Tim Sweeney: Epic Storefront is nearly perfect for consumers - Sensationalist Headlines

nearly perfect in the sense that its being massively subsidized to kill steam

Playnite You can also link up any games you want through Steam. Epic bought the rights so you can only buy that specific game from them, which might not be the best thing ever for the market, but they're offering it at the same price, so it doesn't really matter for the consumer at all besides needing to install their client, which is free and perfectly functional anyway. I was only saying that Epic is important for the gaming market due to their engine that's used by a huge number of games.

The article doesn't refer directly to the Epic Games launcher, only its business model. I don't think Sweeney is saying that the Epic launcher itself is perfect, only that, in general, the model of a digital distribution storefront, whether it be Steam, Origin whatever particular storefront you're talking about, is an ideal for the consumer, and the winning differences won't be features or install speed, but developer oriented business practices, and consumer friendly pricing. It even later talks about all the features that they're planning on adding.

you don't get to decide what doesn't matter for the consumer, dingus! you're a consumer but you're not all consumers - the supposed ease of using the client is far, far outweighed by the negative connotations around forcing users to wrangle more programs onto their desktops. the distaste for that isn't some niggly vocal minority, either. tell anyone they need to install a third or fourth client to play a game and they will roll their eyes. no one wants it. you've already conceded that what epic is doing is not good for market. you can easily see - at least from this thread alone - that consumers are bothered by the idea of having to install the epic client. so what is your angle here, exactly?? if it doesn't bother you then it shouldn't bother us?

It's ideal when they are bringing new things to the table. It is not ideal when every company makes their own store/launcher that is worse than Steam and strictly sells their games through it and removes their games from all other platforms. That's just annoying. Or even worse, be Epic and PAY games to leave other platforms because they are so eager for validation and to forcefully try and prove their platform is better than Steam which it likely never will be. Like, people can shit on Steam all they want, even when it comes to the 30% aspect, but let's think about what you are receiving for that 30%. Valve are handling all the payments for you. You don't have to go through the hassle of dealing with a payment processor. Valve and their servers distribute all your updates and game files for you. Valve handle all chargebacks, refunds, etc... for you. As well as general Steam Support. You get the added benefit of all the other options Steam offers; Ratings, Curators, Friends, Achievements, Screenshots, Community Hub, Marketplace (if your game has this stuff) etc... You also get what is essentially a full-blown CMS to view your profits, set whether you want your game on sale, etc... You are using a battle-tested product. Steam has been around for so long that it's incredibly unlikely anything will go "wrong" with it. Ideally everything can be unified in 1 place for the best consumer experience. The only thing I will say I dislike about Steam/Valve is account security and their lack of U2F and general TOTP. I don't want to download your shitty app to generate my codes when I already have a way better one. Now let's consider something like Origin where there was not really any actual reason for them to make it other than to save that 30%. They've already got to hire an entire team to develop the thing. That's gonna likely already to exceed the 30% mark of their sales. They have to build everything from scratch. Time/Cost. No curators, NOT EVEN REVIEWS/RATINGS, No Community Hub, No Screenshots, No Marketplace, The friends/chat functionality is hot garbage. Not battle-tested. Likely has tons of bugs/exploits. More junk to install on your computer. Crappy support & refund policy.

So, instead of just selling the games, anywhere for anyone to pick where they want to buy it. Your solution is to download a 3rd party, still buy it at epic games (which is still the main issue because of their shit business practices) and have the program run the exe. Perfect solution, too bad you're ignoring the issue that you still have to purchase the fucking game at epic in the first place before your 3rd party program can "run" it. Sorry if I don't trust a client that has you sign off on epic leaking your information to it's parent company, Tancent. Epic buying exclusivity is literally breaking that unspoken agreement to not buy out the market and let the developers choose which publisher to go for. Its a horrid business practice, and saying "well its the same price whats the big deal" shows how ignorant or shilly you are. Publishers should be fighting for the lowest price or best service, not throwing money so they are the sole monopoly in certain titles. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/213360/444011ec-5a43-4529-bd9f-a1b2c1f86f7e/image.png

First of all, I'm not really sure what unspoken agreement you're talking about. Second of all, nobody forced their hand- they did chose which publisher to go for, and they sold the rights to them. Epic is trying to enter a market which is, ironically, almost completely monopolized by steam. Them acquiring property is a perfectly valid strategy to enter the market. Are they not allowed to compete the way every other business does? Why are they beholden to your arbitrary made-up rules?

Holy shit, your idea of fixing a "monopoly" (which you can literally look above you and see how fucking asinine you are for saying that) is to allow another company to get monopoly of an IP as the sole seller? The issue is epic could have competed via selling at a lower cost, providing a better service, offering better user input and feed back. But no, they just lower the bar and pay their way into the market at the cost of user choice. No other business has bought out publishing rights from right under the other open platforms with hard cash. Lets just ignore they are now selling early access games with literally zero community input/reviews.

Why bother making a good game when you can just make 1/4 of a game, get paid a lump sum by epic to put your game on their launcher, and then never touch it again and repeat again with a new game? As if this sort of behaviour wasn’t bad enough on steam already with devs releasing unfinished games. Now they have a larger incentive to do it. At least steam has reviews as well as a refund policy that isn’t just a straight up lie. Imagine buying a game for $60 that was early access and trash, and being denied a refund and told to keep playing the game until you like it. 😂

These "made-up rules" are quite a common goal and seek to prevent anti-competitive practices, such as exclusive dealing and price dumping, which Epic are clearly engaging in. Because unlike Valve, Epic are competing for the developers, not for the consumers. They dumped the revenue share down to a point where other storefronts can't compete, in fact where Epic may even lose profit in relation to how much hosting the service costs, and are buying exclusive deals by offering bonuses. And the simple fact that they are competing for the developers alone ensures that the consumer will always end up with a worse system than what he/she had before, because neither Valve, nor any other storefront can compete against Epic by simply improving the user experience in that environment. Especially when a better user experience stands in direct conflict with what the developers and publishers want.

epic store should go and fuck off, alongside with Tencent the chinese spying company.

If they don't beef up their client I think they are going to end up KILLING pc gaming. If they buy up many more rights and exclusivity to their platform, rebellion will ensue which reduces game sales, discoverability and quality trust is going to go down the drain without functioning community tools. Piracy will be rampant. Devs will start avoiding prioritizing pc versions. Fortnite kids come too late. Either that or other storefronts will actually do something about it.

Capcom really should outsource the RE Engine, its amazing.

It's the exact same as Steam now. No questions asked if under 2 hours and less than 2 weeks. I refunded Metro Exodus earlier because my current setup just can't run it well, and honestly, I got my refund for the game squared away faster than it took me for some Steam refunds in the past. The only extra step required is providing an invoice ID, which is fucking trivial unless you somehow don't have access to your email account. I mean there's Unity. Yeah, there's no straight up free access to the engine's source code, but it is quite capable and honestly, their subscription plans are actually less expensive than the 5% cut that Epic gets back in royalties. Which yeah, fun fact, no AAA developer who's made a game in UE4 is paying that 5%, usually much less through negotiations. Other than that, I guess just hope Godot becomes more capable? Cryengine is probably never going to get improved documentation simply because Crytek is sort of taking the Red Hat approach to their engine now. You don't pay for the engine, but the support. As for my take on this, I feel like Epic could be credible competition once all their planned features are in place. From my limited experience with it, I've honestly had no issues, I just again wish there were more features. The whole exclusives ordeal is bullshit, but whether you like it or not, it is a way to get your average consumer to check out your platform. I'm not a fan of it either, but I understand why it's being done. And honestly, if a game is good, I really don't care what platforms it's on. It's why, for example, despite people having a bias against Origin for so many years, so many people swallowed their disdain for it and installed it to get Apex Legends. Good games sell platforms. Also, can we please stop with the whole Chinese boogeyman paranoia of Tencent? Seriously, if you're that concerned about them, then why are you buying ANY AAA games or using Discord? They have investments in pretty much every AAA publisher and Discord. Redirect that paranoia to Chinese corporations that are actually deserving of it, like Huawei. Not every Chinese company is a spy front.

Steam is not a literal monopoly, but it would be hard to argue they do anything but dominate PC games sales, despite having incredibly scummy and shitty business practices, due to their incredibly unearned public image. Steam also has exclusive titles, hell, when the half-life properties / the orange box were being sold, you had to link up Steam with them, with zero option to do otherwise. This is identical behavior to Epic distributing their own games, or acquired games on their own platform. Steam doing this does just as much good for the market as Epic having exclusive titles. You aren't really demonstrating why you think buying with 'cold hard cash' is different from acquiring rights through any other means. Steam can do no wrong in the eyes of many people- I'm not sure if you're one of them, but the way you're comparing the epic store to steam certainly makes it seem that way. Steam makes an ungodly phenomenal amount of money, and is backed by an enormous amount of free advertisement from people who believe gabeN is christ incarnate. The market is badly in need of some proper competition, and businesses operating the exact same way valve does to compete with them does not a moral outrage equal.

Steam dominates because it provides the best service to it's customers, not because they are pulling the rug right under their competition by paying off for exclusives. And that segment of "due to their incredibly unearned public image." signifies me that you just hate valve, considering all the shit that comes with steam innately that helps both developers and users. Prime example is the steamworks system for online gaming, which valve provides for free. They offer developers a massive amount of tools to contact users via forums/updates, to the point that steam will advertise games that have receive big updates on the front page. Steam's only exclusives are games they published, which is fine considering its their platform and their game. That's a whole other level business practice than paying 3rd parties for exclusivity. Where has steam bought all the rights to sell indie/AAA developers that aren't part of valve software, and moreso, when did they buy the rights after they were shown off on a different platform? And what do you mean by other means? Offering the best platform? How is it steam's fault they offer great services for developers for free. You have a lot of talk to say im gargling on steam's balls while being so deep on epic's cock that you are saying Valve are the ones being predatory. Steam is popular for a reason, there are plenty of competitors that often I do buy games from like GoG because they offer a lower price, or I want a exe instead. Again, show me where valve has bullied and bought out rights from right under another publisher before you throw claims like that.

Better than Rockstar's launcher, which uses 200% of available resources and causes the modem to crash.

I actually don't really like either company or their practices, I just hope that actual competition will improve the overall state of affairs. You've been obviously emotionally invested this entire time, forgive me for pointing that out. This article isn't the source for my opinions on steam, but it does articulate most of them fairly well. Steam and valve look like they're doing a lot of good, but ultimately they're not on gamer's side- they're just like every other goddam corporation under the sun, trying to make as much money as possible. Valve is not your friend, and Steam is not healthy for gaming

There was competition, Epic is the one coming in with underhanded tactics to harm the rest of the marketplace and encouraging shitty business practices. How is someone lowering the bar make the overall state of affairs better? The only person getting upset is the one digging deep to defend epic doing extremely obvious unfair business practices because "they need to get their foot in the door". I told you before, Epic could have given users a reason to switch platforms instead of forcing them by holding 3rd party games hostage. So because steam is out to make a profit, that makes them a horrible company. Yet you want to sit here and act like epic undercutting ALL PLATFORMS is completely fine. That article you linked (fucking polygon opinion piece of basically saying valve's history? really?) is entirely a hit piece to act like sheeple need to wake up to the *dun* *dun* *duuuuuun* valve overlords, and has absolutely nothing about valve bullying other publishers/devs to conforming to theirs. Shit like: Valve had all your information and was tracking your data, but it would be wrong for other companies to do so. Valve takes 30 percent of each sale on Steam, but anyone who wants to keep their own revenue is seen as “greedy.” Is sensationalist, because they are tracking THEIR data. Is this article trying to say its not right that a store can track buying trends of their products or ask users for surveys on their hardware? Also its 30% on top of all the free dev services valve offers, like i said earlier. Then it goes on and on about the refund system, which is bad sometimes, but me and plenty of people have gotten cash back for bad games easily. Even when Valve finally did get around to launching a refund program (a full two years after the supposedly evil EA did it!), many people quite accurately and angrily observed that the default refund option was in Steam credit, which means Valve wins either way. It's almost like Good Guy Valve just ... doesn't want you to have your money back. What in the fuck is this line even supposed to mean? After being told they have to offer refunds and incorporating said system, suddenly its "VALVE ISNT SO GREAT BECAUSE EA DID IT 2 YEARS AGO" and "THE DEFAULT OPTION IS STEAM CREDIT INSTEAD OF CASH!!!!". What are these points even? The article is hilariously one sided and trying to pin EA of all fucking people as good people vs valve, especially when just recently EA's support refused to honor the deal with battlefront2. Not to mention said author spend the entire article saying "good guy valve" 27 times in one article instead of appearing neutral. This though takes the cake: The imaginary Gabe, the one in our memes, is a cultural defense mechanism, a happy fiction we all invented to make us feel better about the fact that we were, and remain, willing partners in installing PC gaming's biggest, most opaque, exploitative monopoly — one which we know deep down doesn't care about us at all. Maybe it's time for all of us to wake up. WAKE UP SHEEPLE, YOU ARE BEING BRAINWASHED.

It's almost like the article isn't neutral.

Thats literally every publisher, even Epic games. And the only "ethical" complaint in that entire "source" you linked was the austrailia refund scandal. Right now epic is doing unethical practices right in front of you and you shrug it off and turn to baseless whataboutism and provide me a one sided opinion article that is written like a 10 year old's shitpost. So are you bitching about Valve or steam? Because comparing a platform to a developer is completely stupid and not the point of the article. As a steam user, I don't support valve at all, but im okay with the steam platform. You're trying to muddy the two which is asinine, because would be like me trying to compare fornite's business practices to epic's platform. The two are not connected at all unless steam starts selling games in lootboxes. They don't "force" games to stay on steam, they offer their client when its sold on there. Literally anyone else can do the same to draw in more potential buyers, but its very costly and lasts well after the game it's self is dead. What kind of point is this, Steam is unfair offering a free service for developers to take advantage of? The point of the 30% cut is that steam offers you all these tools to use for free as part of the cut. If I get a gym membership, I can't pick and choose what machines i want to use to lower the membership cost. The majority of game devs agree, but who would say that they deserve less than what they get. And the issue isn't that epic is offering a better cut, its that they are outright buying rights from right under steam and steam users. Prime example was ashen, which was shown for months with a forum full of excited fans, only for epic to come in and buy the rights. Or metro, a game that was 2 months from release, pulled from the store because of epic. Once again, trying to muddy steam/valve as one unit. People get pissed at valve's dev side, not so much the client side (bar greenlight, which steam added filtering tools to block the garbage). Because its annoying, or down right dangerous to have 5 different launchers. That isn't why people are pissed at epic though (for the 500th time). People are pissed at epic buying 3rd parties out with cash months from launch. That on top of epic missing very basic key features like reviews/forums, and epic pushing for devs to remove any kind of criticisms is inherently worse for the marketplace than anything valve has done in your weird hate fuck imagination.

Valve NEVER purchased an exclusive, if a game is only available on Steam is because the developer choose it, and eve then he is free to sell keys on stores like Humble Bundle, Fanatical, etc. Epic purchasing exclusives not only means that the game is not gonna be on Steam, it means no GOG, no Humble, etc. There is a BIG DIFFERENCE. Yes, we need competition, sadly, the Epic Games Store is the opposite of it. Exclusives are by definition NOT COMPETITION. Nice not argument. You look VERY invested on defending Epic, forgive me for pointing that out. They are a company, they obviously make choices to get money, but tell to the linux gamers if they don't care about the them. Remember that they made some nice stuff like the Steam Input too. So... why do you even posted it? And you defend Epic Games when they are using the Unreal Engine to force developers to use the Epic Games Stores? Do you miss out the recent threads about stuff like the "Rape day" incident of some days ago? You are doing the same shit that Jim Sterling did, we understand that Steam is full of problems... but choosing the Epic Games Store is stupid and hypocritical. Epic Games DON'T CARE if consumers are happy, they care if developers can have more control, even if that means doing anti-consumer stuff.

ill be the judge of that, thank you

Don't need more bloatware clogging my pc up thanks

Lol, not at all. The only thing stopping developers from supporting Steamworks and GOG Galaxy at the same time is having to deal with different SKUs, which is costly QA-wise. Supposedly porting Steamworks code to GOG Galaxy isn't that hard of a process either, don't quote me on this one tho.

It won't because Epic isn't competing for you, the customer, but for the developers and publishers producing games for the platform. And what do shady devs like? Having no review system and no community discussion boards for people to voice their discontent on. If Valve wanted to compete with that, they'd have to make these features optional as well. The end result is that you lose out.

I've already decided I'm not making any more accounts or installing any more clients to play games. If you have your own storefront now then you're just too late to the game, buddy. I'm not coming

I might be totally mistaken, but I was under the impression that if you use any of the steamworks API services, such as matchmaking, your game had to remain on steam. If I'm wrong I fully retract that point. Obviously not everyone is going to be a diehard steam fan, but a good number of people are. Every time a game releases exclusively on a platform you're gonna see thousands of people bellyaching that the game is not on steam. You probably aren't going to see many if any people wishing it were on other distribution platforms. As for the ratings, I have access to the entire internet. If I want to see people's opinions or reviews of games, I can go to any number of outlets. They probably should include a star rating but it's not hard to check. As for marketing to developers and not end-consumers, I don't see that as a bad thing. If developers can get a sweeter deal for their labors that's a good thing. It means more games hitting PC markets as margins increase for big corporations, and it means that smaller indie developers don't have to fork over quite so much money if they want their game to get visibility. Many gamers simply refuse to use anything other than steam. This more or less forces smaller developers to sell on steam, where the vast majority of their sales will come from, at a 30% tax.

It cannot be shipped off-steam with Steamworks but that makes sense because it just can't work if Steam isn't installed. Developers are not prevented from selling their game off-Steam in any way, no matter what parts of Steam they utilize. Additionally, Valve lets developers generate an arbitrary amount of CD keys, from which Valve receives no revenue whatsoever, to allow the developer to re-sell the game elsewhere and still deliver it through Steam (if they want to).

Smaller developers might not have the means to properly advertise without a storefront, though, which is why I think storefronts competing for developers is good. If people hear about a game they're far more likely to end up on the Steam page for it before the small developer twitter which is humbly selling keys through some other payment processor. Furthermore, steam doesn't really seem to like the majority of sales not coming from them. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/107231/6aec4726-9f12-4824-89ab-1018d565ec68/image.png