Awesome to see the Epic Game Store continuing to make waves. Hopefully the beatings will continue until Valve stops taxing game developers so hard.
Epic gets a lot of flack for being a fairly simple store at the moment, but Steam's had ten years to get where it is. Competition was sorely needed and we're finally getting it.
The CEO of Epic is a big fan of open platforms and cross-platform gaming and a loud and outspoken opponent of walled gardens. If there's anyone who will move us out of this model as much as possible, it's probably him. But exclusives is the only way to fight the Stockholm Syndrome people seem to have with Steam.
>But exclusives is the only way to fight the Stockholm Syndrome people seem to have with Steam.
Stockholm syndrome?
Epic competed for developers on a more competitive split, but have done little to entice users; their platform didn't have even the barest of (edit:) feature* parity with Steam at launch (or even today), and rather than, say, fund new titles for their platform, they've largely paid for existing or in production titles to not appear on their competitor.
They're competing based on attacking their competitor (and/or users of their competitor's platform) rather than by bolstering the merits of their own platform.
It's a shallow distinction but a fair one for consumers to make. "We have helped create this thing for our users" is different than "We paid to prevent their users from having a thing."
What do users really need from a platform beyond basic social features and the ability to, you know, launch the game?
I've used Steam chat and voice comms all of about 3 times. Discord is better.
Profile pages and achievements? Couldn't care less.
Streaming? There's Twitch for that.
What I really care about from a platform are the games that are available for it. Valve waved the white flag on that a while ago when they abandoned first party game development.
Given that we're talking about a store, a shopping cart is generally a good feature. Wish lists / favorites are a useful QoL feature as well. There's a bunch of things like that where it's hard to believe the Epic games store is being pushed so hard without them.
Just because you don't use or need those features doesn't mean that everyone feels the same.
Many people use any enjoy the features that steam provides. For example, I enjoy the ability to go to someone's profile and be able to instantly join their game. I enjoy the ability to organize events through events in steam groups. Many people I know use the Steam Workshop to share their fan-made content or the Marketplace to sell their items.
It's not just those features in the client though. Steam also has a number of integrations that developers can make in their games, such as achievements, integrating their multiplayer with steam (allowing for the aforementioned joining via profile), cloud saves, controller support, etc.
Right now Epic is missing many of these features and more. With that being said, what reason do I have to use Epic over Steam besides the fact that Epic has a few exclusives?
> Hopefully the beatings will continue until Valve stops taxing game developers so hard.
87.5% of Steam's sales in Asia are from over 90 non-standard payment methods (outside of Visa, MasterCard, American Express, PayPal, PaySafe), and Steam Retail Cards cost Valve 10-15% of the sale. Epic either just don't support them, or charge the customer extra. I don't think it's fair to say Valve are "taxing game developers so hard".
A couple of months ago they didn't even support regional pricing. Still doubt they support domestic cards. With so many news on hacks on epic account, I've never heard of abyone being thrilled to create an epic account
CD Projekt Red and GOG is doing some great stuff, I think you'd find Epic is much closer to that than you might imagine.
Epic has stated it will put it's games on Steam if Valve drops their cut down to 12%. Epic probably is a little more pragmatic than GOG on ensuring they operate profitably, with willingness to offer compensation for exclusive launches, allowing DRM (although not offering any of their own), etc. but if you've followed Tim Sweeney or read things he's said going back for years, it's obvious he's one of the good guys. He's a CEO of a large business and has to make moves to actually be successful and profitable, but he is strongly opinionated about what's "right" and pushes Epic in that direction where possible.
Bear in mind, even if Epic wasn't offering incentives for exclusives, it would still be silly for game developers to release on both: Sales on Steam would hurt their sales on Epic, and they profit vastly more from Epic sales.
Steam allows you to sell your game and provide players with steam keys from your own website without taking any cut. So that 30% cut that steam takes gets diluted quite a bit.
Epic does not allow for that level of distribution. It also doesn’t seem like they will.
Your argument about walled gardens also falls apart as soon as you realize that Epic is pushing for exclusivity.
So while it's not 100% the same, it's progression far faster than Steam did when Valve pissed the gaming community off by forcing HL2 players to install Steam.
(Can't read the article from my current location) But will the games be downloadable directly from Humble Bundle, or am I just buying a key to redeem on the Epic Game Store (which is the way most HB game purchases work)? If it's the latter, then it is still exclusive.
> Bear in mind, even if Epic wasn't offering incentives for exclusives, it would still be silly for game developers to release on both: Sales on Steam would hurt their sales on Epic, and they profit vastly more from Epic sales.
That's clearly not the case yet, otherwise Epic wouldn't be investing so much effort into pulling exclusives, including games that already have started taking pre-orders on other platforms (to be fair, it seems like those are being honored)
Making their platform a bit less shit for users might help too. It's not like Steam is a pinnacle of good UX that's impossible to beat. Winning through quality and good support would certainly feel better than the impression of "We can burn money getting into this market, so let's buy stuff people want" they're leaving now.
They've released a public roadmap, obviously as more people are on the platform (due to the high profile launches), they're going to be putting increasing effort into improving the platform. Steam has had a long time to improve, and it's still plenty kludgey in certain areas.
I feel people often underestimate the difficulty of going against a monopoly that's been king for over a decade. Multiple avenues are the only way to succeed. I think Epic Store would be DOA without exclusives, regardless of the quality of their launcher.
> CD Projekt Red and GOG is doing some great stuff, I think you'd find Epic is much closer to that than you might imagine.
Absolutely absurd. Steam fundamentally is less of a walled garden than the EGS feature-wise. All you need to do is look at CD-key activation on the steam store. Both Steam and EGS come with the app-requirement constraint, but only one allows you to redeem games purchased offsite.
Besides "He's a good person and will do good things", what actions show this.
Regarding your last paragraph: Epic could put their games on Steam with a 30% price markup. I actually think it would be interesting to see which way users go...
I mean, Metro Exodus is $10 cheaper on Epic than it was on Steam and people are still mad about it. I'm willing to bet people would buy on Steam just because all their other games are on Steam.
I would definitely pay $10 more to have it under the same launcher I've used for a decade. In fact, there's a couple games out recently I've skipped since they decided to release as Epic Store exclusives.
I don't like monopolies, but I like even less having a dozen game launchers/store/accounts.
In that respect, Epic is just as evil as Steam, since they don't offer Federation nor the same as support of users of their service as a hosting platform for interaction.
In respect to which platforms are objectively less evil, comparing features and actual interaction with community and developers...
The ONLY way I see Epic as being better is paying developers a larger cut (and as a result some titles selling for slightly less).
Steam is doing more to support /my/ platform (a competitor to Windows), and has done more to further competition in other aspects.
I don't want Discord to be the federation method either, and XMPP ended up failing due to several mistakes and not requiring full Federation and transparent (un-modified, future / client side extension enabling) message passing between end users of different platforms.
We are talking about the same Epic Games? The ones that abused there position as tech support to get FortNite out the door? The ones that destroyed Silicon Knights? The ones that are 40% owned by TenCent?
Claiming that Epic Games is to blame for the shutdown of Silicon Knights is a reach. Silicon Knights initiated the fight against Epic Games and lost two court cases against them. They were responsible for their own demise.
I agree, I think its a good thing Steam is receiving competition. They have stagnated for a long time with high fees, bad customer service and a bloated drm-filled application.
Competition is two stores offering incentives to users to come buy the product from them as opposed to the competitor.
This is anti-competitive and anti-consumer. If Steam were doing similar things, no one would stand for it, and I find it really odd that Epic gets a pass from some people.
As the consumer, I want to be able to choose which store I buy from based on the merits of the store and the deals offered.
Epic gets a lot of flack for being a fairly simple store at the moment, but Steam's had ten years to get where it is. Competition was sorely needed and we're finally getting it.
The CEO of Epic is a big fan of open platforms and cross-platform gaming and a loud and outspoken opponent of walled gardens. If there's anyone who will move us out of this model as much as possible, it's probably him. But exclusives is the only way to fight the Stockholm Syndrome people seem to have with Steam.