Board 8 > Can someone tell me the deal with the Epic Store and Steam Store?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I was never a PC gamer. I have played like 10 games on PC on 25 years that I am a gamer. So finally having a competitor for Steam seems a good thing since nobody likes monopolies right? But people are furious!

BUT I know that having competition is a good thing right? I mean sure I can't play Gears on PS4 but that doesn't matter since companies have to make offers and such in order to make you buy their consoles and games.

I mean if everything was on one console no point for the companies to make offers right?

Yet I see that people constantly are furious with the Epic Store like it is the Big Bad of gaming on PC or something. I mean you just download it and you can buy stuff and play right? You don't even need to change a PC!

So what is exactly the deal? More competitors the better! Right?
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i personally don't see epic store itself as a bad thing, but people are annoyed by epic's strategy of throwing money at devs for store exclusivity in order to brute force its way into the market. i think that's fine, but the issue is with games that previously promised steam releases suddenly switching to epic exclusivity, especially in situations where people have already dropped money on a product based on prior representations (see, shenmue 3).

im going to be a little annoyed if i have to start using a different client for pc games but it's really not the end of the world. and it's true, steam needed competition to slap some sense into it regarding the policies towards game devs
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the issue people have is that is when they don't offer more competition. epic games has been paying for exclusivity which is rustling people's jimmies

ironically that's more monopolistic behavior than what steam does, which at least nominally competed with gog as well as the publisher stores
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People can wax poetic about being upset at exclusivity and the principle of the thing all they want. At the end of the day the issue is just that it's a bad store. If the store functioned well nobody would care.
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Epic is a badly designed, insecure and poorly managed platform that is forcing its way into competition by cutting massive checks with their unlimited Fortnite money specifically to keep games away from Steam. (Oftentimes this happens well after the game has had a Steam page up, even just weeks away from launch.)

It's basically just maximum sleazy business and people are upset because games and developers they care about are being dragged into the shitshow, forcing them to either wait up to a year to play or give in and support Epic's gross tactics and bad platform.
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NFUN posted...

epic games has been paying for exclusivity which is rustling people's jimmies

Yeah, this. I'm not exactly upset, but I like the convenience of Steam and all my games in one place, and it's not like I'm short on other games to play and things to do. In like 90% of cases I'd be perfectly fine just waiting a year or two for a Steam release.
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Apparently the Epic Store roots through your shit and sends data back to Epic? No idea how legit that is
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^Something you can't be entirely sure of when using an online application.
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Just to put something out in the open - turns out Epic are not about keeping exclusives to themselves - they just decided to declare a war on Steam
They are totally fine with games releasing on Windows Store for example, as long as it's not Steam

Is it more of a bitch move or less of a bitch move? that's for you to decide I guess
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ZenOfThunder posted...

Apparently the Epic Store roots through your shit and sends data back to Epic? No idea how legit that is

To be fair, I assume everything on the internet does that at this point, including Steam
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Xiahou Shake posted...

It's basically just maximum sleazy business and people are upset because games and developers they care about are being dragged into the shitshow, forcing them to either wait up to a year to play or give in and support Epic's gross tactics and bad platform.

At least less of your money goes into Epic's pockets than Valve's! I really hope Valve starts giving developers better percentages at some point.
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Mac Arrowny posted...

At least less of your money goes into Epic's pockets than Valve's! I really hope Valve starts giving developers better percentages at some point.

Yeah sales on the Steam client could definitely stand to take less of a cut for Valve. I think it's worth mentioning though that Valve has no issue at all generating keys to be sold on other stores like Humble and GMG, and they don't take anything off the top for those sales. Valve also takes increasingly smaller cuts as your game sells more, down to 20% in the most extreme cases.

I think Epic really pulled a Mad Men and focused on one specific, undeniable area/statistic that got a lot of people talking while actively trying to avoid all other comparisons/conversation.
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I think it is being glossed over that the Epic store is an online storefront that still doesn't have a shopping cart and will ban you if you make too many transactions in a short period of time.

That said, I have zero issue with using the epic games launcher.
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Xiahou Shake posted...

Valve also takes increasingly smaller cuts as your game sells more, down to 20% in the most extreme cases.

...which basically only affects AAA devs. You have to sell millions of copies for that to matter. Honestly, Valve taking a measure like that only pissed me off more. It's the indie devs that are barely scraping by, not the massive publishers that sell millions of copies.

Xiahou Shake posted...

I think Epic really pulled a Mad Men and focused on one specific, undeniable area/statistic that got a lot of people talking while actively trying to avoid all other comparisons/conversation.

Well yeah, because they suck by most other measures. A lot of indie game companies can't even get their games on Epic because of their stupid rules. But I (and others in the industry) really want Valve to decrease the cut they take. It'd make a huge difference to us.
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Mac Arrowny posted...

...which basically only affects AAA devs. You have to sell millions of copies for that to matter. Honestly, Valve taking a measure like that only pissed me off more. It's the indie devs that are barely scraping by, not the massive publishers that sell millions of copies.

Indeed! What I'd personally really like to see is something along the lines of an indie dev percentage break for those who are self-publishing, though I recognize such a simple idea would be difficult to implement while being also highly exploitable.

At least folks are talking about developer/publisher cuts now, which is probably the one good thing to come of Epic's display of late.
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Steam introduced a couple new features shortly after Epic showed up too, IIRC. That's the good thing about competition.
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It's mostly the exclusivity that enrages people, in my experience. Particularly when it gets announced for games that were previously slated for Steam, complete with Steam pages and active pre-orders.

It doesn't help that Epic has said in the past (forget if it was after Metro or Borderlands 3 maybe even both) it won't do it again (not exclusivity in general, but some of the more close-to-launch-pulled-from-Steam type ones)... then has... done it again.

Shenmue III is a special case because it's: highly anticipated and its nature as a kickstarted project promising backers Steam keys and sending backers emails saying it was still for Steam as close as 4 days before the exclusive announcement. Shenmue III got "downgraded" to a timed exclusive, but last I checked the backers PC keys are still being switched from Steam to EGS.

ZenOfThunder posted...

Apparently the Epic Store roots through your shit and sends data back to Epic? No idea how legit that is

My knowledge on this is that a few months back it was discovered that EGS was grabbing Steam data from the user without asking. Epic said it was only sent back to them if you opt-in to import Steam friends and whatnot but it was there and would act without asking permission. Epic admitted some fault in this when it got big IIRC.

When I went to look up an article on this to make sure I didn't mess anything up from when I was reading about this as it happened I came across other accusations but they seem to be either standard stuff performed by Steam too and in their privacy policy... or conspiracy theory seeming. The Steam data thing is the only one I know to be legit.
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since nobody likes monopolies right?

Thinking that the left can be logically consistent is your first mistake.
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Okay I see. Still Epic Store will get better. I mean was Steam when it first started just like it is today? No. But people didn't complain.
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LapisLazuli posted...

If the store functioned well nobody would care.

Definitely not true. There are Steam fanboys and any competition is obviously seen as a personal attack, not better for the industry. We're still living in console wars. There are tons of people who would love if Nintendo and Xbox ceased to exist too. It's pure childish brand war.

NFUN posted...

epic games has been paying for exclusivity which is rustling people's jimmies

This is the bigger factor though I think. Gamers HATE the notion that developers are motivated by money. The marketing all their lives said that developers make games for the love of GAMERS. Any peek into the actual business side of things makes them go nuts. It's like Santa Claus isn't real.

So there's paying for exclusivity directly, which Epic has done a few times, but the much more common thing is that a dev willingly stays off Steam because the revenue cut is too high. That still ends up being "exclusive" to Epic, but without direct action by Epic. Gamers are still furious at that, despite they themselves enforcing a culture of "wait until it's 75% off".

Developers are reacting to frugality and lack of respect from gamers, and Epic is simply giving devs what they want.

It's fun to think about it as a war or Epic as some EA style boogeyman, but at the end of the day, gamers know this is about their own behavior and actions. That's why it's so infuriating. They are being asked to change their own behavior.
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foolm0r0n posted...

There are Steam fanboys and any competition is obviously seen as a personal attack, not better for the industry. We're still living in console wars. There are tons of people who would love if Nintendo and Xbox ceased to exist too. It's pure childish brand war.

it's basically impossible to determine what percentage of people think this or that

i'm fine with the epic store existing as long as steam and EGS don't start running antivirus type programs to screw with their competitor's programs

the unfortunate thing will be if one or the other company shuts down
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Amid these quasi-launcher wars, GoG is setting themselves up in a really great position with their GoG Galaxy basically being a library consolidator with cross-chat and achievement support - all from a company that people actually like! Only Microsoft and Steam are fully on board right now but those are really the two you'd want in the current environment.
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foolm0r0n posted...

LapisLazuli posted...

If the store functioned well nobody would care.

Definitely not true. There are Steam fanboys and any competition is obviously seen as a personal attack, not better for the industry. We're still living in console wars. There are tons of people who would love if Nintendo and Xbox ceased to exist too. It's pure childish brand war.

NFUN posted...

epic games has been paying for exclusivity which is rustling people's jimmies

This is the bigger factor though I think. Gamers HATE the notion that developers are motivated by money. The marketing all their lives said that developers make games for the love of GAMERS. Any peek into the actual business side of things makes them go nuts. It's like Santa Claus isn't real.

So there's paying for exclusivity directly, which Epic has done a few times, but the much more common thing is that a dev willingly stays off Steam because the revenue cut is too high. That still ends up being "exclusive" to Epic, but without direct action by Epic. Gamers are still furious at that, despite they themselves enforcing a culture of "wait until it's 75% off".

Developers are reacting to frugality and lack of respect from gamers, and Epic is simply giving devs what they want.

It's fun to think about it as a war or Epic as some EA style boogeyman, but at the end of the day, gamers know this is about their own behavior and actions. That's why it's so infuriating. They are being asked to change their own behavior.

damn man
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Developers don't deserve respect with the stuff they've been pulling the last couple years. Treating their consumers as walking ATMs is terrible. Steam is so much more pro-consumer than Epic is, and that's all I really care about as a consumer. In a perfect world everything would be on GoG, but we can't be that lucky.
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Mewtwo59 posted...

Developers don't deserve respect with the stuff they've been pulling the last couple years. Treating their consumers as walking ATMs is terrible.

Buy their games for a one-time $100 purchase then. Then this wouldn't be a problem.

But that will never happen. Look at how disgusted you felt just seeing "$100 " and "game" in the same sentence. But that's what it takes to make the games you demand.

When you say Steam is pro-consumer, what you mean is it lets you demand $100 games and only pay $15 for them. You see that as a grand service bringing games to you for cheap. But you forget that of that $100 that the dev is asking from you, Steam demands $30. If Steam were truly pro-consumer, they would have a 0% cut, and the dev could sell you the game for $70 straight up. But 30% of $15 is more money in Gaben's pocket than 0% of $100, so Steam pressures devs to put their game on sale, and it pressures gamers to NOT support the work that they love.

The result is an industry where even the biggest games need to squeeze their players for charity donations through microtransactions to survive, and the smaller games literally can't exist at all.

If you like games, how does that help you?

Steam has such a huge potential to improve the gaming industry by making developing and selling a game far less risky, rewarding quality games far better, supporting niche/indie games that could not have been made otherwise, infusing a ton more cash into the ecosystem. But instead they just sit back, take their 30%, and watch while fewer and fewer quality games get made each year. And gamers like you worship them for it.
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The fact is, Steam could absolutely obliterate the Epic Store OVERNIGHT by just reducing its cut to 15%. Think about that anytime you get mad about Epic.
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valve is a pretty bad company with a client that is way less feature rich (and well running) than it should be for how much money it makes and and how long its been around.

Valve introduced artifact, probably the greediest card game model i've ever seen. All the while not giving people the games they want for a while.

Valve is way less developer friendly for all the reasons foolmo pointed out.

Epic store has been giving out free games weekly and is bringing in some real competition into the market that steam has dominated for years.It's grabbing "exclusives" sure because theres no other way for it to get a real market share.

Yet everyone gets made at epic and not steam.

(And I don't like the epic store or the interface, but a business trying to make money is what businesses do. And i'd much rather the competition than not)
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interesting stuff. didn't think of it that way. i do hate "i'll only buy things on sale, games aren't worth more than 15$" culture though

What are Valve's profit margins, anyway? It has to be insane right?
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Safer_777 posted...

Okay I see. Still Epic Store will get better. I mean was Steam when it first started just like it is today? No. But people didn't complain.

Oh yes they did. Youd see a lot of the same complaints being made about Epic now in fact, particularly regarding how PC is supposed to be an open platform and all that.
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foolm0r0n posted...

If Steam were truly pro-consumer, they would have a 0% cut, and the dev could sell you the game for $70 straight up.

This is a dumb point when Epic has a lower cut and games cost exactly the same. If Steam went to 0% devs would pocket the difference and the consumer wouldn't get anything (which I know is your ideal since you want to be a game developer but at least be honest about it)

foolm0r0n posted...

and the smaller games literally can't exist at all.

Smaller games do exist, though?
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Robazoid posted...

and the consumer wouldn't get anything

Except for like, the games. More money in dev's pocket = more games, more quality, less microtransactions. I understand that the typical gamer doesn't have a view into the games that AREN'T made, but this is basic economics.

But hey maybe you'll finally get Half Life 3 after Valve gets a few more dozen billion dollars from devs!

Robazoid posted...

Smaller games do exist, though?

There was a time when indie games were made just to be on Steam. Now they are made despite Steam. Fortunately the world of the Steam fanboys is not a reality. But Steam is still a huge looming figure.
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Dels posted...

i do hate "i'll only buy things on sale, games aren't worth more than 15$" culture though

For me, it's not about what games are "worth," or what they "should" cost. It's just that, if there's a neat thing for $50, and a similar neat thing for $5, it's sensible to buy the one for $5.

I have no problem with devs wanting to make money! It's a tough world, you do what works for you. If a dev gets better profits from saying "I will never lower the price below $50" then I'm not mad and I wish them well. But I'm not buying the game for $50 unless I'm convinced it brings me something unique/special that's better than getting 10 $5 games on sale.
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Drakeryn posted...

For me, it's not about what games are "worth," or what they "should" cost. It's just that, if there's a neat thing for $50, and a similar neat thing for $5, it's sensible to buy the one for $5.

I have no problem with devs wanting to make money! It's a tough world, you do what works for you. If a dev gets better profits from saying "I will never lower the price below $50" then I'm not mad and I wish them well. But I'm not buying the game for $50 unless I'm convinced it brings me something unique/special that's better than getting 10 $5 games on sale.

Exactly this. That probably makes me a bad person, but hey!
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Yeah, you're crazy if you think it's Steam's cut that causes micro transactions and all that. Sony and Microsoft have a smaller cut, so why not just make it console exclusive and not charge more money? They'd pocket the difference and still charge micro transactions. Plus there's the fact that most games just aren't worth full price. Game devs shouldn't be entitled to more of my money just because they think it's worth it. You want me to buy your game full price? Make it worth it.
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Drakeryn posted...

Dels posted...

i do hate "i'll only buy things on sale, games aren't worth more than 15$" culture though

For me, it's not about what games are "worth," or what they "should" cost. It's just that, if there's a neat thing for $50, and a similar neat thing for $5, it's sensible to buy the one for $5.

I have no problem with devs wanting to make money! It's a tough world, you do what works for you. If a dev gets better profits from saying "I will never lower the price below $50" then I'm not mad and I wish them well. But I'm not buying the game for $50 unless I'm convinced it brings me something unique/special that's better than getting 10 $5 games on sale.

Man, I take so long to write a response that Drak does it better.
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fool, you make a great argument, very well put

I'm a cheap asshole when it comes to games but I never really saw the damage that culture has done in the long run.

I'm still going to be a cheap asshile though but I get why PC revs are doing what they're doing
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There's nothing wrong with waiting for a game to go down to $15 (or lower) before buying. And there's nothing wrong with a developer refusing to sell their game for that cheap. But the digital games market is such that it almost always makes financial sense for the developer to eventually put the game on sale, considering the marginal cost of each copy.
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Mewtwo59 posted...

Plus there's the fact that most games just aren't worth full price.

Games are an extremely cost-effective piece of media. If you buy a full price, $60 game and it lasts you 40 hours, that's...really really good. And they've been $60 for over a decade, despite issues like inflation and rising development costs that have affected basically every other industry. I'll never begrudge someone for wanting to buy stuff cheap (literally everyone wants to), but people's notions of what games 'deserve' to cost have gotten very skewed. Being able to get a quality AAA title for like $15 on a Steam sale is absurd when you look at how much games cost to make.
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Mewtwo59 posted...

Yeah, you're crazy if you think it's Steam's cut that causes micro transactions and all that. Sony and Microsoft have a smaller cut, so why not just make it console exclusive and not charge more money? They'd pocket the difference and still charge micro transactions. Plus there's the fact that most games just aren't worth full price. Game devs shouldn't be entitled to more of my money just because they think it's worth it. You want me to buy your game full price? Make it worth it.

Sorry, where is this coming from about console sales giving more money to developers? Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft all take 30-40% cuts of digital game sales, and Steam takes 30%. The console publishers aren't any better than Valve is in this regard.
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Oh, sorry. I thought I heard that console companies took less money. I guess I heard wrong.
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You could be thinking of cuts for physical games. I think those are 10-12% to Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft? The retail store takes ~20-30% too though, and there are costs of producing and shipping those games, which means developers still get a bigger cut from digital sales on PC than they do from physical sales on console (or digital sales on console).

Someone also posted earlier asking about how much money Valve makes - Epic recently announced that they make about 5% profits on games sold on their store, from their 12% cut. So I would assume Steam makes at least 23% profits from their 30% cut, probably more. Epic likely makes lower profits than Steam because they're throwing so much money at their store right now.
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I'm a cheap asshole when it comes to games but I never really saw the damage that culture has done in the long run.

It's really not the customers job to ensure that any particular industry is decent at business and is adequately recouping its costs.

The fact that game devs are too ignorant (or too arrogant to admit their ignorance and get assistance) of basic business concepts is their own problem.
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It's not the customer's job so they aren't obligated to help out. However, it's a problem for the customers as well if the developers fall apart so it may be in their interest to cover for the developers even if they don't have to.
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Mewtwo59 posted...

Plus there's the fact that most games just aren't worth full price.

This is what causes microtransactions. Steam's cut influences that but like I said, it's their culture of race-to-the-bottom pricing along with gamers who absolutely hate giving money people to the people who make the games they supposedly love. A $60 game 20 years ago is $100 today. That's what it comes down to. If you refuse to pay $60 up front, then they HAVE to make that up somewhere else.

Consoles take the same cut but give WAY more in return, not to mention the actual hardware they designed to run the game in the first place. That's why devs don't complain about that as much. Although it still has the issues with $60 base game. A smaller cut would work there too obviously.

Steam is another story though. They barely do anything for devs OR players, and all the good stuff they have done (linux, social features) they don't give a shit about vs selling more hats. Their entire value is they are old and thus have a lot of users. They are the facebook of games.

And they are trying to make the base price of games $15, which I'm gonna repeat in case you still don't get it, is NOT enough to fund a $100 game.
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Drakeryn posted...

For me, it's not about what games are "worth," or what they "should" cost. It's just that, if there's a neat thing for $50, and a similar neat thing for $5, it's sensible to buy the one for $5.

Yeah everyone does that and it's fine. I do it too obviously. It's always a choice for a dev to sell a game for cheaper, and they do it so you more people can buy it. Nothing necessarily wrong with it, even if the system it enforces sucks.

But when a dev refuses to put a game on sale, or sells a game for $20 or $30 instead of the standard $15, or only sells on Itch & Epic instead of Steam, know that they are trying to improve the system, which ultimately benefits you.
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Lots of folks in this topic are using "devs" when they really mean "publisher" - it's important to distinguish the two. Monetization decisions are pretty much always made at the publisher level so if you want to talk about someone shitting on customers or being greedy, that's who you should look at. Devs are artists - nothing more and certainly nothing less.

Other than that I don't really see any fault in anything anyone's arguing here on either side, which is precisely what makes this such a muddy issue. FWIW foolmo is absolutely right that the "real" value of AAA games should rightfully be closer to $100, though I'd argue more like $80 personally. That said, games have been utterly devalued simply because it's so easy to get an effectively infinite amount of entertainment for next to nothing, so any "real" solution isn't feasible without a ton of outrage.
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foolm0r0n posted...

But when a dev refuses to put a game on sale, or sells a game for $20 or $30 instead of the standard $15, or only sells on Itch & Epic instead of Steam, know that they are trying to make more money, which may or may not benefit you.

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SmartMuffin posted...

The fact that game devs are too ignorant (or too arrogant to admit their ignorance and get assistance) of basic business concepts is their own problem.

Yeah the GG types who hate games are quite content sitting on the sidelines watching the industry struggle, and I'm sure they applaud the acumen of the thousands upon thousands of developers who have not made games year after year because it's not sound business.

But for those of us who love games, we can acknowledge our agency in this industry and try to improve things little by little. Or at the least, not go out of our way to make things worse while crying online.
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Some of the complaints I've heard are that the Epic Store is less convenient to use (there's no shopping cart system for buying multiple items at once, for example), and that their security is lacking so there's a greater risk of people stealing your account. I think there's also fewer payment options which may make it less of an option for some users, particularly in certain countries.
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