Epic Games Store already a success? Metro Exodus sold 2 1/2 times better on Epic Store than Metro: Last Light on Steam

Source: PC Gamer.

Well, if these kinds of numbers pan out and spread to other games as well, it looks like we finally have real competition to Steam we always wanted. Just wished it didn't happen this way.

Maybe in about 6 months to a year's time we can look back on this as a turbulent launch of something that was ultimately beneficial. Right now, though, this is just irritating to me.

Edit: Further reading, courtesy of Ars Technica:

"We felt we would be lucky if games were selling at 40 to 50 percent of the rate of Steam, just because of the small size of the [Epic] user base," he (Tim Sweeney) told Ars. "[But] in most cases we are on track to match or exceed the Steam revenue... it's all proceeding faster than expected."

The most surprising number Sweeney shared, though, is that fully half of all Fortnite players on PC had never used Steam before. That represents "a new audience ripe to discover new games" that Valve was not reaching, he said.

"There are two ways to bring users into something," he said. "You can run Google and Facebook ads and pay massive amounts of money to them. But we actually found it was more economical to pay developers [a lump sum] to distribute their game free for two weeks... We can actually bring in more users at lower cost by doing all these great things for great people rather than paying Google and Facebook."

He makes a good point here, and I'd argue that all the exclusivity announcements have also helped to keep the Epic Games Store in the headlines, despite the wave of negative responses that follow each one. As they say, there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Sweeney said that the limited game selection on the Epic Games Store so far was a "conscious effort... to release games at a pace where we were confident each game could find an audience. If we released thousands of games on day one, they would crowd each other out."

(snip)

"Epic is going to apply a high quality standard to games," Sweeney said. "That doesn't mean scope; we welcome high quality indie games, all budget levels. But it does mean quality. We don't want asset flips, we don't want porn games or controversy.

"We're not going to be that sort of venue [that accepts everything] because we don't think we can help those games to reach users. So it's going to be driven by quality."

This part, I do appreciate. This has been one of my deepest frustrations with Steam. If they really do manage to void that mess, I could see, for example, the indies who abandoned Steam in droves return to PC through the Epic Store. That would be objectively a good thing.

All in all, looks like we have a new reality to get used to.

So Epic says this based on Steam numbers? :/

Metro Exodus is critically and commercial success despite being controversy is because game is so good. it even turn negative reviews into very positive. (see steam)

its all depend on game. although we prefer steam but if we dont have choice we have to play our fav game.

But the loud angry complainers thought they were in control?

LOL...

It's really fucking depressing that GOG was never considered a competitor. Those guys have a great mentality.

In the end, people will decide. And unfortunately, people aren't reliable when it comes to gaming, compared to other mediums we accept almost any bullshit. We suck. We suck alot.

Metro sells because its good. no matter which platform its on.

Or maybe it's not a big deal and PC gamers need to calm the F down.

Normal people don't see every stupid thing as some great fight against THE MAN.

Well, If all games sell that good on Epic store then maybe more console games will get ported to PC.

This might be a good thing for PC gamers afterall.

I guess downloading 1 more client isnt so bad.

I bought it on Epic Store. I would have bought it from 4A Games directly if needed. Great game. That being said, it would be nice to have a choice where to buy it.

Yup. GOG remains my first choice if a game is available there. Steam is merely "acceptable" to me.

I am glad Steam might finally have real competition, I really do. But between Steam's continued dominance despite their myriad of well-documented flaws and Epic's sledge-hammering their way into the market with exclusives while leaving their store and client feature-bare for over six months, I just hope GOG don't get run over while the two 300 kg gorillas clash.

Exodus was locked to one Storefront compared to Last Light that could be purchased across multiple places. Not a good comparison....... I'm sure game keys purchased from other sites for steam do not count towards steam sales. Also you cant ignore the coverage and budget this game had over the last light had in 2013......

The main problem with Steam for me that GOG by and large fixes, is quality control of older titles. You're typical GOG game will be patched the **** up, with a bunch of extras. i.e. they give a shit.... Whereas Steam will let Publisher dump any old shit, regardless of the state it's in. Not to say GOG are perfect, they have Dotemu games, which are horrific.

When it comes just, sheer features, Steam offers alot. Free as well. It's an ethos they've always had an built upon.

Epic, and these sites basically trying to suck them off (Polygon), it's all about the Publisher and money, jack shit to do with the consumer. Give them an inch.

The game got a bunch of publicity from the whole debacle, it reviewed well, it piggy backed off the success of previous titles, and the userbase of gamers has grown since last light came out long ago.

I wouldn't chalk it all up to Epic's success. That being said, I hope this doesn't set a precedent for Epic moving forward. I don't want their store to succeed in its current state.

@ProtossRushX said:

this game and 4a games in general deserve a success.

Not with EPIC though....

doesnot matter. we dont get enough SP FPS. so they deserve success if they are good.

Yes! this means a next gen metro with an even bigger budget and better open world design. My game of the generation so far goes to Metro Exodus, only Cyberpunk 2077 or Halo Infinite can top it now.

yes it does matter, as long as people dont vote with their wallets to disapprove the crap EPIC is doing and lack their of. We will continue getting the shaft

Now check the numbers on Last Light and Last Light: Redux, now why would they use the other numbers?

Not hard to do when it's literally the only place to legally buy it.

this is true. Most people only care about playing the games and aren't bothered to learn anything about the service they need to play them.

Yeah, pretty much. I'm not entirely sure why we should be surprised by this news. I expect similar things for other games Epic have managed to moneyhat.

Can Tim give us the numbers?

Not sure what Epic are offering apart from forcing you to use it's store if you want certain games.

I'm not a PC gamer but does Epic or MS store mean different friends list and chatrooms etc.?

Huh, what happened to "not buying" and "pirating"?

Literally nothing. Apart from being a Trojan.

Can't say much without being labelled as a fanboy or shill on this topic, but it's disappointing that poor business behavior and anti-consumer practices are being rewarded by the largest chunk of the consumer base -- the ones that don't give a shit about their rights and just go wherever the games go. Can't fault them for just wanting to play the games they want to play I guess, but the precedent is being set for the future to look more like a shitshow on PC like it has been on consoles where you have no choice but to use the only service available without choice, whether it does anything to safeguard your information or provide meaningful features, or just says "**** it, we got your money anyway, who cares."

The amount of times I see Steam = monopoly and monopoly = bad getting thrown around in this debate since it started continues to show that people arguing don't understand what's going on and why so many are against it. Literally from the FTC's site:

https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/single-firm-conduct/monopolization-defined

"Obtaining a monopoly by superior products, innovation, or business acumen is legal; however, the same result achieved by exclusionary or predatory acts may raise antitrust concerns."

Valve does not make exclusive deals with third-party developers or publishers to keep products exclusive to their platform, whereas Epic is paying publishers and developers (often at the last second to release) to only publish to their platform, the literal definition of exclusive. Should they become the market dominator (like Steam is now) through what they're doing, it's legally an anti-trust monopoly violation. Doing business with Epic means only doing business with Epic, whereas doing business with Valve, or CDProjekt, or any other distribution platform, is one of many options available to them. If a publisher only publishes the distribution of their product to Steam, that does not prevent them from also generating keys and selling them elsewhere (cutting out Valve's 25-30% through the sale entirely), nor does it disallow them the ability to publish on any other platform at any time.

Whatever though, "cry more PC gamers" is all proponents for Epic ever do when people raise concern over Epic's exclusionary behavior in the market, so that's all I expect as a response. All I can do as a consumer is not support Epic, the publishers, or the developers that do this, because I don't agree with it. I will miss out on games I was originally excited to play (Exodus, Maneater), and it's highly unlikely that losing my support will even remotely dent these entities. Didn't stop EA from going Origin only, or Ubisoft from going...still uPlay, but now you can only get them on Epic + uPlay instead of uPlay + everywhere in order to entice people to go exclusively uPlay, which is almost brilliant I guess? But that's my choice as a consumer to do. Oh well for me, I'm the loser in the situation, and Epic will likely win, because the majority will support them because they don't care about the things I do.

"cry more PC gamers"

Quiet! The mods are watching us!

If MS tried charging for online again and making games exclusive to Windows store ala GFWL 2.0, I have no doubt that today's PC gamer will bend over and take it.

That's a considerable stretch. Exodus is only available on the Epic storefront and nowhere else. Last Light was available across multiple digital storefronts and legitimate (and illegitimate) key sites, as well as being available in a hard copy form. Exodus is only available on Steam if you pre-ordered.

It's a significantly slanted comparison.

@pelvist: I'm afraid of us going back into the dark days of the mid 2000s especially since gamers these days seem to have gotten dumber as a whole and keep letting themselves get screwed over by the same companies over and over thinking things will change with the next release.

To us? Nothing. To devs? A bigger share.

Many people are saying "finally a competitor to Steam" but I have yet to see anything beneficial to us with the Epic Store.

It would be a great advert for their store. Not sure I believe it though.

Further reading, courtesy of Ars Technica:

"We felt we would be lucky if games were selling at 40 to 50 percent of the rate of Steam, just because of the small size of the [Epic] user base," he (Tim Sweeney) told Ars. "[But] in most cases we are on track to match or exceed the Steam revenue... it's all proceeding faster than expected."

The most surprising number Sweeney shared, though, is that fully half of all Fortnite players on PC had never used Steam before. That represents "a new audience ripe to discover new games" that Valve was not reaching, he said.

"There are two ways to bring users into something," he said. "You can run Google and Facebook ads and pay massive amounts of money to them. But we actually found it was more economical to pay developers [a lump sum] to distribute their game free for two weeks... We can actually bring in more users at lower cost by doing all these great things for great people rather than paying Google and Facebook."

He makes a good point here, and I'd argue that all the exclusivity announcements have also helped to keep the Epic Games Store in the headlines, despite the wave of negative responses that follow each one. As they say, there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Sweeney said that the limited game selection on the Epic Games Store so far was a "conscious effort... to release games at a pace where we were confident each game could find an audience. If we released thousands of games on day one, they would crowd each other out."

(snip)

"Epic is going to apply a high quality standard to games," Sweeney said. "That doesn't mean scope; we welcome high quality indie games, all budget levels. But it does mean quality. We don't want asset flips, we don't want porn games or controversy.

"We're not going to be that sort of venue [that accepts everything] because we don't think we can help those games to reach users. So it's going to be driven by quality."

This part, I do appreciate. This has been one of my deepest frustrations with Steam. If they really do manage to avoid that mess, I could see, for example, the indies who abandoned Steam in droves return to PC through the Epic Store. That would be objectively a good thing.

All in all, looks like we have a new reality to get used to.

It's not what they're offering us, it's what they're offering them... meaning the devs. Which is a bigger cut, and an exclusivity bonus.

I bet that the sales figures on consoles are similar with 2-3x more sold than LL.

The other thing, like other have already mentioned, LL was available on multiple digital retailers and physical and I bet that the marketing budget of Exodus was bigger than all of the budget for LL combined.

In other words, shitty comparison, unless you have an alternative universe where Epic Store does not exist.

Uh... No? All it means is that the exclusivity didn't hurt sales much. People are using the store because they have to. It's only a success when non-exclusive games are also doing that strongly.

Hang on...

"[But] in most cases we are on track to match or exceed the Steam revenue... it's all proceeding faster than expected."

So...they're on track to possibly match the revenue from Steam?

Surely this means:

(a) They haven't done it yet; and

(b) Since the Epic Store gives developers a much higher cut of the revenue, sales must be significantly lower than on Steam.

The sentence before that notes that Tim Sweeney was talking about the rate of sales compared to Steam. He was expecting 40 to 50%. Instead they're matching Steam's pace. Either way you cut it, that's impressive. There may be a cut-off point at which the sales rate dives and they fall short, but there is no logical reason to expect that.

It is unclear what revenue he meant: total or developer/publisher cut.

So they're saying a game sells more copies on the platform it is exclusive to, over other platforms where you can't buy it?

You don't say.

@howmakewood said:

Now check the numbers on Last Light and Last Light: Redux, now why would they use the other numbers?

Thank you sir. I almost lost all faith in PC gamers sticking to their words. That explains the marketing spin.

1) You dont have to buy the game if you don't agree with it. Nobody is forcing anybody.

2) There is no monopoly on anything software wise when it comes to PC, you can simple just pirate it if you want. PC will never have a monopoly because of this. Steam already has a competitor because of this. Something this site often wants to forget because they like to life in a unrealistic bubble of TOS where you cant mention reality because feelings.

3) Steam was total trash and forced upon you aggressively when it got released with deals to push games on there platform and they tried to go anti consumer multiple times throughout the years. Remember when they tried to nail the mod department that honesty killed of HUGE community's of modders just for profit. Oh wait you probably forgot.

Also remember how you do not own any of your steam games? How they changed all there "pro consumer" after they got striked by courts and where forced too and still slime there way out of it by making everything rentals.

Oh you probably forgot. I can keep going on for awhile on this subject. It's funny how those steam fanboys rewrite history as something that valve actually did all that stuff to help you out.

4) People spend tons of money and support tons of DRM boxes that do nothing else then limit your freedom. Yet when epic does it because fortnite is populare its a absolute disgrace and disgusting yet still support other company's doing it and supporting it. LIke how do i play the newest zelda exactly? or uncharted? yea there you go.

Buying a subscription, overpriced software, a whole new box of hardware, have to deal with shitty controllers and now i can play my game vs installing a down second client that takes 2 minutes once in your life time.

All i see is some but hurt delusional steam fanboy spouting unrealistic garbage forwards because they finally realize that steam is nothing but yet another shop.

PC gamers should be happy that the game is even releasing on PC to start with. It's a console game through its core and honestly i don't doubt for a second they would drop the entire next game for PC much like other single player AAA titles are doing in favor of forcing people to consoles where they can bank in more money by releasing it later on PC so those idiots will double dip for there "best experience" and brag about it.

Then about those sale numbers of the game.

This goes both ways.

1) The marketing was absolutely insane, last light had zero marketing here and i saw marketing for this game honestly everywhere. They spended a fortune on it. Which obviously will result in better sales. So yea obviously its going to result in better sales.

2) Gaming market is bigger then when last light came out, which will also result in more sales again.

So comparing sale numbers is honestly useless.

Then the other way around.

1) Sales on steam are heavily inflated by free give aways. I got both games for totally free in my steam library as example. So the sales on steam are nowhere near the actual sales.

Sorry but steam is a joke and how anybody can white knight that platform is beyond me.

I like how in the Eurogamer interview when he's asked how it will benefit the consumer, he gives a long, non answer that ultimately loops round to "help the Publisher".

@pc_rocks said:

@howmakewood said:

Now check the numbers on Last Light and Last Light: Redux, now why would they use the other numbers?

Thank you sir. I almost lost all faith in PC gamers sticking to their words. That explains the marketing spin.

Wood's a better gaming journalist than gaming journalists.

30 seconds on google, schooled.