Epic Games Store Is A Great Thing For The Whole Industry, Cities: Skylines Publisher Says

A bunch of folks below are inaccurately making widespread statements that devs don't benefit / only publishers do.

This is NOT an accurate blanket-statement.

Devs' contracts with their pubs are highly specific to each dev and usually specific to each title. So if a Dev is paid a percentage of the gross based on a specific tiered number of copies, for example, then that Dev DOES get paid more.

There are too many scenarios here for any blanket statement.

Epic's competition is absolutely good for this increasingly competitive market.

You know, I just realized how rich this is.

Paradox is responsible for Gamersgate, a key reseller site with a 70/30 split...

Steam remains the best place for publishers to get the most amount of sales revenue from their games.

Publishers can generate Steam keys for their games at no cost.

Publishers can set up a payment system completely removed from Steam's storefront, sell those keys, and reap 100% of the revenue from those sales.

Valve only gets a 30% cut when those transactions occur on the Steam storefront. Otherwise, they take a 0% cut from generated keys.

This is a fact that Tim Sweeney has left out in his anti-Steam crusade. And it's sad to see that it's a tactic being copied by developers and people who want Steam to fail for arbitrary reasons.

Valve wants Steam to be successful on its on merits. Steam doesn't need to be successful at the failure of other storefronts.

But Tim Sweeney's strategy is that, in order for the Epic Games Store to succeed, Steam has to fail. And it's not just Steam that's getting hurt by third party paid exclusives - pro-consumer marketplaces such as GOG are also losing games because of the Epic Games Store exclusivity.

Yet there are people are praising these shady tactics from Epic Games?

While I agree that the 88/12 split is more advantageous to the publishers (not the developers, they'll get the same money from the publishers they always have), Epic just can't compete fairly yet. They don't even have a bloody shopping cart, one of the most basic elements of e-commerce! I get it that they might not have a fully developed social system, forums, etc, a community takes time to implement correctly. But things like a basic shopping cart, that's not a community feature, it's a basic requirement for running an online store. It's mature technology that has already had the (admittedly complicated) problems solved.

And don't get me started on the user review situation. Giving the publishers the right to opt out of user reviews? What? Makes the system useless and I, for one, won't be even considering Epic as a storefront until they allow user reviews without any developer or publisher interference beyond a response to individual reviews.

Fredrik Wester says it's a "matter of decency" to pay developers a bigger share of revenue.

100% agree.

The 70/30 split that Steam and the like offer is just ridiculous.

if publishers get 70-80% then shouldnt publishers be paying their developers more?

EPIC has made games, they've been shafted by Steam and others, they know and it's dope of them to come in and change the game.

Time to go read the PComplainers below whine about competition and free markets.

People act like the developers will actually get this money. It's going to be the publisher, you know, those sick bastards who keep shoving lootboxes harder and harder despite the looming legal axe over their head? Yeah, this is just giving them more money in almost all cases. They've decided that the bigass sign on bonus and a slight increase on what few further sales they'll be getting is worth pissing off their customer base, AND they get to get goodboy points for adding Steam as a platform after the contract ends AND they get to shove most of the blame off on Steam with the excuse that they had to take the money to make better games. They won't, they never do no matter how much money they get and from what source and that should be apparently by now.

In the case of Indies then yeah, they'll get that split, and the giant phat sign on bonus, but they won't get much beyond that being that they'll be seeing so much fewer sales.

People also forget the sheer volume of work Valve has put into making Steam an amazing platform. Epic has to do all that to compete. Everyone's happy to drop trou and unload opinion on Bethesda and EA for Fallout 76, Anthem and Mass Effect Andromeda's "roadmaps", all of which have largely failed to some extent or another, but they'll believe Epic's roadmap? It's not like they're trying to fix a broken game they're trying to produce basic features that some kid learning web development over the summer via youtube videos could manage.

Basically, Epic isn't offering the consumer any benefit whatsoever, and they're mostly only offering the publisher more money meaning that their execs get another summer house and the developers get... literally nothing but poor reputation. If Epic wants to compete in the market they need to offer the end user something better, not the developer or publisher, and they're nowhere near that.

The customer shouldn't give a single sun-dried old white dog turd what the revenue split is, but somehow Epic and their shills have convinced a lot of people to advocate for the people taking their money and not themselves. So far Epic hasn't given any reason to defend them with essentially all the worst practices in the industry. Shutting down games with active communities to focus on lootboxes BR, turning the lootbox and microtransaction with premium currency dial to 11, essentially being entirely responsible for the excessive explosion of battle royale games and modes taking over everything, paying for exclusivity after repeatedly saying how bad that is and how they won't do it again only to do it again and again, breaking contract with publishers forcing them to pull their content from the store, screwing up kickstarted products' promises and on and on.

When their platform is as good as Steam, when they have a similar library and when they can make sales based on being the better platform and not throwing Tencent's money at exclusives they'll be good for the industry. Currently they're fighting tooth and claw to take EA's 'worst company in the world' plaque from them.

Currently the only people readily defending them come in a very small subset. Paid shills astroturfing, indie developers and their friends defending/justifying their bigass payday at the expense of their customers, and people who just don't know any better and believe the 12/88 propaganda will make better games.

Imagine if Epic spent the money they spend stealing ONE exclusive on making their platform not garbage? They might be able to compete, but that's a bridge too far.

I hope things do go Epic's way, and the industry adopts the better revenue split, and that it leads into more investment into game development. Either way though, I'm fine with their being some more direct competition to Steam, and another place to look for big sales is always a good thing.

The exclusives don't really bother me; I've spent years having to use Steam because tons of games require it. And as far as features go, all I really need in a launcher is that it runs quietly in the background. Epic should improve their app, otherwise it'll just keep being a point of contention for them, but my main bases are already covered.

Here's the problem. Sell out now and there's no guarantee of better games in the future. That publishers are getting more money upfront is great but those signing bonuses are what grates on consumers' minds. Plus, Epic's business practices leave so much to be desired that any company or publisher dealing with them becomes instantly tarnished as well. So publishers would do well to keep that in mind.

Anyone know how much percentage sony, microsoft and nintendo charge for theyr online store?

Publishers and developers talking about decency.

Comedy gold.

Paradox especially where they raised the price of all their games immediately prior to the Steam Summer Sale.

OR have £3000 worth of DLC for games where they literally sell assets like character portraits and music separately.

They go as far as to have Day 1 DLC segmented, for DLC.

Yes, very outrageous, we are all behind you.

Never liked Fortnite but yeah what Epic Game Store is doing is just, but they need to do more, way way more. They are nowhere near competitive as Steam. Steam have so many things, achievements, community hubs, forums, mods/creations, social gaming profile, chat and voice, streaming functionality, cloud sync, item auctions, screenshots, tools, custom music library, remote play, separate browser used in-game, custom controller setup, shader cache for faster loading, review pages, store currency, organized game library and much more. Epic Game is like a retail store with terrible service but Steam is city block of retail stores.

Gamers hate Epic for offering a shitty empty space full of disorganized squares of game library, you need to scroll down again and again to browse. Did you try search function? It does not work properly, even now. Let me give you an example, search for a popular AAA game, go do it. Now how about a developer/publisher like Ubisoft or EA, not found? That is right, they don't have developer profiles, their search and suggestions are missing, they still lack contents. Their store feels like it is still in alpha. You can find only a handful of popular games there. They don't have category or filters, that is basic listing functionality ffs. It is not the money split that is the problem, Epic Game Store doesn't do anything else for gamers or the community while Steam have hundreds. Steam is popular among gamers for lots of reasons. Epic game store is pro devs because they are just a digital store nothing else, they are not even as good as Greenman Gaming. Epic Game Store should invest more on their actual store rather than publicity.

Who among you use Epic game store? Who among you have Steam? Are you a developer? Are you a gamer? Before entering this debacle at least create an account in Epic, because it very likely that you already have Steam, now get the experience first hand.

I've said it a million times, and I'll say it a million times more: It's not the split that people are praising here. A bigger percentage of much, much less means nothing. What these people are slobbering all over is Epic's big, turgid check they give out for exclusivity.

agreed. steam is a thief that robs developers blind and steals their future. thank god there's a competitor that understands it.

Epic can never even make Steam flinch. Let me tell you Epic Shills a secret. Valve has tons of Whales who pump a tremendous amount of cash into Steam. Only those whales will keep Steam afloat let alone the other hundreds of cash flows that Steam has. One of the super-users aka whales is St4ck.

EPIC would dream to even get Whale. let alone hundreds like Steam has.

Valve just needs to reignite the proverbial furnace. They need to start pumping out games that are exclusive to the store, and include every feature that Steam offers as an option. Hiring new developers and opening a couple of new studios might not be a bad idea either.

Funny thing though, Sweeney used to always complain about Microsoft creating some walled garden. I know that these are a different set of circumstances, but it almost seems that Epic is out to do the same thing by introducing exclusive games to a platform that never had them or needed in the first place. Keeping games for yourselves and off the shelves of other stores in an effort to force them to buy where you want them to is almost no different than the Microsoft store. They, like Microsoft want total control of the PC Gaming market.

The only positive in comparison to the two is that you get the games in a win32 format instead of the dreadful UWP format.

Another day, another paid Epic propaganda piece sponsored by the People’s Republic of China.

The Epic shills are here too. Sad.

The Summer of Steam sale is going on RIGHT NOW, and that’s what PC gamers care about. No gamers give a shit about Epic store, LOL.