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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)
- Thread starter Deleted member 8196
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Also developers on Steam actually have to compete
Well, Steam didn't have third party games until later. They were in same forums until new community was made in late 2000s or early 2010s or so. (and before that there were very few third party games)
yeah, you guys are right, I found the point where external devs got added on the wayback machine link and their forums had their own mods. I concede that one's been there since before valve got their market share. Not sure what the structure was with valve/global mods interveneing, see delusibeta's post below, but I was definitely mostly wrong about this one.
AFAIK, the order was that new games got their own sub forum on the centralized Steam forums for ages, but I think Valve still moderated them. It wasn't until per-game hubs were introduced (about 2015 ish) that the devs were expected to moderate their own forums.
its super disappointing seeing the comments in the first page celebrating the success of EGS. EGS has done 0 to prove they intend to advance PC gaming! EPIC left PC gaming due to piracy, games are more expensive in EGS, less features then steam, they can't meet a roadmap proposed by themselves, absurd curation,exclusivity deals that remove games from other stores, avoids using keys to not create competition,etc.
It's really disappointing see "I get free games thus EGS is great competition" instead of a more reserved approach. I get that for those that can't afford it the free games are great; but can't you see that EGS at this time is worse then steam?
I wish Either EGS left the market or started competing.
It's really disappointing see "I get free games thus EGS is great competition" instead of a more reserved approach. I get that for those that can't afford it the free games are great; but can't you see that EGS at this time is worse then steam?
I wish Either EGS left the market or started competing.
I think they just assume that the toxicity they see in EGS threads is par for the course.
It is not about posting opinions. Those posters don't HAVE any opinions on PC gaming apart from "Fuck yeah FREE GAMES! EGS IS THE BEST! cOMpeTiTIOn! Valve Tax!" They don't even post in any of the PC OT's from those free games they are apparently very excited for.
lmao people saying "good, we need more competition"
EGS doesn't like competition, that is why they BUY exclusivity, pay so the games don't launch at Steam. How this works like "competition" I wonder.
It is very nice that you can have random games for free, unfortunately the ones that I'm really interested can't be bought outside EGS because "competition". Fortunatly I can wait until they launch on steam.
Before any "but but but its just one more launcher..." Yeah, I'm used to buy things on R*, Uplay, Origin and GOG, none of them do what EGS does regarding paying so a game not be on Steam.
EGS doesn't like competition, that is why they BUY exclusivity, pay so the games don't launch at Steam. How this works like "competition" I wonder.
It is very nice that you can have random games for free, unfortunately the ones that I'm really interested can't be bought outside EGS because "competition". Fortunatly I can wait until they launch on steam.
Before any "but but but its just one more launcher..." Yeah, I'm used to buy things on R*, Uplay, Origin and GOG, none of them do what EGS does regarding paying so a game not be on Steam.
They were also giving out free money.
Ubisoft took advantage of it the best. They took the free money and pushed a majority of customers to their own store. For that 100% cut.
You do realize Starbucks sells their own branded coffee right? Obviously it's "exclusive" to them.
The glaring difference staring you in the face is that Epic's exclusives aren't their products! They're someone else's products that they pay to keep off Steam/GoG.
It'd be like Walmart paying Kelloggs not to sell Frosted Flakes at Target for one year, so they could have it exclusively.
Getting back to your Starbucks analogy, you also realize Starbucks sells Starbucks coffee at every retail chain right? Meanwhile the majority of Epic exclusives are only available for purchase from EGS.
You mean a "forecast" for over 200 games in 1 year that is lower than the revenue from only 1 game of the big companies that they sold the EGS as the next big thing to?
If a person downloads a PC game, plays a PC Game, but does not post on a PC OT...is that person a valid PC gamer?
An interesting point - the response to Riot & Epic has been night and day, too.
Let's not play dumb, you know what they meant. Yeah, it's legitimate to question someone's honesty when they only ever appear on one kind of thread to stir shit up.
Which also shows the kind of customer they're attracting isn't one to spend money on PC games anyways. They're getting their free games and maybe they buy a game with a $10 coupon and move on.
Not exactly the kind of customer you need to be fighting for.
You have to realize that your average person likely doesn't have a several hundred game backlog on Steam, and EGS is providing weekly free games. It may be that EGS is providing much more value to them with all these free games than Steam currently does. To these people all the pessimists popping up grousing about free games probably come off as equally disappointing as you see them.
User Warned: Community generalization
This is totally me -- I don't talk about pc games as much in general, but after a bunch of embarrassing epic exclusive threads (especially ooblets!) i wrote you guys off as weird/toxic for good. Plus I'm honestly more interested in talking about business and politics than I am games usually, and egs threads are a good intersection of that.
This kind of thing happens constantly! Games (and movies) are a little different because the product is this big name marketed thing, but stores definitely make exclusive deals with suppliers (using x company's coffee beans for Starbucks Whatever Flavor, and precluding that company from selling to competitors,) and stores feature exclusive and timed exclusives with new products, fashion designers, etc, all the time. The analogy is a rough, I admit, and it wouldn't happen with kellogs, but this kind of selling to suppliers is absolutely a real thing in every industry.
Valve doesn't set prices during sales. Developers/publishers do.
Tons of games don't have trading cards or achievements. Trading cards actually earn devs money, too... Valve has never forced devs to use those features. Forums and reviews are "forced" as in, they are part of the platform. Devs can choose to not use the forums, I don't think it's a great idea for Early Access games, but it's their choice.
Your shovelware might be my diamond in the rough. I've seen tons of games that were derided as shovelware and I ended up loving them. You have no right to decide whether those games get a chance to sell or not.
Meanwhile Epic has done the "race to the bottom" thing more than once. They had a sale that literally forced discounts on devs (their first Mega Sale). They set the prices on their store manually (which often leads to regional pricing mistakes). Their free game giveaways might be nice "for the consumer" but as some people have pointed out in this thread, they can "train" people to wait for that indie game they wanted to be free on EGS rather than buying it.
What I don't understand about your post (and other similar ones) is the amount of lies you are willing to post without a care in the world just to "drive your point home".
They are valid PC Gamers.
But if they are only posting in EGS threads to tell us how awesome the EGS is and that they like for (finally) competition in the PC market, then they are either astroturfing or trolling.
I think the fact that Riot is explicitly funding these new games from the ground up is the difference. Meanwhile, Epic poached Metro Exodus at the eleventh hour, and that very much set the tone for all EGS discussion thereafter.
1- There's an obvious pressure to participate in sales, come on. Do you think valve issues those "sale is coming up, set your prices!" emails to devs but doesn't actually care if they participate? They use their power as a store to encourage devs to compete with eachother on the storefront -- this is a basic property of like, every store, and valve optimizes it where they can.
2- Devs can't choose to close the forums, only to either let them fester or invest in moderating them.
3- Yeah, sure, but that's not really a business consideration. There are some diamonds in the rough, but heaping your shelves with junk obviously means forcing the other products to work harder to stand out.
4- I'm kinda of the mind that valve opened the box on constant sales in games and now everybody is stuck with them. I agree epics sales looked like they were handled very badly.
5- we can assume Epic is paying devs for exclusivity and for free game releases (as is standard practice everywhere else) -- flat money is almost always a good deal for devs, and outweighs "training" fears by a lot imo.
User Warned: Trolling.
Guys, you 680 million sounds good, but consider that total profit is only 12% of that, to 30 million.
And then you have to consider bandwidth costs, probably around 3 dollars per download, so subtract 300 million dollars.
And then you have to consider all the coupons and games they paid for, so subtract another billion. Employee expenses, another 100 million.
Oh, and did I forget about taxes? Subtract another 100 hundred million.
I bet Epic lost no less than 8 BILLION in this little experiment. I bet some of you feel pretty foolish for thinking this was good news now, dontcha 😉
And then you have to consider bandwidth costs, probably around 3 dollars per download, so subtract 300 million dollars.
And then you have to consider all the coupons and games they paid for, so subtract another billion. Employee expenses, another 100 million.
Oh, and did I forget about taxes? Subtract another 100 hundred million.
I bet Epic lost no less than 8 BILLION in this little experiment. I bet some of you feel pretty foolish for thinking this was good news now, dontcha 😉
I don't mind this, because of how many broken games are out there I'd rather not have devs close forums and direct you to a barebones wasteland on their own site with no info. Steam forums have a huge amount of info and for every shitpost there's a hundred guides on how to get something working when the devs have long stopped caring.
What you're describing sounds like the game industry equivalent of paying a developer to develop a game that Epic then sells under the Epic brand.
Which is the exact opposite of what Epic does. Hence the strong dislike for Epic among PC gaming fans.
If Epic were actually putting that money towards creating brand new games to sell exclusively in their store, the response would be a positive one. But instead of bringing new creations to light, they're merely taking existing games and removing the option of whom to buy it from.
1) Yes
2) Maybe that bothers some devs, but most seem to be happy to just have something handled for them for free outside of moderation, as most have use of forums. An option of disabling the forum for your game could be a good addition
3) This remains an absolutely worthless point. Games need to be there to sell. You aren't "forcing other products to stand out" you just arent letting the other products exist in your store.
4) you arent even saying anything here
5) Probably right, since it hasnt seemed to be an issue with PSN+
Well, yeah, this is kinda exactly my point. This is a feature that makes you like steam more, which costs valve nothing, and costs devs some amount of $ (or like, pr, if they don't deal with them.)
I feel like this is mostly semantics.
Getting a storefront exclusive deal, getting investment money, getting a publisher, getting a platform exclusive deal, getting government funding -- these are all kinds of income development studios get, and (generally) these all go back into making more games.
I kinda see them as the same, but If anything, EGS exclusivity is less restrictive than a publishing deal -- i can't imagine egs is retaining the rights to any IPs they pay for exclusivity on, and I can't imagine there are any strings on what the money gets spent on in the future. I get that symbolically getting paid to "take away" the game from other platforms maybe feels worse than getting paid to "make" a game in the first place, but development funds are development funds. It'll go towards the next game, which may or may not be an exclusive.
It costs Steam more to have to host it than to the devs to manage it (because they mostly dont manage it).
I'm pretty much purely a PC gamer and I'm not sure if I even have the PC gamer badge to not be in the group described. The hard thing is that they are so indirect, and vague on the qualifications. It's just best to ignore it, especially if you're like me and don't use Era for PC info, help, and entertainment. I actually find console threads more entertaining than Steam related, or PC build threads. A ton of AAA PC games come from console ports after all.
including doing so against the wishes of the audience who funded the game via crowdfunding.
Nope there are tons of developers ho ignore sales. Valve talks to them and says what they think devs should do but devs are ones who decide.
I think that developers actualy can disable whole community section but i am not sure 100%.
By your standards one of the best games of 2019 would never be released and would never sell 100K copies, that game is Supraland that looks like asset flip (developer bought majority of assets from Uneal Market).
And regarding Epic and their free games i already have friends that mostly play indie games who stopped buying indie games, and even Humble Monthly/Choice.
Many devs skip sales just fine, there's games that haven't been discounted in years.
Unlike with EGS where you can't even ignore sales, because Epic discounts your game whatever you want or not.
Valve actually does provide free moderation too if devs want it.
This is a very recent new feature, which I forgot about, but which is an extremely good step imo.
To be fair, Valve moderation is stretched quite thin and is more reactive (through flagging) than active.
"Very recent new feature" that has been there since day 0 and was expanded on 2016.
1. Yes. Plenty of developers feel no such pressure and straight up opt out of a sale. It is completely optional and Valve facilitates the tools to do so. Again, whats the goddamn problem?
2. Im not gonna defend the toxicity in Steam forums but there are plenty of old, abondoned games where users have posted fixes that are beneficial for the community and are easily accessible. These "forced" forums bring a lot of value to many people including me when a game has a weird, obscure issue that needs fixing.
It's bullshit. I barely post in any gaming OT full stop so you cant tell shit from my post history about my gaming habits. I'm sure many other users are the same. Hell, half the forum play games but won't be seen dead on gaming side because of childish shit like this.
I'll take the free games EGS give out. Beyond that, I don't have strong feelings about it and don't plan on spending a penny on their store any time soon. They'll fail and the store will go down, in which case you won't have to worry about exclusivity, or they'll get a decent market share and likely stop this exclusivity crap.
Hey, remember when Steam was initially FUCKING DESPISED by the PC gaming community when Valve forced everyone to use it if they wanted to carry on playing HL online? Fun times.
Honestly..........fine
I am so weary of ever hoping or trying to keep my library in one spot at this point without constant maintenance that, whatever, give me three more launchers while we're at it.
that said, the economics of competition are real and hopefully this means more money and better QoL for devs. Also, they had some pretty solid deals through holiday. I've bought three or four big titles through EGS already.
How's GOG Galaxy doin? Haven't checked in on the beta for awhile. Worked decent but my accounts kept unlinking and ended up with dupes of some games sometimes.
I am so weary of ever hoping or trying to keep my library in one spot at this point without constant maintenance that, whatever, give me three more launchers while we're at it.
that said, the economics of competition are real and hopefully this means more money and better QoL for devs. Also, they had some pretty solid deals through holiday. I've bought three or four big titles through EGS already.
How's GOG Galaxy doin? Haven't checked in on the beta for awhile. Worked decent but my accounts kept unlinking and ended up with dupes of some games sometimes.
I guess it's an okay start, but I imagine they'll be looking to do much higher numbers for the upcoming year, now that it has a user base.
Lots of developers choose to not participate. Even if there was "pressure to participate", Valve doesn't set the sale prices. All platforms do sales (and many of them have been cheaper than Steam over the past few years). Why aren't you complaining about Sony or Xbox sales? Or even worse, Switch devs having to price their stuff super low just to get a chance at people seeing their games.
Regarding the forums option, I prefer to have the forums so I can get quick fixes (or warnings before I buy something that might not work). I can see the downsides, but I also see to many benefits. You know, just like you can see the downsides to the free games, but you see more benefits than losses there...
When Valve started doing sales no one took the PC platform as a place where you can sell games. Those sales, plus the addition of regional pricing in many big markets such as Russia turned things around. Of course it's easier to just blame Valve for "devaluing" games. It's just funny when you do it while praising a company that arrived way later and in a market that had changed a lot, and then proceeded to screw up badly...
Assumptions, assumptions. Of course Epic's paying devs for their free games. And? If people getting "trained" to wait is not a concern, then why is it a concern that Valve has big sales?
Huh, I was quite sure they had worked on general mods since at least 2015.
One more note--
In other EGS threads I've often drawn an analogy between the EGS exclusive/free games budget and a standard user acquisition budget.
It's very standard to scale your user acquisition budget up proportionately to your revenue, such that (especially in year 1 and 2), actual profit is minimized because your revenue is "recycled" into scaling up acquisition. Given that they continue to run the free games program, this seems like what's going on to me. This is what I mean when I say we can't judge how successful EGS is without knowing their expenditures, but given that revenues were way beyond expectations, we can make a reasonable assumption that they are doing well.
In other EGS threads I've often drawn an analogy between the EGS exclusive/free games budget and a standard user acquisition budget.
It's very standard to scale your user acquisition budget up proportionately to your revenue, such that (especially in year 1 and 2), actual profit is minimized because your revenue is "recycled" into scaling up acquisition. Given that they continue to run the free games program, this seems like what's going on to me. This is what I mean when I say we can't judge how successful EGS is without knowing their expenditures, but given that revenues were way beyond expectations, we can make a reasonable assumption that they are doing well.