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.
Slashman wrote on Jun 28, 2019, 11:37:"the people" turns into a single sentence in one 2 month old post that you took out of context. ok, you win.RedEye9 wrote on Jun 28, 2019, 09:27:Slashman wrote on Jun 28, 2019, 08:48:What odd takeaways from this thread.
The funny thing is that the people who are arguing for EGS are actually more concerned with hurting Valve for not making games anymore than they are for "better stuff for everyone". They believe that Valve will be pushed into making games again if Epic's Store takes off.
Please point out the "hurting" valve posts because they're news to me.
As for thinking that storefront competition will push valve into making games again, well that's just laughable.
This from a previous thread on the topic
This is one of Slick's rants from a previous thread. It's pretty clear what his priorities are.
slick said he had an rss feed set to trigger on shill so here goes.
Shill shill SHILL, we'll see if the batcall err slickcall works and if he wants to clarify the statement.
- I refer to it as BC, Before Corona, and AD, After Disaster. -
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