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.
Verno wrote on Jun 27, 2019, 09:09:Numinar wrote on Jun 27, 2019, 08:30:
People seem to care a whole lot about this though, it's not like my usual tirade in a thread with six posts nobody cares about. Maybe I have trouble expressing incredulity and I suppose I should let these dumb boycotts go uncommented
I don't really get this attitude though. EGS is a shitty client, everyone acknowledges that. It has no unique or innovative features to attract users. Quite the opposite its far worse than competing clients from EA, Ubisoft and Valve. So of course people are exasperated when their answer instead is to just buy up exclusivity rights. That's garbage shit from consoleland, in fact several of the users defending it here I've seen trashing the consoles for those practices. Why is "dumb" that people just exercise some willpower and not support practices that they don't like? And quite frankly there are many, many more posts from the people here who claim they don't care so hard yet keep spending hours trying to convince others to buy games on there. "It doesn't matter where you buy games" after all as we've been told countless times - so it shouldn't matter if people just wait and get those games elsewhere.
When EGS had their sale and was providing a consumer benefit by taking a subsidized hit, I rewarded them. When they do shitty things like buying exclusives, I don't. When EA, Ubisoft and Valve do things that annoy me, they get the same treatment. Epic doesn't get the kid glove treatment just because they're a new player in the industry. Seems pretty rational to me. I'm not sure why people are so obsessed over what others do their money either.
The thing is, EGS can't do sales and take a subsidized hit. No publisher will give them pricing control. So if they decide that everything is 10% cheaper on their site, publishers will pull off. Even though it's EGS doing it, they're taking pricing out of the hands of the publishers, which potentially puts those publishers in violation of agreements elsewhere.
Again, when Steam runs a sale, Steam is not cutting the pricing, publishers are. It's the same with EGS.
There's only one lever EGS has. And, thus far, I can't think of a single thing anyone has truly lost here, other than the "choice," but in the past our choice was just Steam, so...
EGS doesn't have keys on key sites... yet. I'll acknowledge that's a loss, but I don't think it's been a tangible one yet.
EGS doesn't have a cart. Who cares? We don't pay by transaction.
EGS doesn't have mod support, but it hasn't yet released a game that would be a candidate for modding.
EGS has really weak multiplayer pieces, but hasn't yet released a game where this matters, either.
I've been doing a lot of XCOM 2 lately, and the XCOM subreddit is absolutely batshit over the possibility that XCOM3, a game not even announced yet, may be an EGS exclusive, and EGS doesn't have the modding or cloud features that makes it so easy on Steam. This is lunacy to me. The game isn't announced, its exclusivity is hypothetical at best, EGS has shown a roadmap that shows these things should be in place before an XCOM3 announcement, and there's little to no chance XCOM3 would go to EGS if EGS was lacking key features that it virtually required on Steam. But hey, panic all you want. I'll wait for something to actually be either meaningful, or the eventuality of it being meaningful is guaranteed, before I panic.
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Music for the discerning:
http://www.deathwishinc.com
http://www.hydrahead.com
http://www.painkillerrecords.com
Music for the discerning:
http://www.deathwishinc.com
http://www.hydrahead.com
http://www.painkillerrecords.com
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