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Would you consider buying a game on the Epic Store over Steam?
- Thread starter Bungie
- Start date
Would depend on the game, is it never coming to steam? The price? Etc
I'm not against epic game store existing, or even it money hatting some devs. I'm against the fact that so far that I can't buy epic store games from a third party vendor like green man or cdkeys.
I don't give a fuck about whatever launcher I need to launch my game from.
I'm not against epic game store existing, or even it money hatting some devs. I'm against the fact that so far that I can't buy epic store games from a third party vendor like green man or cdkeys.
I don't give a fuck about whatever launcher I need to launch my game from.
Hell no, I don't even want my card nor my PayPal anywhere near that thing until they hire an actual customer service department.
Steam won't, or rather can't. They already lowered it to 80/20 for successful games, any lower is unsustainable for a store that actually pays for itself. EGS does its 'lower cut' by dumping parts of the difference onto consumers, and burning Epic's epic piggybank contents. What Epic is doing is called "predatory pricing".
If it's a game I want to play sure. why not. At the end of the day I play games and I if it's something I want to play I will buy it regardless of where its sold. Why would I skip out on something just because some people in internet thinks they don't want to support a certain marketplace ? lol. But if multiple places are selling it then I will buy from the place with the best price whether it be steam or epic or GoG or w/e as long as it's a legal way of buying the game.
You shouldn't skip anything because of other people's opinion. The question is how YOU feel about Epic's current strategy. If you're actually interested in buying games at the best price, it may not be the best idea to support a company that pays devs and publishers to keep their games away from 3rd party keystores. Not sure if you're aware of these keystores, but they have been saving me LOTS of money the past few years.
Like CDkeys and G2A? aren't those illegal keys ? I have heard people losing their games due to illegally obtained keys from those sites.
G2A is scummy as hell (please don't ever buy anything there) and cdkeys is selling keys meant for retail in countries with lower incomes. Both of these stores aren't official resellers.
I was talking about perfectly legal and official sites like Humble, Greenmangaming or Fanatical. You can often buy game keys with a significant discount on these sites and they are also selling cheap bundles.
Because of this, Epic boycotting these sites for EVERY game they moneyhat, results in more expensive games for us as consumers.
This is only one of the reasons why so many people dislike Epic's store.
Oh yeah I know of GreenManGaming I bought games from them many times. They are one of my first go to places when looking for PC games.
Same here. I've recently bought Dirt Rally 2 for €43 on GMG, while it was €55 on Steam.
Sadly, you won't find any games involved in Epic's moneyhatting on GMG or any other keystore because of Epic's policy. 😞
As far as I can see options haven't been taken away...only delayed and for that many, many consumers would like to see a large competitor completely dismantled that would offer a legitimate challenge to steam ultimately netting the best potential long term benefit for customers. That's a god complex no matter how you attempt to spin it.
Worse case scenario: wait it out, see how the Epic Games store works when the timed exclusivity ends and see what features it offers while buying the games on steam. If Epic pulls even with Steam in features offers devs more of a revenue share and at the same retail price to you or even slightly lower prices then Steam why would you not support them? Alternatively if Epic is the same as it is today and still is trying to lock down games Steam will increase developer's cut of revenue. It's not going to work out for Epic because people already waited out the first set of timed exclusives. Epic will either improve or get out..relax.
Amazon used to be a benevolent online retailer that offered products at a significant discount over retailers because retailors were conveniently close to everyone...now the retailors are gone, the amazon discounts are gone, the game specific discounts are gone as is the benevolent customer focused attitude amazon once had. The "Best price for the customer" attitude amazon once had has been replaced with the same "Just make the sale" attitude most other sellers have had. Steam is the next amazon without a legitimate large competitor to force them to either be fair with consumers or disintegrate into dust.
You can continue on with your self-deception if you like.
Steam made PC gaming easily accesible to millions more PC owners then before there was a Steam. It's been dominant for years at this point and multiple game media oriented journals that are steeped in the data have chronicled Steam's dominance in one way or another either in articles or by implication in video over the years until now.
Other game services have popped up recently with one of the larger ones being exposed as a scam most likely because they couldn't make money selling so few games because of Steam's dominance in the market but no services has the level of influence over games as Steam and only a dominant player will have that level influence.
Frankly, if it wasn't the case that Steam is essentially a monopoly Epic wouldn't not have gone the drastic route of offering almost all the revenue from sales to game developers and requiring exclusivity to begin with just to break into the market. It's desparate as far as business moves go, but it's more reflective of how Epic views the market and it's competitor rather then it's desire to accept a measly 12% of games sales out of the goodness of the board's collective heart.
It's actually not, you've confused retail pricing strategy with revenue sharing agreements which are business to business agreements that have little to nothing to do with pricing for potential customers.
Epic, so far matches competitors pricing or offers modest discounts on some games and is now offering the same refund policy as steam, there's nothing legally predatary/anti-competitive about that.
For a retail store, suppliers are business partners, and are equally "customers" purchasing a store's services in distributing their goods.
If I had a store chain with a general, advertised policy regarding suppliers wherein I buy all goods for retail at a price 15% higher than asking, and still price-match other store's retail prices for consumers, I would effectively be giving up a percentage of my "cut" of the sale price to give more money to the supplier - thus undercutting other stores for which such a policy would be unsustainable, leading to suppliers choosing to only work with my stores to maximize their profits.
I can't say how legal this is - legal definitions are fairly strict, they may only take the final consumer price into account. But functionally, this is still undercutting - creating aggressive financial benefits for common business partners that may draw their business away from other companies, leading to those companies losing money on lost business, or on trying to match your benefits.
This is before we get to the whole "hey here's a pile of money why don't you work only with us" situation that this favorable service pricing is supposed to encourage.
edit:
If Epic wanted to use their money to break into the business, they had multiple avenues of action. Including creating a store centered on game-sharing and digital resale. Developers and publishers wouldn't want to potentially lose money to resale - which is where the higher cut percentage and lump-sum incentives would come into play. Steam and GOG are also incapable of eating the costs that loss of actual game sales to digital resale and sharing would create.
Epic Games could, if they wanted to, compete fairly. On first-party content, developer benefits with UE4 and Fortnite-built infrastructure, and customer-facing features. They chose not to.
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Nope. The free ones are the only ones I'm interested in. Ignoring their questionable-at-best practices with consumers over the past few months, their vastly inferior client all but guarantees I have no reason to buy games from them. The handful of exclusives (many of which are only timed exclusives anyway, right?) are all they have to offer over the competition, and I have a backlog big enough to last more than a lifetime so I can miss out on those without much concern.
Nah, "Corporations are people" doesn't quite work like that and frankly it's why most businesses don't publicly announce or post business to business pricing for anything. In this case they do and with Steam they changed their cut but basically only give the biggest customers the discount, which really wouldn't have helped the companies that went for the timed exclusivity on EGS or it would have left them in limbo waiting to see where their revenue cut would end up versus just getting the 88%, plus a marketing and promotion to promote EGS and the temporary exclusivity of their games.
At the end of the day businesses want to and have the legal right to set their business to business negotiated pricing wherever they believe it best benefits them provided for whichever customers as long as pricing disparities aren't based on an already established illegal bias or illegal rule. Business to business rules in capitalism are somewhat minimal and have always been weighted towards prioritizing an aggressive multi-competitor business environment with the ideal objective being to produce the highest quality, fairest priced product via competition for the end consumer.
There are certainly areas where there are problems mostly in other markets*, but this just isn't one of them. Looking at the Epic store it's pretty obvious to me that most of the games that are exclusive and the games that either would have struggled to meet high sales on Steam or would have struggled to be profitable giving up 30% of of their revenue to Steam for PC sales.
Also, this is really all Steam's fault anyway. Back when Epic was negotiating to release Fortnite had Steam realized that because they didn't invest a dime in the development or the marketing of the game and really don't add much value to the games themselves they aren't entitled to almost half of the revenue and they should have changed the split to like 85%/15% Epic would have released the Fortnite on Steam, and Epic wouldn't be on a warpath with Steam right now by building EGS.
Also, businesses enter into legally sanctioned exclusive partnerships with contractual obligations for both deemed beneficial for both parties everyday, that' just the way business works.
*Consider this...there's going to come a point where the whole legality of buying goods from a communist country will for sure come into question because competing companies going behind closed doors and colluding to fix prices to gouge customers with an over-inflated price or a cheap price and product that needs constant replacing is totally illegal, however in a communist country that's really how they do business internationally. If you and your competition are knowingly buying price fixed products aren't you yourself indirectly involved in price fixing? This is a real predatory/anti-competitive problem with not only trillion's of dollars in play but also trillions in governmental debt that compels the legal system to generally overlook the spirit of the law and leaves consumers with a lot of cheaply made, potentially poisonous overpriced products that have to be replaced unnecessarily over and over again. The burden of every legal action is to prove that some quantifiable damage has been done to the consumer.
i've got plenty of disagreements with valve and their policies and would be very open to switching to alternatives, but epic seems very dedicated to making sure i'll never consider them
Not if Steam had the game as well, but I wouldn't be opposed to buying and Epic Store exclusive.
The only reason I could see is if I wanted to give more money to the devs but I would prefer Itch or Humble Widget for that scenario (and if a game can release on both stores, it can probably also release on Itch).
No because the current state of the store is no where near Steam. If Epic does follow through on making the store more attractive then sure I would
If we are assuming that its available on both and the prices are the same, I see no reason to even entertain the epic store
The author was Allegra Frank, do you want to besmirch her reputation without evidence or contact her directly and tell her that her article was nonsense without evidence and report back?
Never!
Fuck their free games also. I will never even install their crap store.
I have hundreds of games in my backlog and wishlist from AAA games to indie gems and can easily skip games or wait until exclusivity runs out.
Epic went from one of my favourite developers during UT/Gears days to my most hated one.
Fuck their free games also. I will never even install their crap store.
I have hundreds of games in my backlog and wishlist from AAA games to indie gems and can easily skip games or wait until exclusivity runs out.
Epic went from one of my favourite developers during UT/Gears days to my most hated one.
When more and more games are take away, for a year at least, then yes, that is options lost. Having to wait for your prefered type of packaging for a year, for a signficant number of high profile games, that is options being taken away for the customers.
And the absolute majority of us are not rooting for the dismantling of the store. I sure am not. Few, if any, would be opposed to games being sold on an additional place.
Most of times people speak about how they want Epic to fail with this, it is because of the way Epic are taking these games for longer periods, or indefinitely, not because there's another a store available for the customer.
Nobody with more than ten big games on their Steam library will want to disseminate their collection over multiple launchers -in my case I have +350 big titles very low number compared with some others +1000 games- on the same way people tends to be loyal to a brand, not for the brand, you've there your achievements, you community posts, friends and some other features.
Sorry tencent holdings you're too late to the party. No Steam no buy, except for some little games like VNs that don't use launchers.
My pc is now my windows steam machine.
With this Epic "pro devs" but no "pro costumers" attitude you feel better using cpy they're even bragging in social media that they don't even need to sell one unit to survive, then right that's the point.
No malware launchers.
Sorry tencent holdings you're too late to the party. No Steam no buy, except for some little games like VNs that don't use launchers.
My pc is now my windows steam machine.
With this Epic "pro devs" but no "pro costumers" attitude you feel better using cpy they're even bragging in social media that they don't even need to sell one unit to survive, then right that's the point.
No malware launchers.
The only reason I'd add any games on steam, is because a 3rd party gives me steam codes. I'd much rather pay g2a and risk losing games than pay valve (though I buy from legitimate resellers most of the time). If price is the same, I'd gladly support devs and buy on EGS.
if you had any idea of how g2a worked, you'd understand that by buying on g2a you're actually screwing over your valued devs
You are not paying the same price in many cases. Games are often cheaper on 3rd party key stores.
No.
The reason is that I'm not really buying my Steam games on Steam store either. I do occasionally take good deals on the Steam store as well, but Steam the client and store are pretty much entirely separate things to me. Buying a key from outside the Steam store is functionally the same as buying a game from the Steam store, although refunds may be more complicated (refunds are a good Steam store perk). Humble Bundle's store gives you 10% off for having the monthly bundle subscription, which is one good example of a perk of not being locked into one store.
Epic launcher games have all been exclusive to Epic's store only, except for The Division 2 which was still moneyhatted in a way that you only have one alternative (Uplay) - and you won't get it on the Epic launcher if you buy it from Uplay. I don't want to support these kinds of monopolies.
The reason is that I'm not really buying my Steam games on Steam store either. I do occasionally take good deals on the Steam store as well, but Steam the client and store are pretty much entirely separate things to me. Buying a key from outside the Steam store is functionally the same as buying a game from the Steam store, although refunds may be more complicated (refunds are a good Steam store perk). Humble Bundle's store gives you 10% off for having the monthly bundle subscription, which is one good example of a perk of not being locked into one store.
Epic launcher games have all been exclusive to Epic's store only, except for The Division 2 which was still moneyhatted in a way that you only have one alternative (Uplay) - and you won't get it on the Epic launcher if you buy it from Uplay. I don't want to support these kinds of monopolies.
I hate a lot of the things about steam, that are considered "pro-consumer" practices and are held against EGS. The two things that bother me the most are user-reviews and valve not going through with paid mods. I think user reviews are about as bad as comments sections on news articles, but curiosity gets the better of me and I usually end up being pissed off about the people writing these dumb reviews. And I thought that Valve was completely spineless not even attempting to go through with paid mods. Did the initial design of the system was flawed? Sure. But they never really let it to be tried out and developped further and bethesda ended up doing only a half measure compared to an actual mods store.
That's not entirely correct, though. That 30% cut goes towards things like a content delivery network, billing, customer service, cloud saves, etc. Stuff like that might not be much of a problem for a company like Epic, but it might be very difficult if not impossible for a small to medium dev/publisher.
Even larger businesses might decide they'll be better off offloading those things to Steam rather than devoting resources handling all that themselves. That's how Valve justify their cut. Whether Epic can sustain all of that on 12% in the long term remains to be seen, considering they only opened their game store a few months ago.
