I'd like to know this, too.
If the game is gonna have an alpha demo May-June, how likely is it to be delayed til next year for release?
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PC Gaming ERA | May 2019 - Romance of the Three Storefronts
- Thread starter Uzzy
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I'd like to know this, too.
If the game is gonna have an alpha demo May-June, how likely is it to be delayed til next year for release?
I agree, except that I am not sure whether the payment is upfront, and whether there is a constraint on the number of sold games.
It seems that it is a contract which only takes effect to guarantee revenue during the exclusivity period, which would hint that:
- this contractual payment would happen at the end of the exclusivity period,
- even if the number of sales is not reached, the tab is cleared after the payment happens.
If we consider Phoenix Point, the price of the game is 32.99€, and the revenue guarantee could be about 2 million euros.
So, if we forget the EPIC MEGA SALE, then Epic would make a profit if there are at least about 61,000 sales.
However, Epic does not make more money by offering 10€ to each customer, and does not lose less money either.
I guess there is something which I am missing.
In this case, my understanding is that Epic would guarantee $2000 to the dev.
If nothing is sold, Epic loses $2000.
If 50 copies are sold with $10 given back to the customer, Epic loses $1500 instead of $1000.
It must be that it is not a revenue guarantee but Epic actually bought game copies, as you suggested. Otherwise, the $10 cashback increases the loss of Epic.
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Ah, I got what you mean.
However there are two big things that I think you are wrong with:
- Contractual payment should happen at the START of the exlusivity period. Otherwise companies would be stupid to accept the deal, as the most interesting part of all of this is the upfront payment. Getting paid the possible loses after 1 year is just not good enough (and as we saw with Phoenix and Rune, they got financing before the game went to sale, in the first case enough to repay ALL the backers and in the other to avoid EA).
- The tab is not cleared after a period of time, but stays until the game crosses the revenue barrier. For the dev, this isnt that important, as they get the payment before hand but Epic should ideally always end up being revenue neutral with the deal given infinite time.
My idea of the contract is:
The devs get paid the equivalent of 200k sold copies of the game in day 0 and until they sell 200.001 copies, they dont get more money from Epic. Otherwise it wouldnt make sense to make an agreement that covers for loses... after you had the loses. You want to cover for them BEFORE they can happen. The main positive of this deal is that regardless of reviews, customers or anything, you as a dev get paid now.
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Interesting. That means Epic actually bought game copies, which are then sold in priority on their store, hence the absolute requirement of an exclusivity window.
Could it be that a HYPER MEGA EPIC SALE could take place when the timed-exclusivity window is about to end?
I was considering that under another contract, as hinted at by Madjoki's post.
It would be an insurance. For instance, Epic would offer development funding in exchange of the exclusivity ; the dev would be afraid of losing sales due to the exclusivity ; Epic would try to convince the dev that many copies would be sold on the Epic store, and to show their confidence, offer an insurance that the dev would earn the same revenue as he would have earned on Steam.
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Not really, their exclusivity window is 1 year for all games (and 6 months for Borderlands).
The main reasons from the sale imho are:
- People havent really used the store even players from Fortnite. Example: They got only 5 million downloads of the first game they send email to all fortnite players / people with EGS account (and normally that tends to drop down as more people put that mail into spam).
- Need to drum up numbers for the publisers. Some of the numbers from people that jumped in might be... not good if we read into the THQN meeting. They might want to show that they are a serious contender in the marketplace to continue getting exclusives at a decent price (as the brand damage cost has potentially increased).
- Drum up excitement for the E3 conference. Lets be serious, the PCGamer E3 is always a laughing stock that only hardcore PC gamers watch... and that audience is the one more pissed out with EGS. They need to attract more people / press.
- Try and change the opinion of pc gamers by actually using a carrot instead of a stick.
- Fight against Steam Summer Sales by doing a Sale that outshines them. We will probably see lots of articles about how Steam Summer Sale was a dissapointment compared to how crazy EGS one was.
Also talking about Fortnite, I am surprised about the lack of cross-promotion around both "brands", but I guess the answer to the promotional tweets being mostly focused on Fortnite worries them (such as a lashback to an EGS sale were they give 10$ credit to EGS games by promoting in Fortnite... but not adding V-Bucks).
Edit: I still think that "revenue guarantees" should happen at the start of the exclusivity period. It makes no sense to sign a deal where the developer is the one shouldering the possibility of the game severely underperforming for 1 year to get the payment. The main driving force for the devs to sign the agreement would be that they get the money upfront and they do not have to care about anything else (well, they do care about making a good game for fans somewhat, but not having to worry about the sales).
Loaded up Origin again. It looks like they did a rollback because they broke the DPI again. But I got the Sims 4 free this time so yay I guess.
It takes two to tango though, and for EGS the exact reverse is true - they would probably like an option to pay later. I wouldn't be surprised if they met somewhere in the middle and EGS guaranteed particular payouts for various subintervals.
In gaming, most of the revenue is still quite frontloaded so most of the revenue should be in the first months. We are also talking about amounts of money that are rounding errors right now for Epic as they can easily shoulder them with the Fortnite cash cow.
I just think that in most cases, the main payment would be at launch
I'm still surprised they didn't do EGS-exclusive cross-promotional content in Fortnite, like owners of Hades or Metro Exodus can get exclusive Fortnite skins or a few hundred V-Bucks or whatever. That seems like a no-brainer for converting millions of Fortnite players into paying EGS customers.
Do you have any weird partial installs of the game hanging around? Anything going on with your browser/addons (assuming you are doing it from the browser store and not the app)?
I've also had it just not work for a while - like there's an issue with the store itself & came back like 12h later and had it work correctly for me.
Sorry if this is like unplug and plug it back in, but yeah, those are the issues I've had/seen in the past.
I have that. I can't actually install *any* windows store games.
I've tried everything. Keep trying until you get an error code, then Google solutions, it might work for you.
My windows 10 wasn't up to date even though it said it was. I had a defender update, installed that and it works fine!
Nope. It was working fine. I stopped using my PC for a month, came back, bought Forza Horizon 4 and it just wouldn't work, no games installed, windows store trash apps install just fine though.
Short of nuking my installation there is nothing to be done.
I'm on 66.0.5 yet but I'm having font issues since last week.
Ah, I remember when every other game had an exclusive TF2 hat. I am not sure when it stopped happening but that was when I knew TF2 was not at its peak anymore. I never played TF2
It's the deal that's been running, it's just about to end is all.
Oh my mistake. Saw it pop up in my email and thought it was new for some reason.
Well I wanted to check out Dauntless, but 180+ minute wait to get into the game. It's an Epic published game, so I'm assuming they are using their servers. How does a billion dollar company keep fucking up so bad? Like, they should have this shit figured out by now from working on Fortnite.
I should just buy Monster Hunter: World, but non of my friends play on PC.
I should just buy Monster Hunter: World, but non of my friends play on PC.
I mean.... Borderlands' only online aspect is P2P multiplayer. I don't think they host anything on their own servers, versus an always-online game like Dauntless.
That's something Valve started doing like 8 years ago with TF2 so it's probably in the 5+ years slot on their roadmap.
This phrase brings back great memories from the weeks after Mass Effect 2's release.
Three Kingdoms Paradox grand strategy game would be way more interesting than Rome imo
Wasn't it supposed to have cross platform multiplayer though, and it's releasing on Steam later?
Unless the game has changed massively from a few months ago it really isn't anything special
What's that got to do with anything?
Still P2P multiplayer and not always-online.
Being on EGS does not equal being published by Epic. Not really sure what their server situation is, but I don't think when they did their PR for it that they said anything beyond that they were retiring the old launcher and using the Epic account system.
I mean, they started busting out spreadsheets and bullet lists here.
Somebody had to say something. We were heading toward a whole nonsense theoretical contract being printed up and argued about.
I've never really played a Monster Hunter type game, and the price is right, so I wanted to check it out. Plus I have a friend on PS4 that's playing it, and we don't get to play too many games together with the platform difference.
When you launch the games, there is a blurb about it being published by Epic, and the Wikipedia page for the game has Epic Games as the publisher. Plus they abandoned their own login system to use Epic's to do the cross-platform stuff.
Just bought the Uprising bundle at Fanatical, I wonder if the bonus 10% code they sent me via email works with Team Sonic Racing.
Everytime I had an issue with the Windows Store, the solution involved running a command to reinstall an app in the PowerShell.
Maybe try running the following in the PowerShell as Admin:
Bash:
Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.XboxApp | Remove-AppxPackage- Status