Ubisoft pulls Anno 1800 from Steam, partners with Epic, prior sales/DLC honored - Sensationalist Headlines

oh wow its gamer revolution!!!

Pretty big difference in bankrolling a project to create hype around your platform and bribing publishers in order to deny the other platform any hype. Both are still trash imho, but one is far scummier than the other.

Best case scenario Steam will man up and have developers/publishers sign a contract that will require them to release their product on their storefront if they choose to advertise there. The fact they can just pull a 180 and remove their game from Steam after receiving advertising support is ridiculous and unfair.

Mercantilism vs Capitalism 2: electric boogaloo

I've been lurking a bit on this whole subject with EGS. At this point should we consider the buying out of "exclusive" games a monopoly? While I welcome competition for Steam, this seems like an unhealthy way of going about it.

The thing is they shouldn't have to and that hasn't been their style. That's not good for anyone but it's exactly what Epic wants to force. Epic doesn't give a shit about the developers or players, just Epic. So they'll force the standards and practices down. Either Valve does nothing trying to keep the high road and Epic just keeps paying to have them excluded and tries to win that way, or Valve tries to be practical and take steps to secure themselves but gets framed as greedy bad guys and Epic rides the wave while it is conveniently ignored that they caused the problem to begin with.

I agree this has to be illegal. It's very different to try to muscle out a single competitor, by name versus trying to win in the general market.

I'll start making threads about Netflix buying up exclusive deals when it is revealed that they're monitoring the other competing streaming services.

Question: Is the "bag of money" that Epic is allegedly waving in front of publishers, actually just the money those publishers/developers would be saving by not giving Valve their almost extortionist cut of the profits?

Epic takes a 12% cut, Valve's "extortionist" cut is actually industry standard. In fact 30% is the standard in a lot of industries, not just gaming. What we do know however, is that Epic is throwing a lot of money at them. In the case of Phoenix Point, Epic was offering the devs enough money for exclusivity that the devs freely admitted that they'd still be making a profit even if they had to issue a refund to everyone who had supported them. They literally didn't even need to sell a single copy of the game to make a profit. Another thing is that there seems to be two components, a signing payment for agreeing to go with Epic alone, and "guaranteed sales" which is either Epic will effectively buy the difference between actual sales and the guarantee, or else Epic pays the equivalent of what would have been earned off of that number of sales before the devs actually have made any.

So what are Epic going to do when they realise that they actually have to put effort and resources into maintaining a digital distribution platform and also to make it good, and then they have to increase their cut to fund the EGS more?

I mean, so long as you can still buy it through uPlay itself - y'know, Ubisoft's own store - and you would've needed uPlay around with the Steam version anyway, then... just get it through uPlay? I mean, for once it's not exclusive to EGS. Ubisoft games being available on uPlay is business as usual.

They won't, because Fortnite funds everything. You breath fortnite when you work at Epic, but also the unreal engine.

What a load of horseshit.

No empire lasts forever.

I think it's pretty good time for Valve to issue some kind of PR statement about all this bullshit. Because it looks fucking stupid that they made one because they were scared of Microsoft Store which literally took 0 games from steam but can't do another one about EGS which steals more and more games from the store.

It's not that big of a deal with Ubi games since you have to go through uPlay ANYWAY

The worst part about this is most gamers are ignorant normies who will still buy from the Epic Store no matter how noisy we are about it.

Guess I'll be playing it for free then, I was going to buy it on Steam just before or after launch but now I don't think they deserve my sale.

At this rate Valve should release HL3/L4D3/TF3/whatever and put it on every single storefront, except EGS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV3ZXOe779k

Wow imagine saying shit like this and not even being paid by Tencent to do it lmao

Well, I was really hoping to have a good Anno game that's possible to play with friends again, but I guess that won't happen for at least another year. And in my case, buying it from another store isn't possible simply due to my OS, with Steam being the only one to offer anything like Proton / Steam Play. Which the earlier Annoy games all run really well through.

Except that it is, since you don't have the nice Steam community features + you have to update it through uPlay as well, which is a problem if you don't visit it often. Basically 90% of the time I only have Steam open and let stuff update.

Not even close

I still find it funny how epic thinks they are helping the industry, you bloody aren't, we don't need more curation, we need less, so all games are equal.

A free game.

To eventually be the dominant force in the market, thus allowing you to dictate how the market behaves and then exploit it to make money hand over fist. Look at the pharmaceutical industry. A dude just comes in, buys a previously cheapass drug people depend on, then jacks the price up to astronomical heights because, well, who is going to tell him no?

Or Starbucks.

Technically you're right, but the 20% off has quite a few stipulations. Firstly it cannot be applied to pre-orders or newly released titles. They consider it newly released from the launch date to 3 months out. Secondly once you redeem the code it expires 3 months from the date you activated it. So if you're like me I already activated mine not knowing the things I just listed. So I'm shit out of luck now. Thought I warn you guys before you do what I did.