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.
MoreLuckThanSkill wrote on Jun 27, 2019, 12:09:Drayth wrote on Jun 27, 2019, 10:51:Verno wrote on Jun 27, 2019, 09:09:
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.
Seriously. GoG does pretty much everything right, and how much discussion on them occurs on average? You don't see anyone feeling the need to grab a sword and shout from the castle walls every time they have a sale, or when something doesn't get released on their store. Point being, if evryone's more or less content with a service there's not a whole lot to discuss other than the occasional praise over a sweet deal, or legitimately interesting news.
But when Epic news causes a genuine stir there's a VERY vocal few who feel like they need to explain to you how your thinking is wrong and their crystal ball has told them that Epic checks out. They totally will stop starving the market if their competitor will just give in to their demands, that they themselves totally will be living by as well forever. And yeah they may have gotten rich off someone else's idea, fumble how to handle a seasonal sale, and are known to have a stressful workplace for the sake of constantly pumping out new content, but their tactics are totally altruistic, meant for the betterment of all gamers, swearzys. Throw all your money their way so they can keep starving the market.
It's not like a company that can literally throw tons of money to anyone willing to sign an exclusivity deal with them would also have the money to hire some of the best marketing people who could come up with tweets like this one. This is from the heart.
Oh and if their tactics of buying out all these indy games happens to kill off GoG, meh... at least we're sticking it to the evil Steam store, with it's dumb feature rich store front and earned market share.
Hopefully that's one of the main takeaways that people get from this: buy on Gog, FFS.
*Disclaimer: I buy everything I can on Gog, instead of any other platform.
Indeed, except I can't buy Genesis Alpha One and Rebel Galaxy Outlaw on GoG, they sold out to Epic last winter.
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