Oh Tim Sweeny, you call for revolution in how video games are sold and played...?

Tim Sweeney Calls For Unified Digital Games Store

Tim Sweeney recently spoke at the Coalition for App Fairness conference in Seoul where he called for a unified digital store for game platforms. Sweeney stated that Epic Games had already begun working with publishers and service providers to create this vision of a unified store where customers could be confident that their purchases would work across all platforms. The system described by Sweeney would be a radical departure from existing ecosystems such as Xbox, PlayStation, Steam, Nintendo, and Epic where digital purchases are often limited to an individual companies platform. This new system would allow games purchased from any ecosystem to be fully playable on all supported platforms without requiring multiple purchases. The success of this vision is entirely dependent on game studios signing up to the program which will likely be a hard sell given the expected fall in sales. While there are limited options currently exist for cross-buy games the movie industry has implemented a similar program with Movies Anywhere which boasts large studios such as Disney, Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros. TW: What the world really needs now is a single store that works with all platforms

Technically of speaking, we'd had that on PC, it's called Steam, and anyone who's been on Steam since 2004 knows it's not the grass is greener scenario. Truth be told, Valve had the whole PC market in the palm of their hands and threw it away by being greedy and price gouging and causing major publishers to launch their own clients. That's what happens when you have too much leeway, you get too comfy until someone comes and corrects your mistake. The same would end up Tim Sweeny gets his one market for every platform Godstore. I'll say this, would certainly be nice to reduce the cyber junk that is all these different launchers for PC games. Guess CDKey, Humble Bundle, will half to do.

Not Tim Sweeney. The guy is 110% profit-focused, does not give two shits about games.

It's really not bad having different launchers.

Sweeny is a snake....

I want an industry where if I buy a license for a game, I can use it on any platform. I don't want Sweeny or Epic controlling any part of it tho.

If this man spouts any more hypocrisy, head's gonna blow up like that dude in scanners.

What a tool.

We had this - it was called Steam. Then he created a rival (fine) and intentionally tried to fracture the community by buying out third party exclusives -> the exact opposite of what he is "calling for" here, by creating a console-like fragmentation of ecosystems.

Meanwhile GoG has come along and attempted to release an update to their platform that can manage and launch games and unify friendslists from all these other squabbling groups. But Sweeney pretends it doesn't exist in public and that he's come up with some sweet idea to problem he has helped create

Apart from all the hypocrisy. Yeah, not gonna work. A$$holes (publishers) didn't even let Nvidia run the games people already payed for to play on a virtual cloud instance via Geforce Now.

When did Valve become greedy and price gauge?

@pc_rocks: They got rid of flash sales.

And how's that an example of being greedy or price gauging? First it was always publishers decision if they want to discount their games.

Sweeney concern trolling again.

Hell no. PC is the last free market in gaming. Keep it that way. I like seeing markets compete for my dollar and driving software prices down. I'd rather not have my consumer free market screwed with by the head of a company that weaponised kids with a fortnite ad campaign to maximize profit, thanks.

Eric Andre as Tim Sweeney: *pulls gun and shoots Valve and CDP* We need a unified platform!

There is no need for "store unification" but your digital license should be portable. I am waiting for the law suit that would issue that inevitable change. I hope I wouldn't be the one to trigger it. 😎

That was all about the new refund policy (can refund within two weeks if the game went on discount, so if you buy on a regular discount, say 60% off, and the game gets a flash sale the next day with 75% off, you can refund the game - unnecessary hassle for everyone).

Plus, it's the publishers who decide how deep the discounts should be, and after the big players released their own storefronts, they lost all incentives to sell their own games at a lower price on Steam.

If Sweeny wants a more consumer friendly platform then, first of all, he wouldn't make his digital storefront exclusive to Windows, and second, he wouldn't be buying out games and making them an Epic Store exclusive. So to date, his actions are diametrically opposed to his stated goal.

@xantufrog: yeah I don't get it, GoG already condenses all my games across launchers....

Also people need to stop acting like steam got screwed by epic, valve got greedy and screwed themselves, pushing developers to start their own store fronts by requiring a 30% cut from every game... I was a big valve fan back in the day but today they are an empty shell of what they used to be. Too much money for their own good.

I call bullshit such a thing is in works, unless they plan another legal spectacle. Honestly I figured Sony would partner with them as a way to create a a console-PC ecosystem with dual rights entitlement, and they often make similar exclusivity deals for similar titles, I thought maybe they could also combine bargaining power. But I can hardly see all three Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft all agreeing to share their revenues, there's nothing to be gained, especially when the party involved has already been pushing to have platform royalties cut from 30% to 12% and got themselves kicked off Apple Store and made all these companies air their dirty laundry in the lawsuit. They're out of their mind if they think they can achieve that. Only way this works is if China's defense division that engages in corporate espionage blackmail/bribes the decision makers of all three into a deal... well, we do live in interesting times.

I'm pretty sure Steam offers developers a lot more than other game stores. From Steamworks to hosted and functional forums, aggregate data, and even reach and accessibility (ever seen Epic game cards at the 7/11?), you pay for convenience.

I can swear back in the pre-steam days I read an article saying the devs cut was less than 20%, after printing, packaging, shipping and retail cut.

There were plenty of other alternatives to steam before Epic. EA, Blizzard and Ubi had their exclusives in their respective stores. Steam was never the "be all, end all"

And besides that, at leat epic gives away plenty of good games for free while Valve gives sh*t. Valve has been smelling their own farts because it barely ever had any competition.

@vatususreturns: that's recent history. Steam first unified the platform (mostly - blizzard was always a holdout). Then companies like EA started to splinter just a few years back - but still offer their games on steam for the most part, but are also justified to some extent by MAKING the games that they offer exclusively. Then epic, the last to the party, completed the degradation of the progress of unifying the platform by introducing paid 3rd party exclusives. You are looking at the progression in reverse - epic is sitting at the end of a descent, not coming in as a cure. We're almost worse now then we we're before "stores" because at that time there was a single platform: the OS. Now that we rely on stores it's actually becoming more fragmented

Been on pc since dos and apple - I've seen it all unfold

*edit* by " worse" I'm just talking about the integration of course - obviously the stores come with great QOL features we couldn't dream of in the before times

I came late to gaming PC in 2007, but I was already familiar with how Steam was EGS when it arrived. It took years for Valve to get where Steam is at today, Epic isn't trying to improve the store at all, they're busy spending money on buying timely exclusive games when that money should have been improving the store. Tim doesn't get it and he'll never have his Godsend store. Valve still gives out free games, they may not be Epic's level of giving out free games but Valve still does it.

GoG & Steam for me. The rest is there when I need to use other clients.

I bet he'd like that...to have a single platform to milk the shit out of everyone. No thanks...I like the current state of things better

Spot on.

The reason there are so many clients these days, is because other companies saw the money Valve was making, it was inevitable.

Valve got lazy, not greedy. Afaik the cut they receive is the same as it is for Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Apple or any other platform holder.

LOL. What a freaking idiot.

Yup. Remember when Epic started their shittery? People defended them and called Steam evil. xD

Must not have been more than 5 people :p

Nobody buys from Epic anyway. Personally I've found waiting for any game for 1 year to be very easy.

The only one I grabbed on Steam the minute I heard it was getting removed was Metro Exodus. And even there I could've prolly waited a year.

Indeed! Valve actually significantly improved the share of devs/pubs to what they had with boxed copies. That's what people and Tim Sweeney conveniently forgets. Valve basically created the market from scratch of which everyone now wants a piece of by (incorrectly) calling Valve/Steam greedy.