Tim Sweeney on EGS' Impact [Jun 26, 2019, 11:18 am ET] – Share – Viewing Comments
A lengthy
series
of tweets from Tim Sweeney looks to address some of the concerns gamers have
expressed over Epic Games Store exclusives and other issues:
This question gets to the core of Epic’s strategy for competing with dominant storefronts. We believe exclusives are the only strategy that will change the 70/30 status quo at a large enough scale to permanently affect the whole game industry.
For example, after years of great work by independent stores (excluding big publishers like EA-Activision-Ubi), none seem to have reached 5% of Steam’s scale. Nearly all have more features than Epic; and the ability to discount games is limited by various external pressures.
This leads to the strategy of exclusives which, though unpopular with dedicated Steam gamers, do work, as established by the major publisher storefronts and by the key Epic Games store releases compared to their former Steam revenue projections and their actual console sales.
In judging whether a disruptive move like this is reasonable in gaming, I suggest considering two questions: Is the solution proportionate to the problem it addresses, and are gamers likely benefit from the end goal if it’s ultimately achieved?
The 30% store tax usually exceeds the entire profits of the developer who built the game that’s sold. This is a disastrous situation for developers and publishers alike, so I believe the strategy of exclusives is proportionate to the problem.
If the Epic strategy either succeeds in building a second major storefront for PC games with an 88/12 revenue split, or even just leads other stores to significantly improve their terms, the result will be a major wave of reinvestment in game development and a lowering of costs.
Will the resulting 18% increase in developer and publisher revenue benefit gamers? Such gains are generally split among (1) reinvestment, (2) profit, and (3) price reduction. The more games are competing with each other, the more likely the proceeds are to go to (1) and (3).
So I believe this approach passes the test of ultimately benefitting gamers after game storefronts have rebalanced and developers have reinvested more of their fruits of their labor into creation rather than taxation.
Of course, there are LOTS of challenges along the way, and Epic is fully committed to solving all problems that arise for gamers are for our partners as the Epic Games store grows.
There's never been any point to buying a Ubisoft game on anything other than Uplay, as you still have to download and launch the game through Uplay. It's giving a 3rd party who had nothing to do with development a cut, and then you having to run 2x DRMs at the same time instead of 1. Literally lose-lose for the consumer.
But what we're seeing is not a normal reaction. A Normal reaction I could understand. This is chicken-little pitchforks who've learned to type staging boycotts.
I like Target more than WalMart. If they sell Half-Life 3 at Walmart, I'll buy it there. The game isn't going to be any different. I'll still double-click an icon on my desktop to play it. We're talking about different makes and models of automobiles and the whole conversation is about how much the car dealer smiled at me when I bought the car.
No other community cares about what store they buy a product from more than the product itself. The discussion on the games is practically nil. The threads that blow up are faffing competition between which faceless multinational billion-dollar DRM software they want to click "buy" from.
No sense of proportion.
"I prefer to go to Kroger over Walmart personally.- Sepharo
And if something I was expecting to buy at Kroger recently became exclusive to Walmart, I'd be kind of upset about that.
Seems like a normal reaction."
But what we're seeing is not a normal reaction. A Normal reaction I could understand. This is chicken-little pitchforks who've learned to type staging boycotts.
I like Target more than WalMart. If they sell Half-Life 3 at Walmart, I'll buy it there. The game isn't going to be any different. I'll still double-click an icon on my desktop to play it. We're talking about different makes and models of automobiles and the whole conversation is about how much the car dealer smiled at me when I bought the car.
No other community cares about what store they buy a product from more than the product itself. The discussion on the games is practically nil. The threads that blow up are faffing competition between which faceless multinational billion-dollar DRM software they want to click "buy" from.
No sense of proportion.
For your transgressions you shall be labeled a shill, called an idiot and anytime you mention facts or disagree with a tribe member you will henceforth be known as a troll. The best you can hope for is that the labels won't haunt your offspring. -RedEye9
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