Which is why big publishers are moving away from it and creating their own personal events where they can generate and manage their own hype instead of being lost in the sea of events.
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E3 PC Gaming Show 2019 is being sponsored by Epic (See EGS Guidelines)
- Thread starter Ge0force
- Start date
So basically every time a game is announced it'll be followed by "huge thanks to our sponsor EPG" etc
When I can get good sales (less than $50 for new games) on Epic exclusives, I'll start giving their store a shot.
For now, it seems like GMG could only muster a meager 10% off of Borderlands 3 for less than a month, while CDKeys is selling the game at a solid price ($45), but the keys are Europe only.
For now, it seems like GMG could only muster a meager 10% off of Borderlands 3 for less than a month, while CDKeys is selling the game at a solid price ($45), but the keys are Europe only.
Seriously. Why the hell am I supposed to be clamoring....
Excuse me.
Why in tarnation should I be clamoring for marketing and promotion from valve? Or anyone? Serious question. I've never asked for more ads.
And actually useful things are no replacement for ads about those things? How... What's going on in there? This is all over the place.
Edit: typos
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It's like when either Playstation or MS gets only the marketing rights for a third party game. Um okay... so they can add their logo on the commercial? Sure. That's uhhh.. something I guess? Yay? Is it cheaper? Do I have features I am used to and access to my friendlists over here? The fascination with corporate hype culture is fucking weird.
Oh, I'm not making a comparison here. Cast your mind back to the old forum when the inaugural PC gaming E3 event was announced. It was hailed as a great way to celebrate and promote PC gaming and an excellent avenue for many PC games (especially indies!) to get eve
As with all ecosystems, it's a symbiotic developer-consumer relationship.
I'm not sure why you feel the need to tell me one approach is 'better' when there's clearly no need to compare. There are two sides of the equation and it's always best when both sides are catered to.
Don't you know? A lot of people here are so used to the corporate bullshit that its absent is seen as wrong.
Valve doesn't have a PR team carefully word every response to maximize public reception? How dare they! Let me go praise the outright bullshit my favorite corporations tell me.
Valve doesn't spend millions on enormous marketing campaigns? They're doing something wrong! I'm all excited for the next AAA title my favorite corporation has spent millions to influence me on! Hype check?!
Valve doesn't release yearly sequels of its franchises? They're so lazy! Why can't they milk me every year instead of supporting their games for a decade? *Sees the success and player-counts of Overwatch and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege* Why haven't they made a sequel yet?!
It's appalling that so many act like they're stockholders when they're just consumers.
Developers matter, too. There are two sides to this ecosystem.
Can you rephrase this? I can't parse it.
What you really mean is a *publisher*-consumer relationship. EGS doesn't provide anything significant to developers, unlike Steam. To publishers, EGS provides one big thing: a low-% distribution system. To select publishers, it provides marketing dollars.
It's true that an ecosystem needs the support of publishers to succeed. But that's no reason for us as posters on an enthusiast forum to line up in favor of their narrow needs. Particularly when it means giving up a lot of quality of life features we expect (and expect to continuously improve).
They're companies trying to sell me software. We aren't "friends".
Yes. You aren't Valve either. Developers should matter to Steam, since that's where their money comes from.
I merely expressed surprise that VALVE isn't interested in sponsoring PC gaming showcases like the E3 event, for example.
Valves offers me a better platform to buy and use software. Developers/Publishers can use the better platform versus the objectively worse one because of handed out cheques but if they choose not to, I can wait until it's usable on a better platform like Origin/Uplay/Steam/GOG.
Valve also organizes a lot of smaller events for indies / smaller devs showing around how to use and maximize Steam market and is one of the biggest contributors to open source code (both financially and through own work) that can benefit a ton of developers. The whole VR in PC owes a big chunk of its API to SteamVR (which is open source).
Valve does a ton for developers, more than people realize.
Valve does a ton for developers, more than people realize.
Until they run into some business challenge they can't buy their way out of and Epic leaves the PC market AGAIN while calling every PC gamer a pirate. Also waiting for the next cycle when the will call Nintendo kiddie and mock their fans.
So there's EA Play, which is still occurring in Hollywood the weekend before E3 begins. Sony had the Playstation Experience but they aren't doing any conventions this year. And that still leaves a whole lot of big publishers. And dozens of smaller, hungrier ones (like Devolver) that need any press they can get.
E3 is not a ghost town. I think a PC-centric E3 event could still create some excitement for the platform. But I am concerned that this one is turning into an Epic-centric event rather than something that celebrates PC gaming as a whole. Maybe that's just the nature of an open platform.
How do developers benefit from valve promoting themselves?
sorry for that second part, I was flabbergasted. I was trying to say I was flabbergasted at the statement about real tools and features - customer and developer and publisher facing - being no replacement for... Marketing? What the actual fuck.
What the shit does that mean? Are those things even related?
they might be talking about Valve promoting themselves to developers/publishers by using kickbacks the way Epic does it
They actually updated their Steamworks site a few days ago to easily show and outline the features they offer to anyone using their store. It's quite a lot, unsurprisingly.
https://partner.steamgames.com/
They're trying to make devs more aware of all the features and tools available to them.
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/1604882062445035703
I've thought about making a thread, but I'm not sure if it's a good enough "gaming" topic.
You CLEARLY didn't follow the conversation then.
I made a post saying im surprised Valve isn't playing an active role in sponsoring more of these PC gaming events since they're a great way of promoting games and the developers behind them.
Someone else insinuated they shouldn't be doing that because they provide a lot of storefront features.
My response to that was that those aren't really a substitute to marketing and promotion via events with massive coverage like E3.
Seems that's the point you entered the discussion, taking my entire point out of context.
This was a side discussion about event sponsorship, NOTHING to do with the EGS and in fact, they weren't even mentioned. I believe Valve can get a bit more involved in gaming shows like this, while still maintaining their commitment to providing consumer and dev focused features via storefront.
There are forum rules - and a staff post In this thread - against bad faith arguments like these. Pretty much the first 2 bullet points.
He's not asking for Valve to promote Valve, he's asking for Valve to provide a means for developers to promote themselves on the Steam platform.
And he'd be correct. Developer tools are helpful but they're no replacement for marketing/acquisition features—your full-featured game still has to sell. This is something I've covered in other posts as well with regards to how Steam as a platform doesn't have active promotion compared to mobile platforms.
Ok, sorry, but no. The money for Steam, EGS, Discord, Origin, GOG, and any and all publishers and developers involved in the game-making-and-selling business, comes from us - the customers, the gamers. Most stores aside from publisher-owned ones typically pay some respect to that fact, and Steam is the frontrunner in acknowledging it, because they've been in the business long enough to know where their money comes from.
I know, it was commented on the discord and on the PC-era topic. You should join it more in order not to miss some of the nice conversations (and new games we find!) in there :).
I wouldn't say the App Store or Google Play have much better active promotion. I'd say Steam is much better in that regard - They constantly have sales and promotions featuring games (including lesser known ones), which is more than what usually happens in the mobile space. I work in mobile dev, and The best way to promote yourself on mobile platforms is ads in other games and social media.
You know what I mean.
Without games on Steam, what would you be paying for?
Yes, the cash comes from your pockets, but that's one part of the equation.
Content AND consumers. Both are essential.
I was referring to platform featuring, which is something Steam doesn't have. But yes, mobile is mostly in-game ad networks and social media. Console might've been a more apt example given how active platforms will co-promote.
I'd say the importance of featuring is appearing in the front page, so Steam does something arguable more effective by customizing your store front based on your interests. It's hard to tell which approach is more effective - In mobile you get a lot of traffic, but it's the sort of organic users that won't necessarily download/buy and don't tend to stick around much. I'd guess in Steam you get less traffic, but the traffic has a much better chance of being the sort of traffic you want to see your game.
Yeah - Consoles are the very different than what goes on in the open mobile and PC spaces, but I think this is the heart of the issue with the EGS really, whether those strategies from the console space - Promotion in exchange for exclusivity, a gate-kept store etc. are good for PC gaming. I personally think they tend to work against smaller devs.
That's also the feeling I often get.
Personally, when I'm not being distracted, my point isn't purposefully misdirected, and I'm not lied to -- which is what game marketing and particularly damage control often amounts to -- then I'm happy. Valve's public blog posts about their policies -- even when I don't agree with them, such as when it comes to review filtering and so-called off-topic review bombing -- at least treat the reader like an adult and try to communicate actual reasoning, rather than whatever 90% of marketing "communication" is.
Because I don't agree with you that there's no need to compare. I think comparing and contrasting is important to gain a perspective of what a platform actually offers to everyone participating in the medium. And that includes players as well as tiny indies, mid-sized developers and large publishers.
Obviously, anyone trying to push EGS will shy away from any structured comparison, because there's exactly one developer-facing metric that it "wins" and half a dozen developer-facing and a dozen or so user-facing metrics that it "loses".
Yes. And where Valve does its level best to provide for both with Steam, EGS is solely focused on the content, at best ignoring the customer needs and at worst actively harming them. I do think Valve could do more to promote its platform, but I suspect that it's a very fundamental problem for that company - i.e., they don't exactly have a "PR department", for any kind of promotion work they'd have to either pull regular staff away from other duties, or outsource to someone else.
Oh believe you me, it's hard to follow.
A company that does no marketing and no PR, but instead spends its resources to build tools and heavily back open source projects that help make it easier to create and play games, is somehow expected to sponsor a show because they aren't doing enough. To sponsor a pony show, and plaster their name all over it, when they don't even have a marketing department. Because they don't do enough.
While epic is evidently doing so much to help developers by making the show part of their marketing blitz.
Let me know if I'm still not following and we'll all have to consider me a hopeless case.
According to his post above he was specifically talking about sponsoring the show.
Why don't you follow the discussion back if you can't remember? I was answering your question.
Valve doing very little to earn the 30% they charge is not a "lazy devs" argument. It's more of a "why is the price of insulin so high?" argument.
This isn't that difficult to understand. Do you like PC gaming being a second class citizen? Do you like waiting 6 months for Monster Hunter World and not knowing when or if Read Dead Redemption 2 is ever coming to PC? Do you not believe that games you love could be bigger, better, more polished and more frequent if Steam raised the profile of PC gaming in a way that expanded the audience and increased sales? Do you not understand every other platform is already getting these benefit as the norm?
Patently false. They let you use Unreal Engine for free, and Epic provides a free multiplayer, platform agnostic, engine agnostic backend. Those seem significant to me.
Valve provides as a service more than the other consoles for both devs (much easier modifications and much more versatile APIs) and customers (console OS functions are laughable when compared to Steams right now). Only thing Valve doesnt provide is as you say the "closed market" of a console, but it provides their userbase which can be quite comparable with them.
Port quality has more to do with the difficulty of working with a different range of PCs than anything else (heck you can see a lot of pc first devs fucking up the game sometimes). The combination of different hardware configs makes it incredibly hard to fully optimize games (as well as some companies just deciding to do subpar jobs and only do QA in reduced configs). The fact that you mention a Capcom game, a company that is well known for fully supporting PC (both on time and with quality ports) only weird case, which was mainly due to the internal studio being quite adamant on protecting their IP (the most profitable ip for Capcom and the sacred cow of the company) and not letting devs with PC experience do the port (and actually decided to do it in house) is pretty funny.
Same could be said with Rockstar, that know they are able to make people double and even triple dip in their games to maximize profit by slowing down the release of gmes.
Now about Steam not raising the profile of PC gaming? Well, we can easily go back 10 years ago when PC was thought to be dead and how nowadays it is a big component of all AAA companies (with it being the second biggest market for Ubisoft) all in the back of Steam opening new markets and reviving a market that was thought to be a pirates den.
The profile of PC Gaming is the highest it has ever been, and Steam has made a market as big as PSN in number of total monthly users. It has also opened the gates to a new generation of AA and indie developers that launch first in Steam and then months (if ever) on consoles, creating the selection of games we have ever seen.
The free multiplayer, platform agnostic engine agnostic backend is not yet up (it will be by the end of the year). And Steam is also making one itself that should be up soon, along with free servers for the devs that want to utilize them.
I would also say that you should disconect what EGS and what Epic provides. EGS does not provide UE, UE is a commercial product from Epic that has a "free" licence (as long as you dont produce anything commercial) because it wants to compete with other engines such as Unity.
All those trickle down benefits eh?
Valve could do a big ass PC Gamer Fest every year and devs would still take their sweet ass time porting stuff to the PC.
Terrible use of the phrase aside, thinking console people are getting a top notch service is just ridiculous.
You know that you can use Steamlink completely without Steam, right?
You can use your Steamlink to start Origin, Uplay, Battle.net and so on and play the games from that library with your Steamlink. It's more interesting why Valve didn't make Steam necessary to run Steamlink. Calling that "increase dependence on Steam" is kinda strange. Your other 2 points are also completely wrong.
You are rocking my world.
Like why the fuck is valve responsible for all of PC gaming lol. That's absurd. I can't say anything more than that. if you want to go on about that, do it for the benefit of some other reader.
Aside from that, there's this idea that sponsoring stage shows would be so helpful to everybody. Foot the bill for some hype? That's how you help?
Look at what they actually do to help PC gaming. They've done as much as anyone out there. The idea that calling up PCGamer and making the show Brought To You By Valve would add or detract to their contribution in any significant way is, again, absurd. You'll have to talk to someone else about that, too.
Really, who's actually behind Epic Games? I doubt they have all this power and influence by themselves in order to get such high profile exclusive deals.
To all those folks saying Valve "should do more for PC gaming". Where were you on the late 90's/earlier 2000? That was when PC gaming "died". It was also when Valve came into the scene. They made mistakes over the past 20 years, but through it all they kept supporting PC gaming, took the time to understand regional pricing and issues (in the process reducing piracy in places deemed unsalvageable like Brazil and Russia), opened up their store to devs and publishers large and small, allowing Indies to flourish along AAA games because they could find an audience wide enough to make money, never cracked down on 3rd party sellers, let's devs issue their own Steam keys or create DRM free versions to sell on GOG and never trying to use their weight to keep stuff out of competitors. Not to mention the more technical stuff on controller support, PC streaming, Linux, etc... This all paved the way for devs who had never given PC the time of day to strat porting their games but( several Japanese ones come to mind, with FF series being the major one I personally noted when it happened).
And you are complaining their are not buying ad space in an E3 show to gloat about being the saviors of PC gaming like Epic goes around claiming? Really?! Epic the comapny that bailed out on PC gaming 20 years ago? I really can't take any of you guys seriously.
And you are complaining their are not buying ad space in an E3 show to gloat about being the saviors of PC gaming like Epic goes around claiming? Really?! Epic the comapny that bailed out on PC gaming 20 years ago? I really can't take any of you guys seriously.
Oh I know! I know!
o/
All of those things also benefit valve and some way, so they don't count.
Because valve is not your friend and they just want to make money like any other company.
Epic on the other hand only has everyone's best interests at hand for sure. Can't you see them sponsoring this show out of pure love for PC gaming and absolutely nothing else???
Valve has insane amounts of cash with Steam as well, not to mention the biggest market share for PC. Epic Games does have some ace in the hole behind all this.
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There is no Unreal Engine license fee for games sold on the EGS.
So all those people saying EGS is bad because it doesn't include a matching Steamlink feature are in fact full of shit?
Epic made like 3 billion last year. Their "ace in the hole" is Valve's inaction. Gabe doesn't want to spend any of his dragon hoard of money to compete with what EGS is doing.
You can add this to my previous post.
Valve doesn't spend millions of dollars securing exclusives? They're so cheap! Why aren't they engaging in a practice to force me into using their store?!
Correct, they are having their own conference, hosted by Geoff Keighley.