Tim Sweeney on EGS' Impact [Jun 26, 2019, 12:18 pm 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.
jacobvandy wrote on Jun 26, 2019, 21:33:Slick wrote on Jun 26, 2019, 20:17:
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.
Yes, community is the key word here. I don't know how many people care more about it than the games themselves, but plenty of people care a lot about the community they're a part of on Steam. It's not just a store like Epic is right now, it's forums and profiles and social feeds and reviews and guides and achievements and media sharing and workshop mods and streaming and fully-featured chat... Maybe you don't involve yourself with much of that, but there are millions who do and some have been at it for a decade or more. They want to buy their games there not because they're lazy or because they're corporate sheep or whatever other little insults people make. It's because the games on Steam are integrated into this huge ecosystem that people like living in, the closest thing PC has to Xbox Live or PlayStation Network.
So you're right in that it's not just about the games. But it's not just about the stores, either.
Yup. Setting aside the anti-consumer and artificial delays exclusivity brings, the store itself lacks a Community component. In other words, Blues News has better community features than EGS.
"There are times when I would rather have some Kahlua instead of a clue." - Mr. Tact (May 27, 2021)
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