Hmm *thinkingface*
They are so business savvy that they apparently NEED the EGS money to survive (according to the "will-anyone-think-of-the-developers!" people)
It is quite the Oxymoron.
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Epic Store and 12% cut
- Thread starter dex3108
- Start date
Hmm *thinkingface*
They are so business savvy that they apparently NEED the EGS money to survive (according to the "will-anyone-think-of-the-developers!" people)
It is quite the Oxymoron.
This shows that Sweeney never planned to make EGS a competent product. 12% might be enough to operate it, but not for improve it.
Economics literature is littered with examples of people who should know better making bad financial decisions.
Highly educated people in high positions of economic power have always told the truth candidly and acted in the best interest of the consumer. Modern capitalism has never been about self interest and skewing data to increase stock value and/or company profit and/or public perception. That's like a republican fact. By extension, I get all my information on environmental policy from execs with MBAs in the coal and oil industry who have access to their own hard data.
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So I take it you buy every game you can direct from the devs and your Itch.io and GOG library is fucking nuts?
You got the receipts?
I actually did read your post in its entirety, however, I did misread a section. My mistake.
EGS exclusivity and launcher fragmentation is unfortunate, but I see it as an inevitable consequence of PC as an open platform and a trade for all the benefits we get.
At some point, someone was going to decide they could adopt the console plan of loss-leading exclusives to acquire market share. I think Epic is right in identifying that .12*price - exclusivity fee is more than the zero dollars they will make on a game if everyone buys it on Steam instead. Metro, and Origin before it, shows that a lot of people don't care about their PC gaming ecosystem, they care about the game they want to play.
Exclusivity is anti-consumer, but it's not anti-consumer enough for the people to actually rally against the games.
At some point, someone was going to decide they could adopt the console plan of loss-leading exclusives to acquire market share. I think Epic is right in identifying that .12*price - exclusivity fee is more than the zero dollars they will make on a game if everyone buys it on Steam instead. Metro, and Origin before it, shows that a lot of people don't care about their PC gaming ecosystem, they care about the game they want to play.
Exclusivity is anti-consumer, but it's not anti-consumer enough for the people to actually rally against the games.
I mean yeah, if people are dumb enough to not realize they're getting the shaft, there's nothing we can do.
I don't think we have the data necessary to conclude this just yet.
The quote I was referencing was criticizing Matt who literally has built a career analyzing this information, both as an analyst at NPD and internally within a major publisher (Activision). The idea someone here quoting him and saying "you must be bad at economics" is beyond laughable.
Why are we trying to throw down on Mat now
His whole thing is numbers, he doesn't really have a dog in this fight except to remind me that I was a foolish fool for buying into VR
FOOL
His whole thing is numbers, he doesn't really have a dog in this fight except to remind me that I was a foolish fool for buying into VR
FOOL
Metro doesn't shows us anything. As said earlier in this thread, we have no clue how much it sold on EGS vs Steam.
And Origin... Yeah it proves that people are willing to use it for F2P games and for long running popular franchises like Fifa, Sims and Battlefield. But other games failed to build a decent community on pc so far, including the excellent Titanfall 2.
I'm also not sure how well games like Unraveled and Fe sold on Origin. No doubt their lack of visibility and community hub had a negative impact on their sales.
We do know that Origin Access (premium) is doing great tho. So it seems that if a store is offering something that greatly benefits consumers, people ARE willing to use it.
Sadly, Epic rather bullies people into using their store by taking all other options away. No doubt many people will tolerate EGS to play these exclusive games, but let's wait and see if they are willing to buy non-exclusive games in Epics store as well. If they don't, EGS won't become very profitable.
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I misread your subtext then. We get a lot of bad faith arguments on this topic here. On the specific point that Mat is bad at his job, no he very much isn't. I agree with you.
He said that a storefront's customers are publishers and developers. I think he is unfairly diminishing the importance of end customers, the people that actually pay for games.
Origin has also does some things to attract customers too. 99 dollars a year for ea access premier and I get access to all day one ea games with another 100+ in their vault? I'll take that.
Once Epic starts focusing more on the customer they will get more good will and support.
Once Epic starts focusing more on the customer they will get more good will and support.
Are you equating a marginally lower cut on Steam with literally not being allowed on a platform...? EGS in it's current state is not even remotely close to being better for small devs than Steam. If the marketshares of Steam and EGS were to reverse overnight it would be a disaster for small indie developers.
What's the shaft here exactly if they just want to play the game? It's quite possible that to some gamers, using the EGS (for whichever reason) is not of concern to them. Or that a user is OK with not using Steam's features.
Paying more for the same game, or not being able to buy at all would be big ones, methinks.
Even if you don't use the extra fluff, you're getting a worse deal than you would usually have, by the fact that it got removed from other storefronts. The possibily of getting the game cheaper, for example.
But if you're a regular PC gamer I really, really doubt you don't care about the features of other platforms (achievements, cloud saves, trading cards, etc). At the very least you would miss cloud saves.
Having to pay more for the game than they otherwise would, having to pay extra fees on top of the advertised cost, having to trust your credit card data to a third party with a spotty security record, and even just having no support forums to turn to if there's an issue, all rather qualify for "getting the shaft", even if you're not into using Steam's other features.
It's true for most cases outside of the US and certain countries in and around the EU. While it may be true that the rest of the world doesn't have nearly as much money per capita as the US of A, it's a rather uncomfortable truth for these richer and happier people, that we do rather significantly outnumber them.
edit: wops, meant to edit. Actually, can we get automatic multipost merging as a feature? I think I saw it in some other forums.
I can understand certain people's concerns about these in this forum and elsewhere on the net, but I think people are massively overrating the general concern about these issues amongst PC gamers. Time will tell to see if that truly becomes a factor.
You are basically asking "why should the majority of people care" and that is not something we can answer. There are distinctive disadvantages, and yes, a lot of them don't affect a bunch of people, specially in some of the most important regions revenue-wise.
Which sucks for us who are advocating against EGS, but is also the bare minimum to EGS to actually be considered usable.
You know 30% of Steam's revenue is from Asia? where 90% of them use payment systems unavaliable on the EGS?
Not to mention the fact that the largest country in Asia is not avaliable on the EGS?
If we assume that 0 people on EGS buy a moneyhatted game and they'll all wait to buy the game full price on Steam after 6 months, then a deal with Epic is basically free money to delay your game 6 months. Not a bad deal at all really. The only real risks are:
-pissing off potential customers that would've bought the game on Steam but now won't buy it out of principle
-losing potential customers that don't want to wait 6 months for Steam AND are willing to pirate the game instead
I'd probably take the deal too tbh
I would say that the Steam pre-order spike for Metro showed that quite a few people care actually. Time will tell for sure, but one crucial difference between the EGS situation and Origin/Battle.net is that in the former case we know that the games will be coming to Steam later anyway so people have the option of just waiting it out and playing other games instead of either moving or not playing the game at all.
Thank you for your answer! I am amazed all these payment solutions are compatible with Steam. Only familiar with Nanaco and Alipay and not in the Steam context.
Mind you, that is not a comprehensive list; just what I could quickly remember + easily searchable/wikiable stuff.
You forgot the third option: people just moving on and not buying your game because there are already way too many games competing for your attention and people may not be interested in buying a year old game when it releases on steam late. This, combined with bad blood due to doing exclusivity, could damage a company's brand longer term. The short term cash infusion could be nice, but it may not be a sustainable model. If the first exclusive game doesn't sell well enough, will epic moneyhat a second? Can epic keep doing moneyhats with a 12% cut from their store? Fortnite won't be top dog forever. They need to have a long term strategy.
I think it's clear what their long term strategy is. Get people to amass a collection on their store composed of exclusives and free games. If they eventually have to ramp down the loss leading, people will stay on EGS because it has their collection on it already, and by that time I'm sure they plan to be much closer to feature parity.
The bolded is true, but I was comparing EGS to the Origin scenario where the customer knew beforehand that the game would never come to Steam. People fucking off forever is a concern in both scenarios. I do agree that Epic's long term plans seem extremely iffy at the moment since it's trivially easy for all of the customers they're gaining right now to simply ignore the store outside of the free/moneyhatted shit.
I mean, even if EGS builds a user base, long term they will still have to compete with steam, which most people are likely to also have a library in, but steam also offers more features and generally better pricing (due to third party sellers), so if Epic is no longer doing exclusivity the customers still won't have a reason for going back to Epic.
I don't give a damn about Valve.
I own more games on GOG then I do on Steam. I don't want GOG to go under because of all this crap.
In addition, I want MORE publishers to get rid of their antiquated notions that DRM somehow ensures sales and put their games on GOG. Last year THQ Nordic committed to put their big releases on GOG Day 1, and it was a positive move for the industry. (Edit to add: a major Japanese publisher (Capcom) released one of its recent big games (Dragon's Dogma) DRM-free. The recently-maligned 2K went on a sharing spree, bringing the first 2 Bioshocks, the Mafia trilogy and new X-com + The Bureau to GOG as well)
Epic's exclusivity is taking us the opposite way from where I want it to go. So I'll do my damn best to discourage people from giving Epic money, and I'll give most of my money to GOG, because they have a USP to their store I respect and am willing to pay higher prices for- DRM-free installers, providing me with best semblance of actual ownership over my games.
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While somebody else already listed some of the payment services, here's the previously posted GDC video of Valve talking about the whole stuff: https://youtu.be/wrvr02SiHY4?t=1970
Some choice info from that video:
- Steam market in Russia is now bigger than the whole of Steam back in 2010.
- The five "standard" payment methods account for only 12,5% of all Steam payments in Asia
- The markets outside of Northern America and Western Europe are approaching half of all Steam business
And if the service is not available/accessible at all some people are going to look for alternate sources for getting the game.
In all cases of EGS exclusivity.
This is definitely true for people who bought a lot of PC games pre-2017. But look at how fast the Steam paying customer base is growing. EGS doesn't have to convert Steam users, they just have to make themselves the first store of a lot of folks buying their first PC game.
Some examples:
+ fortnite player who decides to buy a game that's on both Steam/EGS: why install another program/manage another library?
+ someone who got a bunch of free PC games from EGS and now wants to buy their first game: why install another program/manage another library?
+ person buying their first gaming PC and wants an AAA PC stress test game: Metro is only available on EGS
They are optimizing the paths by which new PC gamers could come to see EGS as their default option.
Unless they match Steam's key generating options, eventually EGS customers will still flock to the Steam ecosystem, because Steam keys remain cheaper than Epic's prices for any non-exclusive title.
I believe developers get a cut out of that as well.
Unless things change I can't imagine anyone living within Epic's walled garden.
Anyone that even remotely follows PC gaming is going to see the prettier outside world that exists beyond Epic's walls
Big problem with you idea, the growing player base are kids who, unless their parents are loaded. do not their own Credit or Debit cards because well they are kids. Most parents will not want to even risk giving kids unresticted access to their card, this is why you have Top-Up cards. EGS is not selling Top-Up cards because of the 12%.
Congrats Epic you have just priced out your current Fortnite player base out of you new EGS.
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I think some people will pay premium prices to keep their games on one platform.
If EGS can expand to offer a similar scale of selection as other comparable curated stores (PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo), I don't see why many people wouldn't be content to play there, or at least prefer it to other platforms if the majority of their library is already on EGS.
Do we have any evidence that most new paying PC gamers are kids? In anything, I would expect them to be either people with newly disposable income (young adults) or those in growing markets. The latter group may indeed be anti-EGS. Top-up cards are not inherently incompatible with EGS though, as they could pass the same payment method tax on to the customer purchasing the card as the other EGS methods.
I am not rooting for EGS in particular (I don't own any non-free games on it), but I don't see its model as something preventable. And I think the strategy will work for them and make them a major player in PC gaming within a few years.
I seriously doubt anyone who's much into PC at all is going to limit themselves to the epic store. As soon as they want a game that's not on it, that's over.
Personally, I don't want them gone. I want them to do better, and they can start by stop treating their potential customers as dumbasses.
But certainly they will have a hard time convincing me lol
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To be clear, I don't think they will limit themselves to EGS. But I can see a group of PC gamers who treat EGS like most treat Steam: their preferred place to buy games, with other stores being used only when a game they want isn't available. (Again, this group are the ones I referred to in an earlier post when I described a hypothetical group of new PC gamers whose first PC game purchases are on EGS).
I can see some people calling it homebase if they get their start there.
Fortnite is notorious for having an audience skewing young. Epic themselves have stated that a large part of their Epic Launcher audience (read: Fortnite on PC) don't use Steam. Combine both statements, and you've got the claim that the audience that Fortnite is introducing to PC gaming skews young.
This might be possible in the future. The problem is that I don't think a lot of people are paying for their first PC game on EGS (see also: the approx 5% conversion rate for Slime Rancher, despite being free and advertised via notification to everyone using the Epic Launcher).
That may be the case. It's key to my prediction and if it turns out to not be true then all Epic's loss leading will be for nothing I think.
If this continue as they are then they'd want to use other storefronts simply because they have more presence and the best deals.
You can go on Amazon and buy Steam, Uplay, Origin, and Battle Net games, the same way you would consoles. There's a level of convenience that Epic lacks.
The advantage of getting kids is that as they grow up while the store devlops they will build up a collection and thus an attachement over the years, this is why it would be so good for Epic to win them over now, so when they are young adults with disposable income they will be more loyal to Epic.
If they are young adults with the desposable income the to be serious PC gamer then it to late, sure they will pick up a few games on Epic. However they will want all the big name games when they come out and as Epic are not yet in a postion to keep up with supply they and the young adults will have to go to other stores.
As for the payment methods tax on Top-Up cards it amazes me that anybody think this idea is remotly sane. You can only apply the payment tax when you sell the card in the shop and do you think anybody will buy a a £50 Epic Top-up card for £55 (or what ever the tax rate they would charge) when they can buy a £50 top-up for Steam, Xbox, Sony, Nintendo, EA, Activision, Apple and every other company I missed for £50.