Vlambeer co-founder blames steam for metro's sudden swap to epic. - Sensationalist Headlines

https://www.pcgamesn.com/metro-exodus/rami-ismail-steam-epic In an interview with PCGamesN at Yorkshire Games Festival (which we’ll be publishing in full later today), the Vlambeer co-founder made fun of Valve’s statement, which said that the game’s move was “unfair” to consumers. But Valve arguing anything being unfair, with the position they’re in, they just got out-businessed. I’m sorry, it sucks to be you.” Ismail goes on to discuss the change in the context of Valve’s impact on indie development, saying “there’s an entire generation of indie game developers that got wiped out because of an algorithmic change in Valve’s recommendation algorithms and they said, ‘Well that’s just what the data said’. Well here’s what the data said, it said that Metro Exodus is not on Steam because the deal Epic gave [developer 4A Games] was better. To call that unfair, but call all they do just data, it couldn’t have been a funnier statement from that perspective.” I have no idea what hes talking about with indie games being "wiped out". If your game is great and has enough publicity, it still tops the store page 9 times out of 10. Guess thats another dev put onto the "dont buy shit from this dickhead" list.

Fuck Valve and Steam, they have nothing to do with why Epic exclusives are a shit move. These people can't get it into their thick ass heads that there's more platforms than Steam and the Epic store.

If your game is great and has enough publicity, it still tops the store page 9 times out of 10. You got any source on that? I'm curious how dependent indie developers are on Steam, the front page, the top 10 and all that jazz.

I actually made a big breakdown on this several months ago and it's categorically bullshit.

I think the way that it was removed after the fact that people already bought the game is kind of awful. Sure, they got to keep it on Steam.

Literally 8/10 of my feed is indie titles vs the 1-2 AAA games that get released, and nuclear throne has been in top selling fuck loads of times in it's hayday. Hell, steam even pushes games that have revieved big updates on the feed. I havent gotten shit shovelware in my feed since greenlight was first announced. And i believe @Coldmute said in another thread that they had to dig 900+ regular indie and AAA titles in their showcase before they hit the assetflip section. The entire "your game will get drowned in shovelware is a old as spook

Rami conveniently reframing context as something else entirely to make his points seem reasonable again. He's so laser-focused on taking a rip on Steam as a storefront that he's forgetting that Steam isn't a monopoly and that other storefronts exist other than Epic. Hyperbole about entire groups of developers failing to succeed is laughable at best since I'm sure the ones he's thinking of are ones that exclusively sold themselves on Steam and were never marketed outside of closed circles or didn't have appeal otherwise. My hot take is that Vlambeer's games are primarily Jan Nijjman's efforts with Rami primarily acting as an occasional consultant (and programmer when convenient to him) and marketer. This was most evident during Nuclear Throne's final stretch of development where there were hundreds of bugs left unfixed, loads of mechanics never finished, and Rami was off selling physical merch and doing convention appearances instead of helping meet the deadline they signed onto with Sony; then taking an entire year to fix PS4 issues and to decide to hire a community member to help out with PC issues. Also JW worked on Minit without Rami being involved, seemingly going off on his own while Rami has done ???

Vlamb my man, big respect for your work but maybe it's time to be a little more critical with what you hear from Jim Sterling. I've seen and discovered many non-darling indie titles through the steam frontpage, and I'm pretty sure Nuclear Throne was there for ages. You can't rely on organic growth for indie games if you're planning on living out of it, it was and will always be a gamble. It only paid off for earlier adopters because Valve gave them massive spotlights, it's hard to give special spotlights for everyone when there are sooooooooooooo many indie titles coming out every day. That being said, I'm all for more transparency when it comes to algorithms and how are these things ranked.

At this point I wouldn't be surprised if one day down the line, shit stirrers like Jim Sterling are revealed to have been financed by Valve's competitors in an effort to astroturf these maniacally dumb rumors.

When are we even going to find out the sales for Metro? They seemed really boastful about the increased preorders, but have totally shut up about it. Unfortunately since EGS is a store from the early 2000s, we have no indicators like achievements, current player counts, forums or reviews to even guess how many sales it has.

I love reading about this stuff, got an URL?

You mind linking to it? I'd like to read that.

You mean if steam bribed them harder, which is not fixing the issue at hand with buying out exclusives. If epic wants to compete with lower takes, fine. But pushing extremely bad business practices that hurt the end user is a lot more damaging. This is after epic got caut literally using their platform as spyware and missing extremely key features that online stores have had for decades.

Indie developers see massive reduction in Steam traffic A lot of interesting things to note in here: Many of them had theirs views overall ultimately return, and their player counts pretty much do not indicate any change at all. More interesting is the near universal spike in views they got just prior to the crash. Also even more interesting is the developer on Google Play who reported an identical incident occurring twice there, including one around the same time as the Steam one. And Valve ultimately talked about how it mostly was a bug that was impacting the views.

Valve also provide a hell of a lot more service for their cut.

No it wasn't. It was industry standard.

You're ignoring the plethora of other platforms that work freely with valve as storefronts that are also being hurt by epic. If they want to back extremely shitty business practices towards your users, go right ahead. But im not and plenty of others wont support your studio for siding with said company.

I appreciate Rami's contribution to the indie scene, but he's a consistent pompous ass. His attitude boils my blood. Yeah, he's anti-Steam, he doesn't hide it.

This makes me happy to hear. I never kept up with the state of the Steam store, but I did have my disbelief about the rampant 'omg the front page is nothing but asset swap garbage', since that doesn't serve the interest of a digital distributor at all.

That's Bullshit, Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, etc cut is exactly the same and offers much less to both the developers and the consumers. Of all of the stores, the Steam cut is the most justificated of them. If Epic offer half the features that Steam offers they gonna ask a better cut. Don't be so naive. Publishers are signing exclusivity deals because Epic offers them a big sack of money, the revenue share is secondary. Also did you know that others stores exists? Why Valve asking 25%-30% means that the game can't be sell on GOG, Humble, etc?

Epic does not take a good cut. They take more than Discord, who has more features on their storefront.

Wouldn't it be better to reject that money offer? Since everyone here keeps saying they won't buy games on the epic store, they would lose a sizable chunk of sales, no? Or is the talk of sales being doomed just not true at all? Clearly anyone who accepts the deal has weighted pros and cons and came to conclusion to either accept or deny the exclusivity deal. Don't blame epic, blame the developer who accept the deal.

Rami Ismail does literally nothing aside from making hot takes, why do people continue to care about what he thinks?

Three Fields gave the same reason with Dangerous Driving, but didn't do so in a snarky tone. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/129/b88c92d2-a8ac-48e7-b8cb-a028374be786/image.png

Ohh no, Epic is throwing heavy amounts. I don't remember the name of it but that indie game like a week ago that suddenly swapped from Steam and GOG to Epic and pissed everyone off said that even if every single crowdfunding backer was issued a refund, they'd not be impacted. So yeah, Epic is paying tons of cash to get these games.

Yeah and you got out-businessed from my wallet. Steam and it's adversaries at the very least pretend to give a rats ass about the consumer compared to the draconian shitshow turncoat devs like you are moving to / supporting. One day Fortnite is gonna crash and when it does you and your cronies can say goodbye to your "guaranteed revenue".

I think that Epic assure a certain amount of sold copies. Let's say that Epic promises 30.000 copies sold, then you sell 10.000 and Epic pays for the others 20.000. That's why the Xcom clone developer said that, even if the game sell 0 copies he already has the money.

Phoenix Point, the Xcom-like. Although strangely that was a case where the developer came to Epic, not the other way around.

Phoenix Point is the game you are thinking of.