed feelings I have about spending money on steam is “do I really need more games when there’s a ton in my library that I still haven’t even installed let alone played?”
I hope they stay private and that Gabe has or finds an heir that follows his mindset rather than decides to go for a quick payout.
Even when those other companies embrace shitty business practices to make more money and it works for them, they are just setting the stage for a better company to come along and replace them.
Lol, Epic losing steam? No pun intended.
Also, fuck Epic.
Other posters seem to forget that competition is very important for this kind of thing.
Sure it’s annoying when Epic stops games releasing in other platforms, and especially how the epic launcher and it’s games do not support Linux.
But without competition, steam can continue with an insanely high cut of indie game sales, and that is NOT ok.
it’s games do not support Linux.
I just use Heroic and like 90% of my epic library just works. Admittedly, still won’t spend anything on epic, but then, I like Heroic more than Steam at the moment…
Heroic Game Launcher ist awesome. Use it for both, my Epic and GOG libraries.
Until I see official Linux support, I’m not putting any eggs in the community Linux launchers. Rug could easily be pulled
Definitely. This is why i don’t spend money on that account. Well, that and not wanting to spend on that store.
I can’t wait for lemmy to become a viable competitor to Reddit, I hate seeing those smug bastards at the top of my search results.
I think this is pretty viable, at least as a daily driver. Reddit has a lot more as far as help threads go, but the community here is fantastic.
I mean that’s seems like a decent deal for developers but I’m not buying it until it goes Steam and GoG.
This is probably a worse deal than the previous offer of guaranteed revenue regardless of performance.
Guess I’ll get the game on sale
