-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
-
We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.
4A Games developer: If Metro Exodus does not sell on the PC, the next Metro will not come out for it (Up: Deep Silver Official Response)
- Thread starter Sqrt
- Start date
It's not like they can do anything about it. They already signed the deal.
Well they've said this in their statement:
It'd go better if it explained how it is really beneficial for the future of the series and the developer. It's as vague as it gets, and doesn't really explains if it will be limited to Metro or other Deep Silver games, etc.
Don't know about the specific deal 4A has with Deep Silver/Koch Media/THQ Nordic but to me it seems that devs in general seem to be pretty unsavvy concerning business. It amazes me that the actual dev of the game has no say about the actual process of selling the game.
Also the fact that Deep Silver openly admits that 4A had no say in the matter (and won't likely benefit from the deal and probably not even from the improved cut) is astonishing. I feel like the series is big enough that they would have enough leverage to actually demand a veto right for every business decision Deep Silver makes.
Basically more powers to actual devs instead of tonedeaf suits (remember the Dead Rising statue from a few years back?)
Also the fact that Deep Silver openly admits that 4A had no say in the matter (and won't likely benefit from the deal and probably not even from the improved cut) is astonishing. I feel like the series is big enough that they would have enough leverage to actually demand a veto right for every business decision Deep Silver makes.
Basically more powers to actual devs instead of tonedeaf suits (remember the Dead Rising statue from a few years back?)
Even in US you could have bought the game on third party authorized seller like Razer Game Store for 48 bucks and get Steam key. So you got lower price AND better service, EVEN in US.
And then the game was taken away to epic, for higher price and infinitely worse service, where you also happen to support Tencent and by extension chinese government.
Unless this ever actually changes, it should be posted in every pc platform "debate" thread.
Inform youself before spouting nonsense. This is tiring. Read. Use your brain.
I am confused. I thought there was no other way to get the Steam version now?
Now. The Razer Game store was selling it cheaper before the exclusivity.
That won't stop people coming in here and talking about how it's great it is cheaper on the Epic store though, just parroting PR talk.
Last edited:
Which is funny since some sites like CDkey were offering it cheaper than Epic.
Why is this surprising? 4A isn't the publisher, Deep Silver is. They would control all aspects of publishing and distribution, as per whatever contract they have with 4A. This is how the publisher developer situation usually works. Unless 4A somehow managed to buy the IP back, they can't just sell it themselves however theyd like. This is only odd in that Deep Silver made a move at the last minute to go with one store instead of several all selling steam keys
I agree, but IMO CDkeys shouldn't really be part of these discussions since they aren't an authorized seller. Razer are.
No I think developers should start to take back some of that power from the publishers. I do realize that THQ Nordic is the IP holder but this is still a creative work and not just some work for hire. Devs need to cut better deals because they definitely got enough leverage to have some say.
Genius Marketing
"Put it in Epic STore that nobody has"
"Threaten people to buy it or they never get one again"
"Profit"
Seriously.... someone needs to be fired to get it out of Steam in the first place.
"Put it in Epic STore that nobody has"
"Threaten people to buy it or they never get one again"
"Profit"
Seriously.... someone needs to be fired to get it out of Steam in the first place.
This is false.
He said that happens in some developing countries where regional pricing has driven the cost of the game so low that the 12% cut is leaving very thin razor margins.
In the developed countries that make up the bulk of game purchases, Theyve gone on record to say 12% cut still yield quite a decent amount of profit for them.
Ironically, the best deal developers can cut now is to convince Valve to cut their take to at most 20%.
You can see that from the GDC surveys...developers want a bigger share of their sweat.
Unfortunately, there's limited support here for giving developers a better deal. Surprisingly so.
It's a shame that developers are always the ones most likely to suffer from a poor business decision that they didn't have any control over, but that is life under a publisher. People are right to boycott or rally against their game if the publisher is working against the consumer.
Given that they don't have anythign like Steams suite of features to support, I don't doubt it.
Where are the devs demanding a better cut on consoles, by the way?
But how is Finland considered developing country, where base price is 40% more than in US? and 5% payment fee on top of that makes it almost 50% more than.
It's just his shitty excuse.
Nobody?
Basically everyone has Fortnite these days so everyone has the EGS/Launcher.
If you say nobody i can easily say everyone.
Because Tim Sweeney said that Epic Game Store would "advance the cause of all developers".
Maybe he meant "all developers except those for whom we deal with the publisher to screw them over".
Don't use them much myself, but I didn't get to see the price on GMG so they were the only thing that came to mind when this was first announced.
But he has a funny avatar though, so it's perfectly ok.
It doesn't matter if the majority is on console, if the majority is just 51%. Do we have any clue what the split is? Most young kids I know are playing on PC.
Goes against what Tim Sweeney says the Epic store is all about, empowering devs. We knew from day 1 it was bullshit but it's good to have official confirmation and something to point at because folks certainly won't stop parroting 'why don't you want devs to get more money?'.
Do not know anyone from my friends or immediate family that care for Fortnite, tho many play PUBG religiously. Fortnite is popular in the West and among kids here, but PUBG has Fortnite beat easily on a global scale. Most Fortnite players around here have it on PS4 anyway. People who invest in PC either do it for DOTA 2, CSGO, RE6 or PUBG, ain't no one paying for gaming PC just for Fortnite.
People were pissed about Division 2 leaving Steam, Metro Exodus leaving amidst preorders on Steam is the straw that broke the camel´s back.
This.
If the game was always EGS, nobody would mind. It's that the game was removed from the Steam only a few weeks before release.
People would be mad still, because PC gamers really don't like shitty exclusivity deals.
This whole ripping it from Steam thing just made it 100x worse.
Yeah, there was always going to be disappointment at Metro Exodus going to the epic games launcher, but I believe what really poured gasoline onto the flame was how it was done.
Deep Silver shows up two weeks before release and goes "Hey remember this game we've been advertising on Steam the past 6 months, now go buy it on the epic games store". Deep Silver literally did this from a Metro Exodus Steam game page news announcement. Which lead to all this insanity going on right now. It's kind of crazy when you think about how poorly Deep Silver handled this.
If the game reviews well I expect some of the "boycotters" to buy the game from the epic games store, which I won't blame them. Who wants to wait a year to play a good game? However, I think they'll buy the game with resentment on the epic store and still be mad at Deep Silver, which doesn't really help anyone in the long term. It sure won't make people want to buy more games from the epic store. It's just a bad situation all around.
Sorry for my dumb question, but is this one of the reasons why Valve doesn't expand? They have the money to open another studio but yet instead they seem to mainly focus on expanding steam and offering more tools (and even hiring more people to work on these Steam tools/services) instead of more people to make games.
I would assume that since Valve makes Billions every year that if they really wanted to open up another studio dedicated to only making games they financial could do that but if things went wrong they would have to fire a lot of people or has that already happened? I've heard of people leaving Valve but not of a mass Exodus (sorry for the pun) of people leaving because of layoffs or something like that.
Also I it was funny looking at some of those links (the Kotaku one from 2010) about how Epic felt about PC gaming almost 10 years ago. They did a full 180, it's only now that Valve is making billions that they also want a piece of that action and if devs like 4A don't happen to be in the best position because of what upper management chose then oh well. Epic is not the bad guy here it's customers that don't want to be pushed around by Epic for forcing them to buy from one store only/s
But you know there is nothing wrong with this after all, all the console manufacturers have exclusives as well and Valve is a company that just cares about your money and only that and that's why they have not been adding any new features to Steam at all and that's also why they force you to pay for things like Cloud save the same way that console manufacturers do. And console gamers know all about this which is why there is nothing wrong with them coming here to a mostly PC focused discussion tells us that we are being "pathetic" and then say that this doesn't really matter to them since they are just going to buy it on consoles. (Sorry my attention is not to attack any one or anything but it's just annoying seeing some one mention something that they have no stake in, once again sorry)
This game was going to sell very well on Steam, I'm pretty sure that a lot of people knew this already, well to be more exact a lot of people on Steam knew about this game (not sure the same could be said about people using the EGS). The evidence that I have is the upcoming top wish list category, for over the last year or something Metro Exodus had been in the top 5 wishlist item on there. Meaning that out off all the upcoming games both indie and AAA Metro Exodus was a game that a lot of people bothered to go to the Steam page and hit wishlist (and as crazy as that sounds that does in fact require a bit of effort to do). Had things stayed with how they are on Steam, or if the game released on EGS along side Steam the game would have sold very well (assuming that the game is in fact great, but we do not know this for a fact right now since reviews are not out) and that would have been that but sadly now this has turned into a whole mess where the dev in the end may be the one that loses in all this and it's okay for them to feel frustrated about how this has been spiraling out of control.
Also let's play a very strange game, the rule are simply take a look at the Steam top wishlisted upcoming games and guess which ones EGS will make exclusive. Atomic Heart may possibly be one of those games that EGS snatches up along side stuff like The Last Night. The point I'm trying to make is that all EGS really has to do is look at that list to get an idea of what games they should snatch up.
Was I even planning to pick this game at launch/at all? Well sort of. I am very aware that this game exist and know that Nvidia has promoted it for their RTX cards in the past. I planned to eventually start the Metro game that I have on Steam. Once I heard that this game was going to be exclusive to EGS I decided to pre-order it right away to play it on Steam but after thinking about it some more seeing how it will still be available on Steam one year later, how in low on Cash, and in no real hurry to buy the game.
I can only imagine the type of uproar that Sekiro would cause if Activision announced that it would be exclusive to either (or both??) Epic Game Store and Battlenet. But what different with that game is that it's being published by Fromsoft in Japan and some other company in Asia, also that company in Asia it seems has their own PC launcher that they will also be selling Sekiro on in addition to Steam??
Man, 4A doesn't deserve this shit. That developer has been through hell and back to deliver some incredible games (literally smuggling dev kits across borders as they fled Ukraine) only to get dragged through the mud by their publisher.
I'm a console player so this doesn't affect me but it just saddens me to no end that what could end up being one of the games of the year will likely be overshadowed by this dumb as shit controversy.
I'm a console player so this doesn't affect me but it just saddens me to no end that what could end up being one of the games of the year will likely be overshadowed by this dumb as shit controversy.
It wouldn't be at least so hot of a topic right now.
It's not just about the game being ripped of steam, two weeks before release though. It's also about Epic using third party exclusivity to force people to come to their, sub-par store (which doesn't even have a cloud save feature, let alone family sharing or in-home streaming).
This is third party exclusivity an unheard move in the PC industry, it is perceived as anti competition and bad practice in general. Epic is taking something away and putting pressure on the people they want to become their future costumers, while claiming that they are trying to improve PC competition and margins for developers. In truth competition would be to offer the game on both (or all) store fronts so people can decide based on price and store features. Further Epic is throwing larger margins and bribes toward publishers and their shareholders instead of towards developers. Honey for the publisher, the whip for costumers.
Then a 4A developer was overwhelmed by all the negativity that is flying in from the PC community and vented on a Russian forum, he threatened people that future metro games won't come to PC at all. That made everything way worse. It's a PR disaster. At least Deep Silver took the blame back to them, without firing the individual dev that messed up, which is good.
The context was Steam's inability to run without an internet connection, the destruction of traditional game ownership, and forced updates that broke Half-Life 2, the game that was used to force people to get onboard.
As someone whose main gaming PC wasn't hooked up to the internet back in the day, Steam was unequivocally more intrusive and draconian than many implementations of GFWL.
Yes, GFWL was amazing and Windows Store is good.
Careful, your true colors are showing.
The Windows Store is terrible. Have you ever actually used it?
Honestly this is my biggest takeaway from the whole debacle.
Epic seems to be doing everything in their power to completely poison the well that is Epic Game Store before it even gets off the ground.
Instead of investing those billions of dollars in Fortnite V-Bucks on building an attractive platform to draw people in, they've instead chosen to focus on money-hatting 3rd party exclusives to strong-arm users onto their bare-bones service.
I've no issue with big publishers creating unique storefronts for their exclusive, in-house content. But when they frivolously throw money at 3rd parties and take options away from gamers, forcing them into a sub-par environment if they want to play. It's just a horrible look.
There could have been a world where I considered EGS a viable alternative to Steam. Perhaps competition even. But they've ruined any open-minded good will I might of had in a staggeringly short amount of time.
Perhaps I'm just one vote that doesn't matter in the end, but man I can't get over how quickly they flipped me from, "Tell me more." to "NEVER!", lol.
I mean, no. That is factually wrong. Games For Windows Live created an online profile by default and you couldn't play games without an internet connection. You had to follow a small link at the bottom of a help page to be able to create a local (offline) profile.
I don't mind giving developers a better cut, but what Epic's doing will largely just lead to publishers getting a bigger cut.