steam does not compete for exclusives
so congrats on winning that battle i guess?
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Epic Games Store tops $680 million in player spending and over 100 million users (free games promotion will continue through 2020)
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so congrats on winning that battle i guess?
Effective monopoly...real competitor to Steam.
Oh boy, Epic's PR blitz this morning working as planned.
Steam has no 3rd Party Exclusives, so Valve is not competing with Epic on Exclusives.
And the 1st Party Exclusives matter, because they show that you are interested in the health of the industry instead of just being an investment firm who throws "fuck-you-money" around to buy yourself a seat on the table or use this money to drive out real competitors (the 3rd party stores and GoG/itch.io) who got to their place because they worked for it.
Very happy for Epic Games. And if this means more free games, I'll happily take the savings as a consumer!
hell yes, got some baller ass deals on their over the sale. Could not complain, plus my library is growing to be larger than steam already just due to free games alone. I just wish i could gift fucking games............the store still severely needs some basic features
Steam never had 90% of the PC gaming market.
Closer to 30.
MMOs, LoL, Origin, F2P games outside of Steam etc make Steam nowhere near the monopoly you're painting it as.
Schrödinger's monopoly.
(I assume you have data on that 90% figure, please share it with us here)
That's a pretty childish response. I was arguing about whether it matters if the games are Epic developed or not. Also, EGS can try to compete with game exclusivities whether Steam does it or not.
While the EGS store is pretty barebones, I do like that it isn't 90% filled with absolute shite. Steam need to get their act together in this regard, but I suspect they don't give a fuck.
The structure for their recent deal where you get $10 off a $15-or-more title, which then nets another coupon for the same, was a really clever way to daisy-chain purchases. I spent $20 total, when I would have spent $0.
Foraging through the full list of games in that $15+ price bracket to see if there was something I wanted for my next buy had the feel of "fun" shopping. I think their overall curation has been solid, to this point.
Foraging through the full list of games in that $15+ price bracket to see if there was something I wanted for my next buy had the feel of "fun" shopping. I think their overall curation has been solid, to this point.
They had 0 sales before last year. Now they have 250m. That's an ok start! If your goal is growth, you have to start somewhere!
Let's say they can increase that by 50% each year from now on (which is probably a high estimate, but bear with me), using the same aggressive spending tactics. They're probably spent about 10% of their 1.5b investment (not to mention the fortnite profits they keep making) so lets give them 10 years. After 10 years they'll be making 14.5 billion a year. That's a real foothold, and a great return for their investors (and, at that point, they probably wont need to pay for exclusives anymore.)
Do you have any proof that Steam is 90% "shite"? Instead of your opinion?
You guys cheering for more Free Games better start spending some good money on Fortnite, if the game dies it will take all your free games with it. lol
That's because they don't let small devs release games there unless it's a exclusive.
I can almost guarantee you that until Fortnite became an international phenomenon, the second highest grossing PC platform after Steam would've been either the Riot Launcher or Battle.net.
The money's where the F2P titles that sell cosmetics are at.
Talking about revenues to the store.
Of course Epic are massive and make more via UE.
Still doesn't change the fact that they can't buy the market for everymore. Well actually they probably could but I'm sure they'd like to make some return one day which means actually paying for games, or something!
Once Epic are settled in the market, they'd not need to buy market share via exclusivity agreements and thus consumers will thus benefit from the extra choice in the market as opposed to having their choices forced upon them.
Of course this also shows that Steam isn't going anywhere, and they're still the player to beat, unlike some doom merchants prophecy of EGS ruining PC gaming, or something.
Nowhere on EARTH will you see growth %'s like that year over year, holy mother of god, lmao.
I mean.....Epic hasn't 'only' launched big winner games - they've had plenty of 'indies' that (seemingly) haven't taken off.
The store has gone from one page of games to a (poorly sorted) scroll-down sprawl.
Bunch of people replied to me so I won't quote
-- 90% if sweenys claim from the article linked in zhuges tweet (i didn't realize it wasnt the same article linked in the op):
"Sweeney continued, "Exclusives have been critical in gaining momentum in the presence of a competitor that began 2019 with more than 90% market share"
-- Yeah I agree this is much smaller if you include stuff like LoL revenue, but I assume the number is for open storefronts like steam, gog, humble, and so on, that don't just sell publusher exclusives (ie, no battle.net unless I'm mistaken.) Wikipedia cites 75% in 2014 from this bloomberg article, so even if steam hasn't continued to dominate for the last 5 years (lol,) i'm fine to go with 75% instead of 90, it doesn't really change my point.
-- 90% if sweenys claim from the article linked in zhuges tweet (i didn't realize it wasnt the same article linked in the op):
"Sweeney continued, "Exclusives have been critical in gaining momentum in the presence of a competitor that began 2019 with more than 90% market share"
-- Yeah I agree this is much smaller if you include stuff like LoL revenue, but I assume the number is for open storefronts like steam, gog, humble, and so on, that don't just sell publusher exclusives (ie, no battle.net unless I'm mistaken.) Wikipedia cites 75% in 2014 from this bloomberg article, so even if steam hasn't continued to dominate for the last 5 years (lol,) i'm fine to go with 75% instead of 90, it doesn't really change my point.
Only if the advance sells out. They could sit on a majority of unsold advances of the games that are not BL3, WWZ, Satisfactory, and Ubisoft. With the previous PR about those games selling great, there is basically nothing left for the other ~80 exclusives to have sold.
That's almost as much as the entire PC gaming market as it stands.
Not going to happen.
ya, that's fair, I picked a big hypothetical number to help demonstrate what compound growth looks like, but 50 is way unrealistic. but i shoulda gone with like, 20%. Regardless, epic's new 2018 investors probably expect a pretty big number, and epic has money to burn on big name exclusives.
Thats the issue, believing Sweeny's claim instead of using real data that show that F2P games are the PC moneymakers... It is stupid to remove them when talking about the entire PC marketplace, because that is how it works. You cannot say Steam is the biggest seller if we remove all the top seller PC games that are not on Steam.
20% is pretty unrealistic as well.
50% each year is really well beyond the realm of possibility though.
Like what big name exclusive?
RDR 2 was exclusive for a month
Destiny 2 now is Steam exclusive
MS, EA, Bethesda are back to Steam (MS and EA were out for years)
Or Epic is slowing down, or publishers aren't taking the deals anymore
They're kinda different businesses though, right? Fortnite is the arm of epics company that competes with LoL (and dota, and WoW, and whatever) -- egs is the part that competes with steam's PC game sales, and gog, and humble. Surely that "60% over projections" wasn't based on goals set for competing with LoL.
Borderlands is the big one so far, but I'd assume the 1 month rdr exclusivity wasn't a small spend either. I would expect them to speed up personally, not slow down -- they've proven to themselves and their investors that their strategy is working, and they have long way to go. I'm not in the business of game sales tho so I'm just speculating!
How many games are on EGS? Including all the Coming Soon games (I couldn't be bothered not counting them) there's 229, according to this page.
So as a raw average, that's about $1m per game on EGS. Though obviously that figure is skewed because I doubt the non-exclusives games sold at all on EGS. I can't be bothered to go through and count all the exclusives, but I have seen elsewhere that there's about 90 exclusives on EGS. So if we go by that figure we get an average of just under $2.8m per game. Obviously these figures are very rudimentary and limited however, because the figures Epic have given are probably the best-looking figures they're willing to include in a press release and look impressive until you start digging deeper.
Considering the range of EGS exclusives go from blockbusters like Borderlands 3 through to indie games that probably haven't sold that well, $2.8m average per exclusive doesn't really tell us much because it's clear as day that many of the games won't be getting anywhere near that $2.8m figure. It's not even really a useful average to know, but it's the best I can come up with considering the figures we have.
Without sales data for individual games (or even a better breakdown of the figures between AAAs and indies) it's really hard to tell how well the store is actually doing.
I don't see how first party exclusivity is that much different from third party. It's invested money that could have been invested elsewhere. You could even argue that moneyhat money ensure the financial success or big third party games thus enabling even more games to be developed. Also, first party exclusives compete with ALL games thus hugely successful first party exclusives negatively impact third party sales (and the market's health as a result).
Overall, let's not forget who EGS is competing with. We are not talking about an "unfair" advantage over a small store but against a monopoly more or less. So the ultimate question is whether people believe anyone can compete with Steam by following the same rules as Steam. Up until now all alternative stores are either glorified first party game launchers (which only exist to save publishers money and don't contribute in the promotion of third party games in any way) or really small third party stores. Finally, developers themselves seem to enjoy EGS's money terms quite a bit.
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This is going to be one of those threads where the people who just read the headline walk away with a very different experience than the people who actually read the thread.
Of course it's not fair to compare with PS Store but if you want some data
Data below doesn't include Services (PS+/Now)
PSN (digital software + add-on) generates $9.70B in 2018 (calendar year) with 90m MAU as of Nov 2018
In 2019 so far (from Jan to Sept included), PSN generates $6.48B
My estimates for Oct-Dec 2019 is between $2.5B to $3B for PSN revenues
So in 2019, with the low estimates, it will generate about $9B for 103m MAU as of Dec 31, 2019
The competition of Steam is the PC marketplace, which is what contains F2P games that hold a lot of the market. You cannot remove the biggest competition and say Steam controls everything.
The "over projections" is, as in most cases, a nice fluff piece in most occassions, as internal projections quickly change.
They should delist 90% of the games on Steam. This will make the PC gaming market better for everyone.