Epic Boss Says Exclusives Policy Will Change If Steam Adjust Their Revenue Share

How noble...

Sweeney Tim the Demon game developer of Wall Street knows full well that Valve would have to significantly reduce infrastructure features and/or staff to commit to their ludicrous cut and never will, that's the only reason he said it.

lets be real, even if steam did make the cuts to hit that, who the **** would use EGS if there wasn't exclusives. Epic may have money, but if the store doesn't bring in revenue it may aswel end, Sweeney has no intention of ending exclusivity deals. His attacks on valve are just because they're salty they didn't have a product strong enough to carry a market place, or no idea to at the time.

Twats.

Activision should stop selling 10 yr old products like Call Of Duty games for full price retail release prices. In my country its like $99 to buy Modern Warfare 2 or Black Ops 1. Ridiculous pricing for decade old games.

Epic requires that employees give them 88% of their life or they'll be fired

??

Valve is patiently awaiting Fortnite to become irrelevant.

Might happen sooner than later, as Fortnite is depending in Marvel hype and Endgame turned out to be crap.

Also, none of us want to give any money to the Chinese government (Tencent).

::Steam goes into their own general discussion and types 'LOL"::

::Epic is scrambling for a piece of paper and pencil to reply::

Epic is trying to play hardball but it doesn't look like anyone here is buying the good-guy act.

Too many people have this weird loyalty to Steam. Sure, they offer a few good features, but they've been sitting on their yannys for a while. Alternatives like GOG Galaxy have come up but people are still hesitant to but even a single game off their platform of choice if they can possibly avoid it.

Oh wonderful! Epic is sooooo awesome for looking out for these poor game developers! Let us all praise Epic Games for their heroic stance standing up to Valve's greed!

OK; now let's all be real. Epic isn't doing this for game developers; they're doing this for themselves. This whole developer's cut thing is a farce; and has been a farce from the beginning. Epic is just using it as a shield to hide behind while they use anti-consumer tactics to increase their market share as quickly as possible. They have the cash to bribe greedy publishers and developers to go exclusive to their store; that is all. If it really was about "the cut"; other distributors who offered a lower cut than Steam would have already seen a bump in their market share. But it isn't and they haven't; it's all about the amount of money Epic has been willing to throw around.

Epic knows they can't compete with Steam on an even footing; so they target specific high profile games to go exclusive on their store. They know that gamers as a whole are going to talk the talk but won't be willing to walk the walk. Many will bitch and moan; but many of those same people will eventually go to their very inferior platform anyway rather than miss out on a game for 6 months to a year.

And seriously; who can now trust Epic and Tim Sweeney after all the lies they have told in the last couple of months alone. Remember "no more short notice exclusivity deals like Metro Exodus"? Yeah; that didn't even last a couple of weeks before they pulled the exact same thing with Anno 1800.

Screw Epic and screw whoever decides to go exclusive to their store. I personally will not support either.

But that would mean that they'd have to shut their store down again. Yeah, obviously that statement wasn't meant to be taken seriously, and they only made it because they knew that Valve wouldn't bite.

About Steam's cut, here's an article that explains it

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/04/why-valve-actually-gets-less-than-30-percent-of-steam-game-sales/

Here's a developer's take on it

https://twitter.com/RobotBrush/status/1112204567394086913

Here's consumer's take on it

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/b9i4yd/to_everyone_complaining_about_steams_cut_please/

And here's my take on it. In short, Valve's 20 to 30 percent take is justified for the amount of features and services they provide.

Let me tell you something. The whole debate about 20 to 30 percent cut from Steam vs 12 percent cut from Epic is a farce. Its a stunt pulled by Epic. Its not about the percentage cut. Its about Epic giving these greedy publishers a bag of cash to sign exclusivity deals on their platform, either on day one or a certain time afterwards and Epic lining their own pockets in the process. All the while trying to strong-arm customers to submit to this forced exclusivity and other anti-consumer practices while providing virtually nothing

If it was only about the cut then, these publishers would've moved to other platforms that has lower cut than Epic, who've been into digital distribution platform a lot longer than Epic. Platforms like Discord, which reduced their cut down to 10 percent after Epic store's announcement. Humble Widget through Humble Bundle, which asks for 5 percent of the cut. Itch.io, which asks for basically whatever percent of the cut you want to give them, which is lower than all the others combined. And yet a lot of developers and publishers choose Steam over any of them Why ? Because none of the other platform provides the massive visibility / discoverability of games that Steam provides and the subsequent big sales potential. Not to mentions vastly inferior features and services towards customers compared to Steam. Its because Steam provides THE most features and services to both developers and customers more than any other platforms in the gaming industry, PC or consoles.

https://blog.discordapp.com/why-not-90-10-3761ebef4eab

https://www.humblebundle.com/developer/widget

For the record, other major platforms like GOG, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Amazon, Google, Apple and a lot of others also take the industry standard 30 percent of the cut while providing significantly less features and services to both customers and developers in return. I wanna emphasize on Sony and Microsoft (Playstation and Xbox) who are the biggest gaming platforms next to PC, Who've been taking that 30 percent cut from developers and publishers for decades now while doing business with them. They don't provide nowhere as near as many features and services as Steam does. Who takes hefty licensing fee from developers / publishers spanning in millions of dollars to sell their games on Playstation and Xbox. Who used to charge devs / pubs money everything they wanted to patch / update their games on those consoles. Who locks certain essential features and services behind monthly subsciption fee against customers. And yet, developers / publishers happily put all their games on those consoles and make huge profits. Now with Epic, while they do take 12 percent cut, they also provide virtually nothing in terms of features and services for customers. Steam on the other hand provides numerous features and services for customers for their 20 to 30 percent cut.

To give you a rough idea of the amount of features and services Steam provides, take a look at the following chart. It lists all the major features of Steam compared to other platforms on PC. These are just some of the features and services that are public knowledge and / or have been revealed by Valve themselves. There's a whole host of other infrastructures that Valve operates and maintains on a daily basis. All of these combined costs a lot of upkeep on a day-to-day basis. At the same time, Valve regularly innovates, improves and expands on all of these features, services and infrastructures to give customers and developers a better gaming and business experience.

https://imgur.com/P6cIq1u

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks#announcements/detail/1697194621363928453

When you look at all these features and services that Valve / Steam provides and are continuing to provide at an even greater capacity every single year, it is clear that out of all the other platforms, only Steam gives back the most to both consumers and developers. Unlike other platforms, Steam earns their cut AND they're adding and improving new features and services every single year for no extra charge. Not only that. Valve has also reduced their 30 percent cut to 20 percent for those who meets certain sales milestone.

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks#announcements/detail/1697191267930157838

In conclusion, what Epic is doing is using the 12 percent to undercut others using money generated from Fortnite, then trying to get developers / publishers on board with cash incentive and subsequent forced third party exclusives, and then trying to strong-arm customers with said forced exclusive deals and other anti-consumer practices while providing us virtually nothing since they cannot compete with Steam on fair grounds or match Steam's level of features and services with that 12 percent cut. Its all about greedy developers / publishers getting paid by Epic for exclusive deals while shoving down all sorts of anti-consumer / anti-competitive policies on us customers. Epic does not care about customers as they've openly proved it time and again but only care about lining their own pockets since they realize the money they generate from Fortnite is unsustainable.

Lastly, its about publisher getting a bigger share of profit while developers sees virtually no benefit from it. Most of the profit a publisher generates does not go to the developers but straight to the higher-up CEOs, CFOs, board members and the likes. If anything goes wrong, its the developers who suffers either paycuts or getting fired from those companies, while the higher-ups enjoys their every increasing profit margin. We've seen it time and again. Here are just some recent examples.

In short, Valve / Steam always has customers interest at heart followed by developers / publishers. Epic on the other hand, has only their own interests at heart, following by developers / publishers. We, the customers, will choose the platform to do business with that has our interests in mind. Because at the end of the day, we customers don't need their games to survive, its the developers / publishers who needs us, our business, to make their day-to-day living.

The following links are just some of the examples of how publishers fire hundreds of developers despite earning record profit

Here's Epic's own developers being abused and overworked

https://www.polygon.com/2019/4/23/18507750/fortnite-work-crunch-epic-games

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7lecpA2zPU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT14-lyqofA

https://www.geekwire.com/2019/guild-wars-2-developer-arenanet-confirms-layoffs-canceled-projects/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GN1uV57hE_w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmK43DV_wVY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9Y_PJ9lByw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bn3Ydzj-tY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6rwbKzrcd8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz4qegmGoLo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jM_FL5VxO8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbEtxD9nU6o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdVLJ6mLT-U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tke1c83ceXI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh0mKpzXf5A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrKDgDlbsS8The

If indies are having a hard time with Steam, why bother even releasing on steam platforms when you have sites like Playism or itch?

This is awesome! I want devs to succeed and really don't think the middleman of stores deserve a large cut so if we can get that down to 12% that's 18% more in the hands of every solid indie developer that deserves every penny.

But what about those key resellers you now allow on your platform epic? Don't they get the full 30/70 cut? How bout that?

Oh gee, aren't you just a bunch of heroes, eh Epic? Doing all this out of the kindness of your hearts, are you? Sure.

Forget Epic Games, who are they to give another company an ultimatum of any kind. The games are merely timed-exclusives and as long as they are I will gladly wait. I have so many games on Steam that it would keep me busy from now to the next ice age. There tons of games announced everyday that are coming to Steam and not coming to the Epic store. Devs know that they need Steam because they have the user numbers that Epic doesn't. Basically if they thought that Valve was so bad then they wouldn't want their games on the store at all, but they need Valve as much as they need us.

Epic knows that need a new revenue stream before the next Fortnight comes along over(nite), or their plans fail. Personally I hope that Valve doesn't respond to those scumbags.

So he created Epic in order to get Steam to reduce their cut? That sounds so magnanimous of him. He's doing it for the devs and the entire industry!

The way I read it is different. They don't have an unlimited budget to keep signing exclusives and paying for freebies to bribe people away from Steam. They were about to stop doing it anyway, and wanted to try and get something out of Steam for something they were going to do anyway. But they get to look like the hero.

All the major publishers already have their own launcher.

30% cut is the same cut Google and Apple are charging. But I don't see him going after them. They could create their own store on Android and not charge the 30% cut, and then put Infinity Blade on it, which is iOS exclusive. Then tell Apple, he'll sign more exclusives and put them on Epic Android store if they don't reduce their cut to 12%.

The devs who go over to Epic and ditch steam will make an extra 18% on each copy sold, but will sell fewer copies and overall make less money. They will eventually have to go to Steam a year later anyway (they're timed exclusives only). So these exclusives are not tenable long term, and Epic knows that. They don't want to continue moneyhatting these exclusives forever, so they want to pull out gracefully and in doing so, get Steam to lower the cut for their own games on the store (and everyone else's as a byproduct). They also get to look like the good guy, and get to save face over the fact that they really didn't want to continue paying for these exclusives out of their own pocket because it's not as worth it to them.

Epic have given away a LOT of free games now which will have cost them a ton of money. I haven't taken a single free one nor have I downloaded their launcher one, because it's a launcher that sucks and I don't want 6 different launchers on my system, and two, I don't think Epic's intentions are as pure as they want you to believe.

Doesn't matter what Epic does, PC gamers are going to be mad. More money for devs can mean better games from those devs in the future. If I can buy a PC game from someone other than Steam, I do. Competition is necessary for a healthy industry. Whether or not Epic can provide that remains to be seen but I am willing to give them a chance without acting like it's the end of gaming as we know it. Games I buy off of other places than Steam play just fine.

Amazing idea for consumers, but is it a “real” offer? Could Steam possible accept it? For example, it would be one thing if accepting this meant that Steam just wouldn;t have money to continue developing as aggressively and feature rich services, but, is Steam’s infrastructure, which provides more features, dependent on a continual revenue stream to maintain?

Personally, i’d Rather see more money to devs, more competition between stores, and less ‘extra’ features on storefronts, beyond what I consider minimum essential: cloud saves, user reviews, aggressive refund policy, (and I’m probably missing a few but I need to go to work).

Sounds like a bluff. Any intelligent person who compares the Steam platform to Epic's will pick Steam's every time (in Epic's current state).

Epic's isn't ready for head on competition (and this exclusivity deal BS shows they know that full well).

from my understanding or lack there off, developers get a sweet deal but the customer still pays full price ... so developers get a bigger chunk of money but the customer isnt get any savings or deals in the process