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Epic Games Store changes its refund policy to match Steam's, adds local pricing (on some countries)

Digoman

Digoman

Member
Oct 27, 2017
233
Nzyme32 said:


Reading this thread really highlights the little thought that has been made by Epic towards customers. Some payment methods are costly to use, but are the primary means of choice in some countries. Epic's position is laughable - asking of such payment methods "why would you want to support it". How about, because sometimes that what customers want to use and is beneficial to them

They absolutely do not have to "pass those charges to consumers".
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"pass those charges to consumers" and "little thought" can be used to describe almost everything about the Epic Store so far. Almost every solution to perceived problems are made to detriment of consumers. My completely baseless guess is that maybe regional pricing is one of the things Ubisoft insisted for the deal - because the do it everywhere including UPlay - and what we have now is what could be implemented in short notice. The hard part like actually implementing local currency and payment methods will have to wait.

I doubt Valve is eating "up to 25%" cost of the transactions, but they also only launch regional pricing when everything is ready. Also, it's a probably a good bet that Epic has yet to deal with a lot of other logistics problems like users traveling (which region do you show them?) and so on.
 
RestEerie

RestEerie

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if they can keep the pace, valve will have some real competition (with a huge purse to boot) on their hands one year from now.
 
Micael

Micael

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Oct 28, 2017
1,362
rumbling said:
A game from 2001 is the best you can find? Are you saying that the MSRP of the game is 5,29 euros and not 5,99 euros? Still /doubt.
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https://kitfoxgames.itch.io/moon-hunters this is moon hunters normal price 13.49$ on itch.io where the price is set by the developers (so is it on steam but what ever) https://itch.io/docs/general/about "As a seller you're in charge of how it's done: you set the price, you run sales, and you design your pages. ", and a store where developers set up their own cut (a model far better than epic btw) "Since March 2015, itch.io has an open revenue sharing model. Sellers can now apply the pay what you wantmodel towards itch.io: the revenue split between the seller and itch.io is configurable by the seller. Set it to 10%, 30%, or even 0%. ", these days itch.io is the equivalent to developers store because of this, now for the steam price https://www.steamprices.com/us/app/320040/moon-hunters 14,99$, you can also look at this page https://isthereanydeal.com/game/moonhunters/history/ to see the price history and see that the itch.io page which once again is setup by the developer, with a price set by the developer, and a cut set by the developer (as close to MSRP as you can possibly get) to see the price on itch.io has always been lower than steam price (outside of sales ofc).

Feel free to search itch.io for more examples of this.

Valve does not limit developers in how they set the prices, a developer can do what ever they want, this isn't some theoretical thing up for debate, this is a fact proven by games doing it, and by years of developers talking about how they set up their prices on steam, at which point no dev that I have ever heard said that valve forced some price on them, they give advises on prices and suggest regional prices based on historical evidence they have, but that is about the extent of valve involvement in devs setting their own prices both inside and outside of steam.

So to answer the original question, no valve would not agree to that, because they just simply don't have to agree to it, since publishers/developers can already do what ever they please (once again including selling steam keys, while giving 0% to valve, while at the same time using steam servers).
 

Deleted member 1849

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So with Epic now putting payment processing costs on consumers in some countries, they bring themselves less in line with their actual competitors and more in line with shady services like G2A.

It's almost like their margins with the 12% cut are razor-thin after all.
 
Hektor

Hektor

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Nzyme32 said:


Reading this thread really highlights the little thought that has been made by Epic towards customers. Some payment methods are costly to use, but are the primary means of choice in some countries. Epic's position is laughable - asking of such payment methods "why would you want to support it". How about, because sometimes that what customers want to use and is beneficial to them

They absolutely do not have to "pass those charges to consumers".
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So i am to understand that their 12% cut is not financially viable anymore if you use specific payment services?

469.gif
 
Nzyme32

Nzyme32

Member
Oct 28, 2017
5,245
Hektor said:
So i am to understand that their 12% cut is not financially viable anymore if you use specific payment services?

469.gif
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Oh lol - it's already started. Epic can fuck right off!!

Madjoki said:
Looks like Epic now charges extra for some payments methods like bank transfers.

As an example The Division 2:

K9m66ag.png


uPlay would sell you this without any "payment fee" with same payment method and you could even use 20% coupon for additionnal.
Competition is great, isn't it?

But looks like Epic is currently losing.
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Eolz

Eolz

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Oct 25, 2017
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Nzyme32 said:


Reading this thread really highlights the little thought that has been made by Epic towards customers. Some payment methods are costly to use, but are the primary means of choice in some countries. Epic's position is laughable - asking of such payment methods "why would you want to support it". How about, because sometimes that what customers want to use and is beneficial to them

They absolutely do not have to "pass those charges to consumers".
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Madjoki said:
Looks like Epic now charges extra for some payments methods like bank transfers.

As an example The Division 2:

K9m66ag.png


uPlay would sell you this without any "payment fee" with same payment method and you could even use 20% coupon for additionnal.
Competition is great, isn't it?

But looks like Epic is currently losing.
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Wow, that's really shitty.
Seems like a purely american-centric point of view not caring or looking at what happens in the rest of the world.
 

Deleted member 1849

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The alternative is that 12% is viable, but Epic are being greedy.

With this and the lack of key generation, it wouldn't surprise me if their 12% cut works out comparable or higher than the amount Valve ends up taking per unit sale. (30% but 20% for popular games, with Valve takes the payment processing cost, and a significant portion of sales comes from external keys with a 0% cut).
 
Kurt Russell

Kurt Russell

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Oct 25, 2017
1,504
Pryme said:
Posting this - in a thread talking about Epic Store implementing regional pricing (including multiple ERA confirmations of prices being dropped in Brazil) - is incredibly weird. Did you not bother to read the OP?
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Are you kidding me? Did you bother to read the message I was replying to (and my previous messages in the thread, since you decided that my message was "weird"?)
The Epic Store's implementation of regional pricing in Argentina is way worse than Steam's, as I've stated in this thread. If more publishers follow their lead, we'll get to the same point we were before Steam added support for the Argentine Peso and adjusted pricing so we could actually buy stuff.
But I guess that's "incredibly weird", right?
 

Deleted member 42

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I literally just did

You can either use this thread or the megathread for the store but we don't need 854343 threads for every little thing that happens RE: the storefront, y'all already know this
 
chobel

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I don't think it's "minor matters" though
 
Nzyme32

Nzyme32

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BronsonLee said:
I literally just did

You can either use this thread or the megathread for the store but we don't need 854343 threads for every little thing that happens RE: the storefront, y'all already know this
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No offence intended, but I utterly disagree with this position.
Surely, this is a very considerable piece of news utterly different from what is being discussed here.
There are plenty of threads that "doesn't involve a dev announcing a game for the storefront"

Ridiculous

Edit - okay, seen the edit. Still don't agree. Your show I guess
 

Deleted member 42

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Nzyme32 said:
Might as well if this is your position.
It is contradicted by so many other threads
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I got no problem letting the thread rock if peeps can explain how it's major news

Just remember that this isn't an argument or a debate so if you come in guns blazing that means I have to cut through whatever attitude you're giving me to get to the meat of what you're trying to say
 
oni-link

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Nzyme32 said:
No offence intended, but I utterly disagree with this position.
Surely, this is a very considerable piece of news utterly different from what is being discussed here.
There are plenty of threads that "doesn't involve a dev announcing a game for the storefront"

Ridiculous

Edit - okay, seen the edit. Still don't agree. Your show I guess
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As someone with only a passing interest in the Epic store I wouldn't have known about the issue if not for your thread, seems like new information to me, but fair enough if the mods disagree
 

Deleted member 1476

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New news, new thread. Keeping all that inside one thread is ridiculous.

There's no way that was "minor news", what the fuck.
 
sinny

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BronsonLee said:
I literally just did

You can either use this thread or the megathread for the store but we don't need 854343 threads for every little thing that happens RE: the storefront, y'all already know this
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It's not a little thing or a minor matter, sadly for people on other regions it's what makes our hobby sustainable.
 
Lashley

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I'd say that thread was worthy of remaining open tbh, it's pretty big news
 
Nzyme32

Nzyme32

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BronsonLee said:
I got no problem letting the thread rock if peeps can explain how it's major news

Just remember that this isn't an argument or a debate so if you come in guns blazing that means I have to cut through whatever attitude you're giving me to get to the meat of what you're trying to say
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In my opinion, as was explained in the OP - this is extremely significant news
First it was just a conversation from Sergey, now it is actually in action. It is in essence a foghorn, declaring that their 12% cut is not capable of supporting the store as a customer would traditionally expect OR it is significant business decision that is exceptionally unusual in the PC gaming space.

The news is wildly different to this thread and has a totally different set of discussion that can be had, that simply derail the point of this thread, and extend beyond Epic's game store ecosystem also.

I seriously have no idea why this can't have it's own thread and genuine discussion. It has clear significance
 

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BronsonLee said:
I got no problem letting the thread rock if peeps can explain how it's major news

Just remember that this isn't an argument or a debate so if you come in guns blazing that means I have to cut through whatever attitude you're giving me to get to the meat of what you're trying to say
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Well for one, Epic are actually breaking EU law by doing this.

For two, by shifting payment processing costs away from themselves and onto consumers, Epic are now doing something that all major competition (Origin, uPlay, Steam, GOG) do not do, and something that is usually reserved only for shady key resellers like G2A, this is noteworthy.

Third, there have been multiple users here convinced that Epic's 12% has been lowered without batting an eyelid, and everyone else can do the same easily (with some users claiming as low as 5% would still be enough, with absolutely no justification). This is more evidence that Epic are reducing costs and that the 12% cut really isn't much to be running their storefront on, while also making that 12% figure massively misleading to begin with.
 
Hektor

Hektor

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BronsonLee said:
I got no problem letting the thread rock if peeps can explain how it's major news
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The entire business model and marketing of the epic store as well as most conversation on this forum surrounding it chants the 12% as the major selling point of the store, which is wholly contradicted by the act of charging an additional fee as big as 8%.
 
Mobyduck

Mobyduck

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Oct 27, 2017
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I always had to pay an extra 1,50~2,50 when buying from Steam with payment slips. Always assumed some payment providers charged extra for certain kinds of payments types.
 
BernardoOne

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If Steam started charging 5 bucks on top of games prices for certain payment methods, I'm pretty sure a thread about it would exist and the mods wouldn't give a single shit. They wouldn't go there and say "hey guys this belongs on the PC Era thread instead". Why this double standard?
 
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