Observation (game from creators of Stories Untold, published by Devolver Digital) exclusive to Epic Games Store on PC
- Thread starter InquisitorAles
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Then that will be the day the affected gamers eventually come to consider EGS as an option. Before that happens you are not "thinking of me", in fact since you actually took that into consideration before making the decision it feels like a bigger insult than those who are not aware.
I don't fault devs for wanting to profit. They just don't exist for me anymore since there's no way for me to buy the game.
If you handwave every single legitimate problem away with "yes I'm sure it will eventually happen" - despite no evidence of the likelihood of that happening - then sure, nothing is so bad about EGS.
Yeah I'm used to the Epic store not available for me. Pretty clear cut.
It's always been a bad thing, its just the console warriors who get all happy that their game isn't going to be playable on another platform.
Console exclusives have existed for years.
Edit: Imagine working on a game for years only to not make a deal with Epic, leading to relying purely on sales, not selling enough, and then having to shut the studio down, meaning you can't make a 2nd game.
Compare the feature set of the console stores and compare it to Steam and asks yourself again what exactly brings this "healthy competition". (paid online VS free, etc... )
Exclusivities is a way to bypass creating or needing a better product. Also, the console industry is starting that stay away from 3rd party exclusivities. Naughty Dog is owned by Sony btw.
They are currently in some kind of grey area. That is why they work together with Perfect World now to make it all legal in China.
And your sales are bad because?
Maybe your game is not good. Maybe you are not good enough as developer. Maybe your marketing was not enough. Whatever.
Why you need to rely on exclusivity deals money to survive? Really are you questioning those exclusivity deals as the real deal to developers existence? Oh boy.
That's the reality of most devs, since Epic are heavily curating their store, and this moneyhatting is only a temporary thing even for the selected few.
As I've stated before, anyone in the industry will tell you that a good game does not automatically sell well.
If you like a developer's games, would you rather they make 1 more game, or 2+?
Exactly, the industry is extremely unreliable. Which is why devs will take some reliability when they can.
Why you feel Devolver is in good situation based on just 80/20/5 when they limit title availability?
They are in good place as they got mountain of cash as sign on bonus, but other than that... how they are putting themselves into good position to succeed with sales? Do you feel that large part of EGS userbase that is for large part there for Fortnite will purchase Observation? Same audience that apparently didn't really go for Exodus and it's closer to their wheelhouse of game preference, I would argue.
Relaying on Epic handing out stacks of cash and covering your development costs + X thousand sales isn't sustainable business model. Not for Epic and especially not for developer. Epic has already said that faucet will be closed "soon" as they want walk away from paying for exclusives. If they will follow through is another question.
Also succeeding on Epic golden handshake also gambles on getting picked by Epic into their garden to begin with. For now they have been harvesting in established publishers, developers and/or brands. Not struggling studios that would benefit most from this all, which is shame.
Making a LOT of assumptions here. There are many, many quality games that don't get a lot of sales simply due to various reasons including many that are out of the indie studios control. If there was a way to be able to make the game you want to make and guarantee compensation for yourself to support your family via an upfront exclusivity deal, many developers are naturally going to decide on that solution if made available to them.
Valve is in progress of making a Chinese Steam by means of cooperating with Perfect World, but they also happen to not geolock Chinese users out of their worldwide infrastructure. I think this is one of the things that can actually be traced to Tencent's stake in Epic, in that PRC can directly retaliate against Tencent if EGS content annoys them.
Frankly, PRC's preventive censorship is such a pain that I can understand Epic not bothering, the real WTF for me is South Korea.
Here's a little secret for you: a pc is NOT a console. :)
Sony and Microsoft are using exclusives to motivate people into buying their proprietary hardware. But most of the revenue they make from these people doesn't come from these exclusives; it is generated by royalties from the sales of 3rd party games, and subscription services that are locked to this hardware.
On PC, it doesn't work like that. Epic can force people to use their store to buy an exclusive game, but that doesn't mean people will use Epic's store to buy other (non-exclusive) games as well. The reason for this that pc is an open platform that allows competition: pc gamers have a CHOICE where the want to buy and play their games, based on things that appeal to them like pricing, features and pro-consumer policies. Store exclusivity deals are taking that choice away.
On pc, no one will chose a certain store to buy game X because game Y is only available in that store. But a game being DRM-free is a valid season for me to buy a game on GoG instead of Steam for example. Because of this, it is in the consumers best interests that a game is available on as many stores as possible.
Last but not least: there's a huge difference between Microsoft and Sony funding their own exclusive games, and paying 3rd party devs and publishers to keep nearly completed games away from competing storefronts. What Epic is doing is the same as Microsoft moneyhatting Rise of the Tomb Raider, which didn't exactly help the reputation of the Xbox One. And Epic isn't doing this for one game: they are grabbing as much games as they can.
Please read my post above. I'm curious, are you a pc gamer?
Sorry that your quote got cut out, something went wrong in the quoting process. Anyway, I strongly disagree. Valve has done a hell of a lot for developers too, the most important one being the creation and retention of an audience willing to spend money on their games. The difference is that Valve puts the customer first in the developer-customer relationship and that's always how it should be because without customers neither Valve nor developers can maintain a business.
Here's the thing though. That is the scale of the difference for you. It's certainly not for me or for a big part of the PC community all over the internet. You don't speak for all these people and neither you nor anyone else can decide how important this situation is for them. Clearly you don't care, clearly you don't see a big difference but others very much do and that's just the way it is. You're going to have to accept that people have different priorities and that something that's no big deal to you is very important to others.
I don't expect any different from developers. Most of them have proven over time that they'll happily take the moneyhats. They should understand however that exclusives not meeting any resistance in console gaming doesn't mean that the same thing will happen in PC gaming. It might, or it might not. Time will tell.
No, I find it quite appropriate. Keeping in mind that we're talking about gaming and not something more serious, trying to force customers to use a bad platform that they don't like by taking away their options means that these customers are indeed fucked.
Ofc not and like I said I understand devs who do it. Do not lie though and say "its best for the customers", because the customers in the end gets a worse deal in the long run.
Maybe the game is good, but in a saturated market.
Maybe the game is good, but doesnt have a big demographic who is interested in such games.
Maybe marketing failed etc.
I do not think that this is Epics concern. Blizzard is available there. Even uPlay and the UWP.
It is just that you have to pay tax there for every transaction, so the 12% is not sustainable in China. You cant just say "I open a digital distribution plattform, but file my taxes in Luxembourg and only there".
The console analogy never makes sense for me. I can actually buy a console. I might not want to, but the option is there.
EGS leaves me no option. I'm not moving out my country to play a game.
It's just a gut feeling, and just based off of my interactions with players, but I would guess there are plenty of people who play games who don't care at all about exclusivity. Especially since it's not a $400 box they have to buy to access the game, it's a different launcher. To them it's no different from real stores - there are some brands that you can only get at one store.
But how many of them would be interested in Observation or even know the game exist? Furthermore how many of them will be interested enough to create an account and download EGS just for that game?
This is a good point. I'm assuming Epic approached Devolver, and they went round the various devs to see who was interested. Devolver could have told Epic to jog on, but given how they seem so for the devs, they would have presumably felt obligated to offer them the opportunity for their game to immediately be profitable.
If that is true then they were in a bit of rock and hard place scenario, but they should just come out and say so. That response they gave out earlier was clearly bollocks.
No, the customers get a better deal in the long run, because that good developer can make more games. It just happens that you are not a customer anymore and (if their bet pays off) they have gained new customers.
I play games on everything.
New customers for them means less customers for other indie dev. Demand has a limit as well as people's money and time.
I think this is your developer-centric view speaking. You seem to be completely detached from what your customers might consider important besides the game itself.
These are all questions that I guarantee you Devolver and the developer discussed before making the decision. It's a risk they're taking, which is why Epic pays them money - to offset the risk.
So another game being made or not from a developer you like isn't important to you or other players?
Than you should know that console tactics don't work on pc because it isn't a closed ecosystem. Even Microsoft seems to realize this nowadays. ;)
I'm sure they did, but I really feel like they underestimated the backlash and the potential loss in the long term with this deal. We can more or less already see that with the screenshots from Devolver earlier in this thread.
As I said in my previous post, the money offset the short term risk, but I'm cautious of what's going to happen for their next game.
No. The product is still worth less, because you get a product that does not offer (right now) cloud saves or achievements. And e.g. you lose the chinese customers. I doubt that the Fortnite audience suddenly will think "Oh. Observation. Thats my drift! Gotta buy it in droves!"
Look at Slay the Spire. 43% sales from China on PC. You are gambling with 43% of your potential playerbase to release a game risk-free by getting money and in the end pissing the customer off. (https://www.resetera.com/threads/sl...llion-copies-43-of-it-came-from-china.106387/)
The Dawn of Men devs said even 60% of their sales are from China.
None of the big indie-devs talked about any of the sales on the EGS which kinda feels like, besides getting money, they didnt really create new customers just by being there.
And I don't want Valve to have a defacto monopoly on PC gaming as a developer + providing extremely poor support for the amount of money they make and the cut they chop off the top, so I'm glad to see the pressure being applied to them.
Epic's giving a better cut because they should. 30% was an old percent from older physical days, and nobody should be charging it digitally. Epic lets you use Epic's backend and servers without locking your game to the EGS or even to Unreal; Valve forces your game to be locked to Steam if you use Steamworks functionality. Epic waives their engine fee for sales on their own store; Valve doesn't waive fees for Source games sold via Steam. Epic's been sharing the wealth of their Fortnite money with their grants program with developers; Valve has never done anything similar as a program for Steam, despite the amount of money they make off the backs of other developers.
They are missing some features, but I'm fairly sure they'll implement them over time. I put up with functionality in Steam being completely inoperable in Steam since 2003 for multiple years; I can't really fault Epic for needing to play catchup in that regard.
I already know they're not gonna do the exclusive thing forever, but it's how they're gonna have to bootstrap their customer. Nobody is gonna wander outside the Steam walled garden if they can get the same game for the same price on both storefronts. That's reality. Exclusives gets people to come over and try the store. Of course Valve doesn't need to do this, because they're a de-facto monopoly and those rarely have empathy for those that have to work with them or die off. And no, selling Steam keys via other stores is not competition. They're still Steam keys that have to be redeemed on Steam. No, you cannot generate as many of those keys as you want as a developer per Steam's own documentation, and they WILL turn developers down on key requests. You can ask Gabe Newell yourself via email, and he'll confirm they turn down key requests.
I mean, this is literally the same way Valve bootstrapped Steam. They had Half Life 2 and you could only play it via Steam, buy it via Steam, and the physical version required Steam activation to even work. They then eventually started adding other games, but there was nowhere else to play Half Life 2.
Epic's just doing the Valve playbook. They have Fortnite, which you could only launch via the Epic Games launcher, and then Epic used the game's success to bootstrap a store. Except this time the friends list functionality will actually work the first three years it's out and Epic hasn't arbitrarily shut down the legacy online service for their older titles like Valve did to WON to force people to get on Steam if they wanted to keep playing games they had already paid money for.
At least this whole thing has made people stop spamming devs to "switch to Unreal" every time they talk about using another engine.
Edit: ^FyreWulff speaks the truth.
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree, y'all. I just don't see the Steam features as all that important, personally speaking, and I'm confident the important ones will show up soon enough. Either way, I'm fine with a store that's literally just a place to purchase games and nothing else.
I agree that EGS should be in China, that really sucks that it isn't and I didn't know that it wasn't until I entered this thread.
Edit 2: Coming back to this post to clarify: my posts in this thread are purely speaking about my general viewpoint of the matter, and not a specific contractual agreement with Epic. I did not speak to anyone behind the EGS, I am just speaking as a general developer about the matter.
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree, y'all. I just don't see the Steam features as all that important, personally speaking, and I'm confident the important ones will show up soon enough. Either way, I'm fine with a store that's literally just a place to purchase games and nothing else.
I agree that EGS should be in China, that really sucks that it isn't and I didn't know that it wasn't until I entered this thread.
Edit 2: Coming back to this post to clarify: my posts in this thread are purely speaking about my general viewpoint of the matter, and not a specific contractual agreement with Epic. I did not speak to anyone behind the EGS, I am just speaking as a general developer about the matter.
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Developers who signed the EGS deal did not know...
I personally know one dev on a team who has an EGS exclusive deal that they did not know.
And Phoenix Point devs also did not know about that and do not have a clue how chinese backers will get their key....
Well, I'm not surprised a developer is going to downplay services that matter to a consumer. All you care about is selling your game, so a store is just a store to you.
For the rest of us, they're more than just stores. Hence the reason Fyrewulf admits that nobody would choose the Epic store over Steam if not for exclusives. They have literally nothing to offer the actual user of the store. But they're a dream for publishers because they're doling out that microtransaction money to help themselves to a larger piece of the pie.
My favorite game of all time is the original X-Com from 1994 by Julian Gollop. I backed his latest creation, Phoenix Point, as soon as the crowdfunding campaign went live. Phoenix Point was quite literally the only game I was really looking forward in 2019. As soon as Gollop announced his deal with Epic, I asked and received a refund. A game can be important to me but it is just that: a single game. In the grand scheme of things, a very tiny part of my overall life as a gamer. If I accept Epic's and these developers' bullshit, I will be screwing myself over for years to come. My stance right now has the potential to mess up the platform I prefer and make all of my gaming worse.
This is why I'm saying that your developer-centric view is blinding you to what your customers want. For you, the developer of a game, the whole universe revolves around you and your creation. You fail to realize that for customers that have invested many years of their life to gaming, the decisions that you make can have an adverse effect on a much bigger scale if they choose to support you despite them.
Short term gain risking your future titles and bomb your user base doesnt seem like a plan in the long run.
To me it sounds more like a Capital flight
Also, again with the its just another launcher argument
Nintendo didn't "secure" exclusivity with Platinum. They straight-up funded the entire development of their games. Same with Sony. Console-exclusive games are more often than not entirely funded by the platform holder, literally "made to order". There are no issues to be had with those games being exclusives, other than "I wish it were not so", because if they were not exclusive it's a good bet they wouldn't have happened at all.
Selling keys through online stores, which Valve doesn't take any money for is indeed competition. You may not be a consumer but I am, and as a consumer it's a benefit to me that sites are competing for me to purchase a game through them rather than someone else. It's no different than Amazon competing with Best Buy.
If we're going to whine that they're selling Steam keys my answer is then why the hell aren't you selling you're keys through online key sellers? What's stopping you? Take the zero percent cut like Valve and let stores compete selling your keys. Uplay does this.
So let's quit the whining about key selling sites selling Steam keys, because as a consumer I welcome ANY launcher to do the same because it's to my benefit! They won't though because Epic can't do without a cut of the sale, plus Epic wants to keep prices high.
As for Steam turning down some key requests, yeah...because shady developers were dishing out keys in exchange for positive reviews. That's misleading consumers, so yeah, Valve curbed it and also changed the way reviews count.
Except Linux gamers and people in certain parts of the world literally cannot play the game due to it moving to the egs.
So no, it's not a "10% fewer popcorn toppings" scale of difference. Stop being disingenuous.
Because it's actually against your developer agreement to officially permanently undersell Steam itself and can lead to your games and access to Steam being revoked. Please read the documentation above, it would have answered this question and gives this exact example.
No, it wasn't over that. Once again, they quite literally explain situations where they will turn down keys, and plenty of non-shady developers have had key requests revoked. You can email Gabe Newell and ask him if a developer can do 100% of their sales via no-royalty generated Steam keys.
And even if it were possible (which it isn't), in no real world would 0% cut actually be sustainable. Valve deserves money for the service they provide; however, that amount isn't 30% of every sale.
I think most PC gamers agree that Valve shouldn't have a monopoly on PC gaming. But that doesn't mean we have to accept Epic's shitty moneyhatting tactics. What we need is a competitor making a better alternative for Steam. What we don't need is a big company that spends millions to make Steam and other existing storefronts worse.
Can't disagree with any of this.
We're 2019 now, not 2003. If you launch a storefront today that doesn't even support basic features like cloud saves or an offline mode, you either don't care or you don't know what you're doing imo.
Not it's not. People will use other storefronts if there's a valid reason to do so. The Witcher 3 sold more on GoG than Steam for example.
Wow, your hate against Steam is strong. No doubt you have your reasons for this, but again, I agree that Steam needs competition. PC gaming needs competition. But PC gaming doesn't need console-like moneyhatting.
Valve made the Orange Box. No one is complaining that Fortnite is EGS exclusive.
No they aren't. Again, Valve never paid 3rd party devs or publishers to keep their games away from competing storefronts. And that what it's all about. But it seems you and probably many other developers are seeing this as a logical step to compete against Steam, while many PC gamers see this as an anti-competitive and anti-consumer strategy.
I'm not in a position to judge which opinion is true, but my gamers heart screams that this is not how competition on my platform of choice should work. The more exclusivity deals Epic announces, the less likely I'll ever spend my money on their store. What happened with Metro Exodus and Phoenix Point even grows a hate in me against Epic, making it hard to be happy about the good things they are trying to do (lower cut, funding etc)
But what's even worse: Epic's moneyhats are resulting in many people losing respect for the devs and publishers involved. And I'm not talking only about myself and the "vocal minority" online; I hear this from my friends and colleagues as well. Many of them are talking shit about the devs involved and some of them even returned to piracy for EGS exclusive games. This is really, really sad imo, so please don't tell me that Epic's moneyhatting strategy is good for pc gaming.
Wow, you conveniently ignore that Valve have to take the burden of hosting the infrastructure for any keys sold that they don't have any cut from. Do you fucking realize how ridiculous it is for them if they allowed unlimited key generation? Someone could literally made Steam just a hosting platform, obtaining all the benefits offered whilst Steam don't get any cut. I asked you that, does Epic would even allowed this, having a game that only used them as hosting platform while they don't get anything? This is why your view on key resellers as not competition to Steam as being completely ridiculous because the burden of maintaining infrastructure still weight all on Steam. All of this nonsensical contradiction you make shows that you are arguing in bad faith.
I would assume they need to double down on services. Keep the cut, keep the open market, but really lather on the gloss and polish. The new UI updates and store/library features will work great (if they work), see about expanding stuff like library sharing and streaming, maybe see if Unity devs will agree to work with their Source engine on a new joint venture, etc. They already have a massive amount of dev-facing stuff lined up as well, like VAC support, servers, DDoS protection, etc, all free.
They basically need to keep doing what they're doing, and maybe throw some finances around to make sure more of the bigger publishers don't go the Ubisoft route.
Whatever the case, they absolutely need to avoid exclusives. Not just "exclusives" as in "this game is sold on Steam and keys are sold elsewhere", but they should really look into having games that release across multiple storefronts, emphasizing the "divided we fall" mindset that is the only way to press back against the console-war-on-PC notion that Epic is working to introduce. If Epic starts to gain ground, everyone will lose.
Pretty disappointing see that Devolver jumps in the Epic moneyhat train too. I hope they don't repeat this with Serious Sam 4.
A defacto monopoly on what, indie games on PC? People can buy indies on other platforms, both on PC and on other devices, every major western publisher has their own PC store (several are completely exclusive to it and ubisoft is probably going to be in the next 12 months too) and most of the biggest games on PC aren't on Steam. The consequences for "the valve monopoly" are completely negligible, because even if Valve could get a cut of every cent spent on PC (not even remotely close and arguably declining over the last few years) it would still be competing with Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Apple, and Google for videogame services.
The 30% cut is standard across PC, consoles, and smartphones. The "old physical cut" was far higher and to this day Retail offers the publisher ~55% margins, versus 70% margins on most digital stores. There is no moral imperative here that makes it obvious that this is some kind of outrageous sum. I don't object to it being lowered, but if it being lowered means substantially worse platforms and services to me, then I would rather keep it where it is.
No, Valve didn't start sending cash to a huge nubmer of developers to remove their games for 12 month periods from competing storefronts in some kind of lightning business offensive to capture the market. This is not "the valve playbook", this is not "literally the same way valve bootstrapped steam". I'm not sure why we keep seeing so much of this blatant historical revisionism in an effort to defend Epic games.
"Officially permanently". Nobody is doing this on key selling sites. Games go on and off sale, with sale prices virtually always being cheaper than Steam. You're trying to give some scenario that never happens.
Oh no! A developer can't do 100% of their Steam business outside of Steam?!! I mean, who are you trying to make out the bad guy in this situation? All I see is Valve not looking to be taken advantage of!