If I want to play a game, which launcher the game uses isn't really a consideration. I figure out which game I want to play first, and then get whatever launcher it requires. Are there really people who would refuse to play a game that looks interesting just because they can't get it through Steam?
Tons of people, yes.
And most of those people will change their tune as more exclusives become available on a competing platform. It's why we still have competing consoles.
Valve really needs to do something about it's UI in Steam. Aside from that, they have a fairly comfortable entrenched position in PC games. The only notable exception is the Windows Store since you literally have to do nothing to install it.
Good. The more of these the better. The Steam Sales have been shittier and shittier each and every year since they did away with the flash sales in 2015.
Steam used to have some mind blowing deals on games that were 1-2 years old. I'm talking a $60 game at release going for $15 a year after release. Good games. Not the average or below average crap that they can't move at full price.
For instance, Warhammer 2 came out in September of 2017 and the best deal I have seen for it since then was 50% off during the Autumn Steam Sale. 3-4 years ago, there would have been a flash sale where it was 66% off for 12 hours on one day of the sale.
So basically, I welcome this new service and hope it can survive and push Steam to do better.
I really don't like Epic at all. I won't even think about installing this. I love Steam. Some people complain about all the 'crappy' indie games. But some of them are actually really fun in a really weird way. And the truly awful ones tend to only be found if you are really looking for them.
It's always amazing how many people want other people to decide which games they can discover and choose to buy. I want to have access to as many games as possible to decide which to buy. And I want that on as few launchers as possible. I love the new direction Steam is going with less censors.
Thanks but no thanks Epic.
If I want a world in which people can purchase success and power with cash, I'll play Real Life. Keep Virtual Worlds Virtual!
It won't be an epic but definitely a steamy competition.
Constantine, The Console Poster
"One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games and it cannot be done by men out of touch with their instinctive selves." - Carl Jung
Steam has a huge following of players with massive libraries, too much investment for players to leave.
The only way to compete with Steam at this point is to buy them out and become Steam.
Nice try Epic but I dont think its gonna work long term
I think you're grossly misreading things. It's the developers that have the power here, and most are going to take the platform that makes the most economic sense. And a 12% cut with a subsidized Unreal engine has a much lower overhead cost than what Steam is offering, even with their announced milestone percentage reductions.
Dev do have some power, but tons Dev need to make money. They would sell in both or get hit pretty hard not making the most money they can after frist few weeks.
Anyway, Epic already has their own launcher, so I don't see the big deal in that regard.
The real thing that actually matters is if they allow you to access outside games through their platform(the way that Steam does). To clarify, Steam allows you to add games to your library no matter where you bought them.
I, for one, have never been very fond of Steam, but starting a new platform will require much compromise on Epic's part, like the games-adding I mentioned above.
For developers, Steam's greedy cut is pretty massive. 30% is a humongous profit-slash. It's bad for everyone, honestly. 30% from a AAA title that sells millions of copies is an enormous amount of money. And, for Indies, 30% is a stab in the heart since you already are short-funded.
Not to mention, it's pretty hard for Indie games to get themselves seen easily on Steam compared to a AAA game... thanks to all of Steam's clutter and trash.
Side-note: Steam actually reduced their % take of AAA titles, down to 20% after a certain profit margin. But, that only takes effect after so many millions.
Not even going to touch it with a fifty foot pole. Fortnite's Save the world had no security measures in place for making payments on vbucks or making purchases on the legendary packs for god knows how long. The horror stories of people suddenly having 500-700 dollars charged to their card because Epic didn't even place a simple confirmation on making payments was absolutely ridiculous. If there was a major security oversight involving just a single game's monetary system, imagine just how significantly worse it could get if their lax security was now surrounding an entire store front. Either way, I don't feel even remotely comfortable letting them handle any money from me.
Also the fact that the user reviews is opt-in for developers is absolutely ridiculous to me. Yes, there's plenty of aggregate websites for users to look at to see whether a game is shoddy or not, but the point of steam reviews is so that the moment someone opens a store page and sees that "Positive," "Mixed," or "Negative," they can get a bead immediately on whether or not they should do any research on the game or simply just pass it by. Understandable that game reviews have easily been weaponized by users in some regards, but that's just the day and age we live in. If you don't piss off your consumers, they don't weaponize the reviews against you, same as in any other business; but that by no means that you're allowed to try and minimize scrutiny over your own consumer/pr practices by opting out of the reviews and not letting people immediately see your game's dirty laundry. Just imagine if restaurants were able to opt-in/opt-out of health inspections.
"People can't say bad things about you, and you get more money. Yes, come to us." Is how their entire sh-peel reads off as.
Epic is really aiming for the next-gen gamer, those playing Fortnite and already customers. Steam just announced changes in its cut, probably to get out in front of Epic's move on their almost-monopoly.
Let's say 5 million folks sign up for Epic and that Steam has 200 million users. Now use your Maths. It is better to have 80% of 5 million or 70% of 200 million? At the moment, Steam still has the advantage because of its enormous user base. That may change over time, but the idea that Epic is going to launch and take a big bite out of Steam doesn't quite seem realistic.
While Epic's been upfront with its cost sharing ratio with developers, the only clear benefit at the moment for users is the 14 day return policy. And that sounds great, but let's face it. You usually do know within a few hours whether the game you just bought is worth keeping. Thirteen more days is not going to make you like it more or less.
The idea that Epic will be more of a gatekeeper than Steam isn't something I consider an advantage. Like others, I enjoy the wacky, off track games you can find on Steam, some of which have been real gems.
Nonetheless, competition usually improves service and products, so even if Epic isn't a Steam-killer, just giving Valve an apprehensive chill is a good thing.
I'm cautiously optimistic about this news. If I had to pick one of the major gaming companies besides Valve to make a platform for digital distribution of games, I can't come up with one I trust more than Epic to be honest. I don't want an increasing number of platforms for games but I think there's room for two big ones, right now we have Steam which dwarfs all the other platforms. My ideal scenario would be if this new platform from Epic can become big enough to compete with Steam, it might be possible with the help of Fortnite and Unreal Engine. If we get two large competing platforms for games, hopefully it won't make sense for the smaller ones to exist anymore. This is just wishful thinking on my part of course, time will tell what ends up happening.
I'm very familiar with pre-Fortnite Epic since I've played Unreal Tournament for soon to be 20 years. I don't have anything bad to say about them, besides minor things I disliked about their games, which is probably the best compliment I can give to a gaming company. From what I've heard it's a great place to work as well. I don't know if and how Fortnite's massive success has changed Epic, I have no interest in that game. Hopefully they've managed to remain a trustworthy company and haven't become too greedy with all their recent success.
Now that I've shared my ideal scenario that I find realistic for games distribution on PC I'll share my worst case scenario as well. I believe Microsoft are very interested in becoming a much bigger actor in digital games distribution on PC and that would be very bad, in my opinion, since they want to lock everyone into their Windows ecosystem and control as much as possible within it. I definitely don't want PC's to end up being locked ecosystems like the iPhone or consoles where one company controls everything. Valve is working hard to increase support for games on linux, they don't want to be dependent on Microsoft and Windows.
Here's an interesting older interview where they touch on the importance of the openness of the PC-platform with Gabe Newell, co-founder and President of Valve who made his first millions working at Microsoft on the early versions of Windows: https://venturebeat.com/2012/07/25/valves-gabe-newell-talks/.
I don't see other publishers giving a cut of their revenues to a competitor.
I don't think Steam has anything to worry about.
Except that Steam takes an even larger cut. A much, much larger cut. Money talks, and a strong competitor could make Valve revisit its overly large take, which is good for AAA and indie developers alike.
I can safely say that even though Epic asks for a lower cut, the saving won't get passed to the consumer. A new game will cost $60 regardless. It just means more money to the publisher.
You underestimate business politics. No many publishers are ready to give direct competitor a slice of their money, because that money will be invested in making games that will compete with their own games. If Bethesda were to use this platform, it means they are directly funding Epic games, I don't see that happening.
Plus most publishers have their own platform already and could have easily done what Epic is doing.
Bethesda , Blizzard and EA have their own digital store which can easily be adapted to distribute other games.
They better have some ground breaking exclusives on it, if not I ain't touching it. It would have to be vastly better than Steam and offer some sort of transition perks.
Why not just use both services? Buy games using Epic's service doesn't mean you can't still buy and play games on Steam.
Because f$%^ multiple launchers?
"As far as the forum code of conduct, I would think it's a bit outdated and in need of a refre *CLOSED*"
I absolutely hate Steam and would love some competition.
Steam, among other things, keeps a gaming company that produces no games - afloat. That's bad. They have it so good they don't feel like they need to improve.
The client is sluggish and terribly outdated - looking at you "checking installation" on every run and having to wait 5 minutes after I double clicked to launch some game.
And even once it boosts it's sluggish as hell. Bloody Javascript launchers are faster than it nowadays that bundle the whole NodeJS runtime in them (e.g. Discord) and are low on memory usage.
It is beyond me why steam is such a heavy application for the things it offers. Which is mainly a game library and a web browser.
Origin/UPlay launch N times faster than Steam on my PC and steam is on the SSD partition.
The Battle.Net client in comparison feels instantaneous.
Steam often forgets my login credentials as well. And using Steam in offline mode used to (might still, idk) limit game's online modes. Good luck hiding from obnoxious friends for a quick 5 minute game.
I don't even know why people love Steam. It costs more (seriously, buying physical copies from brick & mortar is about 10$ cheaper on average), you don't actually own the games that you buy, it's slow, it's a DRM and it's flawed (i still remember 11 year old kid hacking it from Chrome's developer console, LOL)
Are you guys having a Stockholm syndrome or something?
If I want to play a game, which launcher the game uses isn't really a consideration. I figure out which game I want to play first, and then get whatever launcher it requires. Are there really people who would refuse to play a game that looks interesting just because they can't get it through Steam?
Tons of people, yes.
Me. Why would I want yet another store front to track and manage? I have enough of those.
What do you mean "track and manage"? Do you do anything special with your games on Steam? I mean, they just sit there in my library and if I feel like playing one, I boot it. There's no "track and manage" involved. How complicated can that be?
If I want to play a game, which launcher the game uses isn't really a consideration. I figure out which game I want to play first, and then get whatever launcher it requires. Are there really people who would refuse to play a game that looks interesting just because they can't get it through Steam?
Tons of people, yes.
Me. Why would I want yet another store front to track and manage? I have enough of those.
What do you mean "track and manage"? Do you do anything special with your games on Steam? I mean, they just sit there in my library and if I feel like playing one, I boot it. There's no "track and manage" involved. How complicated can that be?
You can track hours played, achievements,DLC and trophies among other things and also mods on Steam. Some people are very goal orientated so these metrics are important.
Steam has a huge following of players with massive libraries, too much investment for players to leave.
The only way to compete with Steam at this point is to buy them out and become Steam.
Nice try Epic but I dont think its gonna work long term
I think you're grossly misreading things. It's the developers that have the power here, and most are going to take the platform that makes the most economic sense. And a 12% cut with a subsidized Unreal engine has a much lower overhead cost than what Steam is offering, even with their announced milestone percentage reductions.
Let's not forget the exposure a product has on Steam due to millions of users vs Epic launcher.
A 30% cut with potential massive playerbase is better than 12% with a tiny fraction of players.
Steams biggest advantage is the sheer number of potential users - this is far more important to developers
Steam has about 125 million users by the last count I could find.
Fortnite alone has about 200 million users. Even removing those players from consoles and smartphones, it's not going to be "a tiny fraction of the players." It's going to be a large built in user base right from the start.
Also, the sheer number of crap games flooding Steam right now has made it increasingly less attractive to indie developers. Many of the most iconic Steam indie games have already reported higher sales on the Switch than on Steam.
For indie developers in particular, a 12% revenue split, a free Unreal engine license, and a less clogged storefront is going to be highly appealing.
I'm calling it now. This will succeed. It may not dethrone Gabe, but it will succeed.
When I buy a game, if there are multiple sources where to buy it, I try to prefer the one that will lead to a third party who had nothing to do with developing the game skimming off as less of the money. That doesn't mean I'll prefer that over a site that legally sells the game for less. But if I can buy the game through Steam for $40 or directly from the developer for $40, I'm going to do the latter.
If that someday means that I can buy a game for $40 through Steam and have $28 go to the developer, or buy it for $40 through EPIC's game store and have $35 go to the developer, I'll probably do the latter unless EPIC's launcher is markedly inferior in some way. Unless, of course, Steam announces that they're cutting their fees to compete.
I want developers who make games I like to make money off of it. That encourages them to do it again. If you want developers to make games you like, then support them when they do.
If I want to play a game, which launcher the game uses isn't really a consideration. I figure out which game I want to play first, and then get whatever launcher it requires. Are there really people who would refuse to play a game that looks interesting just because they can't get it through Steam?
Tons of people, yes.
Me. Why would I want yet another store front to track and manage? I have enough of those.
What do you mean "track and manage"? Do you do anything special with your games on Steam? I mean, they just sit there in my library and if I feel like playing one, I boot it. There's no "track and manage" involved. How complicated can that be?
I mean track and manage games across multiple launchers and libraries. I have almost 300 games on Steam, nearly 200 on GoG and between 50 - 100 on Twitch Prime (I didn't even pay for those). That doesn't include the odds and sods like Origin, U-Play, and the OS stores.
Which launcher has GOKEN, Wartile, Dragon's Dogma, Van Helsing or To The Moon? Some of those are on more than one launcher.
None of those library lists are combined so I would have to look through every launcher to be reminded what it has. For example, I rarely launch Origin so I don't see those games often and I forget that I have DA:I and SimCity.
How many launchers do I need to leave running at once in the background? A few is okay, but adding more just adds more notifications and useless chatty network traffic.
So why would I want to add yet another launcher? What purpose would it serve me, unless I played Fortnite, which I don't.
Well, the real problem here is all of the first-party launchers that don't exist to compete with Steam, but rather to bypass it. UPlay, Origin, Arc, Blizzard Battlenet, NCSoft launcher, etc. don't really need to exist and could have easily been replaced by standalone clients, like they should have been.
This is an actual competitor (and the first real competitor, because, let's face it, what publishers are going to use an anti-DRM platform like GOG) and that's a good thing, because monopolies are bad for everyone (except the company with the monopoly, of course).
If I want to play a game, which launcher the game uses isn't really a consideration. I figure out which game I want to play first, and then get whatever launcher it requires. Are there really people who would refuse to play a game that looks interesting just because they can't get it through Steam?
Tons of people, yes.
Me. Why would I want yet another store front to track and manage? I have enough of those.
What do you mean "track and manage"? Do you do anything special with your games on Steam? I mean, they just sit there in my library and if I feel like playing one, I boot it. There's no "track and manage" involved. How complicated can that be?
I mean track and manage games across multiple launchers and libraries. I have almost 300 games on Steam, nearly 200 on GoG and between 50 - 100 on Twitch Prime (I didn't even pay for those). That doesn't include the odds and sods like Origin, U-Play, and the OS stores.
Which launcher has GOKEN, Wartile, Dragon's Dogma, Van Helsing or To The Moon? Some of those are on more than one launcher.
None of those library lists are combined so I would have to look through every launcher to be reminded what it has. For example, I rarely launch Origin so I don't see those games often and I forget that I have DA:I and SimCity.
How many launchers do I need to leave running at once in the background? A few is okay, but adding more just adds more notifications and useless chatty network traffic.
So why would I want to add yet another launcher? What purpose would it serve me, unless I played Fortnite, which I don't.
Well, the real problem here is all of the first-party launchers that don't exist to compete with Steam, but rather to bypass it. UPlay, Origin, Arc, Blizzard Battlenet, NCSoft launcher, etc. don't really need to exist and could have easily been replaced by standalone clients, like they should have been.
This is an actual competitor (and the first real competitor, because, let's face it, what publishers are going to use an anti-DRM platform like GOG) and that's a good thing, because monopolies are bad for everyone (except the company with the monopoly, of course).
Well, enjoy using their service. It sounds like you have good reasons why you need it.
Conversely, as a Linux user, I would understand why you may have legitimate cause to not need it.
However, you don't have to use the competition to benefit from it. A good competitor will encourage Steam to potentially improve its sales, customer service, renenue split, security, etc., which is good for everyone. I'd certainly like to see Steam up some of its standards.
Comments
Steam used to have some mind blowing deals on games that were 1-2 years old. I'm talking a $60 game at release going for $15 a year after release. Good games. Not the average or below average crap that they can't move at full price.
For instance, Warhammer 2 came out in September of 2017 and the best deal I have seen for it since then was 50% off during the Autumn Steam Sale. 3-4 years ago, there would have been a flash sale where it was 66% off for 12 hours on one day of the sale.
So basically, I welcome this new service and hope it can survive and push Steam to do better.
Proud MMORPG.com member since March 2004! Make PvE GREAT Again!
It's always amazing how many people want other people to decide which games they can discover and choose to buy. I want to have access to as many games as possible to decide which to buy. And I want that on as few launchers as possible. I love the new direction Steam is going with less censors.
Thanks but no thanks Epic.
If I want a world in which people can purchase success and power with cash, I'll play Real Life. Keep Virtual Worlds Virtual!
And if you’re using Unreal Engine, Epic will cover the 5% engine royalty for sales on the Epic Games store, out of Epic’s 12%.
It will open up more broadly to other games and to Android and other open platforms throughout 2019.
Also the fact that the user reviews is opt-in for developers is absolutely ridiculous to me. Yes, there's plenty of aggregate websites for users to look at to see whether a game is shoddy or not, but the point of steam reviews is so that the moment someone opens a store page and sees that "Positive," "Mixed," or "Negative," they can get a bead immediately on whether or not they should do any research on the game or simply just pass it by. Understandable that game reviews have easily been weaponized by users in some regards, but that's just the day and age we live in. If you don't piss off your consumers, they don't weaponize the reviews against you, same as in any other business; but that by no means that you're allowed to try and minimize scrutiny over your own consumer/pr practices by opting out of the reviews and not letting people immediately see your game's dirty laundry. Just imagine if restaurants were able to opt-in/opt-out of health inspections.
"People can't say bad things about you, and you get more money. Yes, come to us." Is how their entire sh-peel reads off as.
My ideal scenario would be if this new platform from Epic can become big enough to compete with Steam, it might be possible with the help of Fortnite and Unreal Engine. If we get two large competing platforms for games, hopefully it won't make sense for the smaller ones to exist anymore. This is just wishful thinking on my part of course, time will tell what ends up happening.
I'm very familiar with pre-Fortnite Epic since I've played Unreal Tournament for soon to be 20 years. I don't have anything bad to say about them, besides minor things I disliked about their games, which is probably the best compliment I can give to a gaming company. From what I've heard it's a great place to work as well.
I don't know if and how Fortnite's massive success has changed Epic, I have no interest in that game. Hopefully they've managed to remain a trustworthy company and haven't become too greedy with all their recent success.
Now that I've shared my ideal scenario that I find realistic for games distribution on PC I'll share my worst case scenario as well. I believe Microsoft are very interested in becoming a much bigger actor in digital games distribution on PC and that would be very bad, in my opinion, since they want to lock everyone into their Windows ecosystem and control as much as possible within it.
I definitely don't want PC's to end up being locked ecosystems like the iPhone or consoles where one company controls everything. Valve is working hard to increase support for games on linux, they don't want to be dependent on Microsoft and Windows.
You don't have to take my word for it, here's Tim Sweeney, the co-founder of Epic Games sharing his fears about Microsoft: https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/27/12294708/tim-sweeney-microsoft-windows-10-uwp-steam.
Here's an interesting older interview where they touch on the importance of the openness of the PC-platform with Gabe Newell, co-founder and President of Valve who made his first millions working at Microsoft on the early versions of Windows: https://venturebeat.com/2012/07/25/valves-gabe-newell-talks/.
A new game will cost $60 regardless.
It just means more money to the publisher.
You underestimate business politics.
No many publishers are ready to give direct competitor a slice of their money, because that money will be invested in making games that will compete with their own games.
If Bethesda were to use this platform, it means they are directly funding Epic games, I don't see that happening.
MAGA
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Steam, among other things, keeps a gaming company that produces no games - afloat. That's bad. They have it so good they don't feel like they need to improve.
The client is sluggish and terribly outdated - looking at you "checking installation" on every run and having to wait 5 minutes after I double clicked to launch some game.
And even once it boosts it's sluggish as hell. Bloody Javascript launchers are faster than it nowadays that bundle the whole NodeJS runtime in them (e.g. Discord) and are low on memory usage.
It is beyond me why steam is such a heavy application for the things it offers. Which is mainly a game library and a web browser.
Origin/UPlay launch N times faster than Steam on my PC and steam is on the SSD partition.
The Battle.Net client in comparison feels instantaneous.
Steam often forgets my login credentials as well. And using Steam in offline mode used to (might still, idk) limit game's online modes. Good luck hiding from obnoxious friends for a quick 5 minute game.
I don't even know why people love Steam. It costs more (seriously, buying physical copies from brick & mortar is about 10$ cheaper on average), you don't actually own the games that you buy, it's slow, it's a DRM and it's flawed (i still remember 11 year old kid hacking it from Chrome's developer console, LOL)
Are you guys having a Stockholm syndrome or something?
Fortnite alone has about 200 million users. Even removing those players from consoles and smartphones, it's not going to be "a tiny fraction of the players." It's going to be a large built in user base right from the start.
Also, the sheer number of crap games flooding Steam right now has made it increasingly less attractive to indie developers. Many of the most iconic Steam indie games have already reported higher sales on the Switch than on Steam.
For indie developers in particular, a 12% revenue split, a free Unreal engine license, and a less clogged storefront is going to be highly appealing.
I'm calling it now. This will succeed. It may not dethrone Gabe, but it will succeed.
It will not succeed though unless they can offer something Steam does not and that is customer service,Steam is awful.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
If that someday means that I can buy a game for $40 through Steam and have $28 go to the developer, or buy it for $40 through EPIC's game store and have $35 go to the developer, I'll probably do the latter unless EPIC's launcher is markedly inferior in some way. Unless, of course, Steam announces that they're cutting their fees to compete.
I want developers who make games I like to make money off of it. That encourages them to do it again. If you want developers to make games you like, then support them when they do.
This is an actual competitor (and the first real competitor, because, let's face it, what publishers are going to use an anti-DRM platform like GOG) and that's a good thing, because monopolies are bad for everyone (except the company with the monopoly, of course).
However, you don't have to use the competition to benefit from it. A good competitor will encourage Steam to potentially improve its sales, customer service, renenue split, security, etc., which is good for everyone. I'd certainly like to see Steam up some of its standards.