WingedKagouti on 20/12/2019 at 22:00
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
I don't think that's quite how it works.
We don't know about the games as such, but for their free UE4 Marketplace giveaways, they pay a set amount to the creator to be able to give it away. It's not as if they pay an amount based on how many copies are actually claimed.
I'd imagine it only makes sense when that lump sum is more than the devs are likely to earn with the product on its own for a while, which is why they're mostly giving away older games that have sold most of their copies already.
Also, yes, the thing about once a game has been free, it devalues it a bit and people won't want to buy it for full price any more.
For their UE4 Marketplace they're usually dealing with individual people or small teams. For the Epic Game Store they're dealing with larger publishers/developers and a small selection of indies. The deals they can do with these groupings differ wildly. You might not recall what happened when Epic did their summer sale, but they offered the same deal as they do this time around ($10 off on any title worth more than $15), but back then a couple large publishers with major titles went "We don't want to sell our new games at that lower price, so we're pulling out games from the store for the duration of the sale".
The publisher (or dev in case of self-published titles) always have the final say in whether to participate in a sale/giveaway, it's still their product even if it's offered through EGS. And most major publishers are loathe to give even a remote sign of dropping the price of a large title half a year after release, unless it's a MP only title and they're bleeding players. As you note, if they do lower their prices quickly, this will make the prospect of not pre-ordering/buying during launch week much more appealing. The main exception would be using a major title to sell a subscription based service.
But even with the UE4 Marketplace free asset deals, I can not recall seeing them feature someone with only 1 asset in the marketplace and the free ones are usually the older stuff in my experience. Then again, it's not something I monitor too closely, so I may be wrong in this. There's also the way the sales flow, a creator with a $30 asset is likely not going to see many sales of that asset, and the ones they do get will be over a long period of time with no specific spikes. But if Epic then steps in and offers to pay a lump sum for a free month, the creator will likely see a massive increase in people getting the asset without suffering economically.
But when talking games we usually see the vast majority of sales during the launch week and then they taper off with spikes around the usual sales.
TL;DR: Don't expect any major releases from this year being part of the Epic Holiday Giveaway.
Pyrian on 21/12/2019 at 18:21
I've been waiting for a good sale for that one for years. I guess this qualifies, lol.
Nameless Voice on 22/12/2019 at 17:46
Looks like tomorrow's game is likely to be Ape Out.
Something ape-related, anyway, going by the teaser image.
demagogue on 23/12/2019 at 02:12
I've always loved Little Inferno. The whole game is just burning things and seeing what happens, and it has a kind of dark humor, two things I really like. (There's a little puzzle to it in finding combinations, and some story comes along with it. In other news, I couldn't get Superhot in time. What a shame.)