Epic Games Store sale is competition done right

I've been pretty vocal about my dislike of Epic Games and I know many share my thoughts. However, I think their current sale is commendable. Many titles have nice discounts and you get an additional $10 off everything above $15 on the store (Epic says they're absorbing the cost of this extra $10).

This is the kind of competition that I was hoping for when Epic Games Store was announced (alongside the smaller revenue share). It gives steam sales a run for their money and, given their recent reactions, I don't expect Valve to respond back.

Are these sales sustainable moving forward? Or only a temporary gesture to grab users off steam? Will you be using the Epic Games Store for the sale?

Much better form of competition. All the epic slobbering that's been done so far has been over success born of blatantly anti-consumer practices. Absolutely pathetic and self-defeating. The arguments boil down to literally choosing the greater of two evils because it's the new evil.

This, on the other hand, is something actually worthy of applause, because it -you know- helps us

Who knew that SW was short for Store Wars lol.

Nope.

YES. That is how they should do it. But this is right after they've been total assholes, so it's gonna take Epic a while to get me over to their store. This sale is not enough. More sales in the future and way less bullshit? I can see myself becoming a customer after that.

Nice, that's the first good thing they've done

Too bad they were too cowardly to do this from the start. Still not biting until the exclusive deals stop.

And yet Epic managed to **** this up as well, as they did not seem to notify the devs/publishers about the additional discount, and messed up the regional prices, so some games were pulled from the store altogether for the duration of the discounts, like Bloodlines 2.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-05-17-epics-first-big-sale-is-having-teething-problems

Gabe Newell stopped caring a long time ago, now he's just fooling around with gimmicks and earning passive income through other people's work and the multiplayer IPs he bought from developers that actually loved game development, he's old and tired, and when he dies, Valve dies with him.

It's time to look to the future, and the future is in multiple stores, all game launchers are free, so why not give it a shot? Personally, my #1 store is both Steam & GoG, but I do branch out various launchers to find the best deals for the right price. If Hades is on sale during Epic sales, I'll gladly buy something from their for the right price of course. I don't use Epic store unless I really have to.

My main concerned with Epic store is this their bad security protection and plus I have enough launchers I'm fine with Steam.

If they get rid of the exclusivity practice and add some more (very basic) features, happily check them out.

Unfortunately they seem to not give too much of a shit about the consumer, and I feel, if you let them win, this will have massive ramifications in the future. Publishers aren't your freind and actively make it a job to try screw you over. The less power the better.

Also Polygon likes it, so it must be bad.

Wait, additional $10 off after $15 spent? thats actually pretty good.. might have to finally download the epic game launcher and check it out

@uninspiredcup: Yup this is exactly why I'm wary of Epic. If they fix all that (especially their attitude towards customers) then I'm all in.

Heh cant argue with that I guess... Picked ud operencia the stolen Sun for 6,5 euro... And you can get Metro for 35 euro which is a pretty good price!

I'm good. Games will release soon on steam and I have plenty to play.

They didn't even tell publishers about the sale or five them an option to be excluded without taking the game off of the store. This is just another half-assed attempt at buying marketshare without putting in any effort.

I was planning to post something similar but I heard from Bellular News that EGS sale wasn't done right. Their partners weren't informed resulting to some partners like Paradox to pull out (temporarily) games in their store.

Actually, not really. As far as I am concerned, this is just another sale.

HOWEVER! Epic did this without the consent of many developers. What ultimately happened is Epic cut prices and added a 10-dollar discount to full-priced new games and pre-orders without talking to people, so developers ended up pulling a lot of their games (temporarily, mind you) for the duration of the sale.

We all know Tencent-Epic is anti-consumer, but this latest act only goes to show that they are blatantly anti-developer as well. Savings be damned, they clearly have no respect for their partnerships with developers, and only care about the bottom line.

Precisely.

Steam does it right by A.) letting developers and publishers set the price of their games, and B.) when there's a sale, essentially going "Hey, we are having a sale, would you like to participate?"

Epic is like "**** you, we are slashing the price on your game"

@uninspiredcup: I must be blind, or Tencent-Epic fails at storefronts, because I don't even see a filter/category option. It's just "store" with all the games in big picture format and "library".

Definitely lacking on features like you said.

Lol, they managed even to screw this up. Jeez. I can't tell if this is additional sleaze or a sign of incompetence

So, wait, Epic just up 'n decided to sell an unreleased game for 75% off without any prior clearance, and got salty when the publisher wasn't happy about it? Epic Fail!

No developer or publisher should be required to have their games on sale if they don't want to. It's ridiculous to expect all developers to agree to a sale for their own games. Only the Rights-Holders should have control over their pricing.

Exactly.

And that's all well and good for games that have been out for a while (though, tbh, it really isn't), don't get me wrong; but for games that have not been released, where full-priced pre-orders are a substantial part of their profit, that's a pretty fracked up thing to do.

Imagine trying to sell a home and waking up one day to find out your real estate agent took your home that was listed at 500k and decided to offer it on sale for 50k, without your knowledge and approval. That'd be pretty depressing, to put it lightly.

*It's also a really bone-headed move on Epic's part because half the reason developers sign these exclusivity contracts is because Valve charges 25%* while Tencent-Epic charges 10%*, but if they suddenly reduce the total cost of your product, WTF is the point of saving 15% when you're making 75% less from each sale?

*not sure of exact numbers but it's something around that %

Don't you have to be online to play games on the epic store that's a huge disadvantage vs steam

That's not what this is about. Epic are selling these games at a loss and give the devs their full royalties. It's about them not informing the devs about the sale and devaluing their games without their consent, in some cases resulting in broken contracts with other stores, stating that the pre-orders will be sold for the same price everywhere.

I feel they’re temp.

Things like this don’t last once you’ve gotten your foothold placed well into the market.

At least usually that’s the way it works.

@uninspiredcup: Yeah I also feel like they don't give a **** about gamers.

If Epic is a store for both the GAMERS as well as the devs/publishers, than yeah sure, I'm up for it.

I might take a dive on Heavy Rain for 10 bucks

This is the first time I'll say this without being me trolling. Lol PC gamers!

I think you're slightly misunderstanding what's happening here. Long story short, the publisher is still receiving the same amount of money from a purchase in this sale as they would normally because Epic is paying the discount themselves (effectively moneyhatting the consumer as I said). The problem is mainly for early access games which are currently being sold for a lower price than they will be at release. Basically, people who may have been waiting until the final release might bite now instead at $5-10, which reduces possible future revenue and on top of that reduces the perceived value of the game, since if they kept it up then people waiting for the final release might wait until they see it for something closer to the sale price, which might even force them to drop the price sooner. This "perceived value" concept might sound ridiculous, but it has proven to affect consumer purchasing habits and is why Nintendo, Activision and R* do their best to avoid permanent price cuts for as long as possible; if the consumer thinks that they won't have to wait long for a sale, often they'll just wait. Thus, the devs of those games won't want to put a sale on top of their already discounted early access price.

The problem? Epic's store is so barebones that it doesn't even truly support sales. They basically went into their server and wrote "if(price > 14.98) then(price = price - 10)." There's no way to opt out other than suspending sales. For the consumer who doesn't know anything this seems strongly pro-consumer, but it's again a case of Epic buying marketshare instead of improving their store. It's lazy and I'm still not sure what their endgame is here.

BTW, the cuts are 30% for Steam and 12% for Epic.