Nameless Voice on 4/12/2018 at 18:38
Epic Games have just announced that they are launching a new game store, which will only charge a 12% commission (as opposed to the 30% pretty much all the other game stores charge).
It will sell games made in any engine, though Epic will also waive the 5% commission for using Unreal Engine for any games sold on their store.
The announcement is here:
(
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/announcing-the-epic-games-store)
There were rumours that this was coming, but it's nice to see Epic live up to what CEO Tim Sweeney said a while back, when he said that he felt the 30% charged by storefronts is far too much for what they provide.
Sounds like it will all have a curated set of games, which might help high-quality indie games get exposure without having to get through the deluge of low-quality games that are being released on Steam these days.
As someone who hopes to finish and sell games at some point, I'm glad to see some competition for Steam and GOG, which will hopefully drive down the cut that they take.
As a player, I'm not that keen on needing even more game launchers - though at least in my case I already have the Epic Launcher for UE4.
Aja on 4/12/2018 at 20:07
Hopefully it'll have the first Gears of War at a discount price.
Sulphur on 4/12/2018 at 20:14
You can get GoW1 Ultimate on the Windows marketplace, and it usually gets a sale price markup along with its Xbone counterpart at the usual times of year. It's great to look at but unusually demanding on the CPU because they retooled the UE3 engine to stream those high-res textures instead of moving the entire codebase to UE4. UE3 texture streaming was always a well-documented issue but, well, at least you can't say they didn't strive for authenticity here. Make sure you have the CPU+GPU grunt if you do try it out.
Anyway, with this news it looks like Steam may finally get some serious competition. Though, having said that, if Steam does go belly up someday I'm gonna be so pissed about potentially losing my game library. The expectation was always that, like most owned assets, I'd be able to hand my digital storefront collection down to my descendants through the eons, and if Valve's business model renders them unable to fulfill this most basic of requirements then they deserve to go out of business.
...right, moving on from self-defeating arguments with myself. More competition = win for the customers.
Renault on 4/12/2018 at 21:00
Quote Posted by Sulphur
Anyway, with this news it looks like Steam may finally get some serious competition. Though, having said that, if Steam does go belly up someday I'm gonna be
so pissed about potentially losing my game library.
It's a good point, I'd be pretty devastated if Steam went the way of MySpace some day and I lost every game I've bought in the past 10 years. People always say that could never happen, but you can't really say that for certain these days.
Tomi on 4/12/2018 at 22:12
This does sound good, but it's already annoying enough that my digital game library is split in two places: Steam and GOG.
henke on 5/12/2018 at 05:37
Only TWO places? HAH, lightweight! :D
I've got my digital games library split across Steam, GOG, Origin, uPlay, Windows Store, Oculus Store, the Epic Launcher, Humble and itch.io. And that's just the PC ones, of course.
Pyrian on 5/12/2018 at 06:39
Mine are Steam and Battlenet. Well, Steam, Battlenet, and my file drawer. But I like Steam enough that if I can get something from my drawer on Steam for a buck or so, I will.
Tomi on 5/12/2018 at 08:08
Quote Posted by henke
Only TWO places? HAH, lightweight! :D
I've got my digital games library split across Steam, GOG, Origin, uPlay, Windows Store, Oculus Store, the Epic Launcher, Humble and itch.io. And that's just the PC ones, of course.
Heh, I know. :D I do have a few games on uPlay (Assassin's Creed and Prince of Persia games probably) and I remember having to install Origin for some reason in the past, so I must have got some game(s) there as well, but right now I haven't even got either launcher installed. I didn't even think about Humble actually, I've got loads of games there, but it's more like a storage for your Steam keys, isn't it? I also didn't realise that the Epic Launcher is a thing already.
But yeah, it'll be great if Steam gets some proper competition. I do feel a little bad about wanting to have all my games on Steam and helping them to get a monopoly status, but it's just so convenient to have everything in the same place. Not just games, but reviews, screenshots,
friends . GOG has come a long way too and now that GOG Galaxy isn't a horrible mess anymore, I've started expanding my GOG library too. GOG Connect is a beautiful thing, it's just a shame that it's been quiet on that front for a long time now. And from what I've heard, Origin and uPlay aren't too bad anymore either...
WingedKagouti on 5/12/2018 at 09:07
(
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks#announcements/detail/1697191267930157838) Hot on the heels of Valve doing something similar on Steam.
If your game sells more than $10M total (including DLC, martket place fees, etc.) you get 75% of the revenue above $10M. And if you get to $50M you get 80% of the revenue past that. I'm sure that's going to benefit a lot of ... Sorry, can't finish that sentence without laughing.
One really good thing in that Steam announcement:
Quote:
We've also made a change to the agreement regarding confidentiality of your sales data. We frequently get questions from partners who want to talk with other developers\third parties or publicly about the sales of their games on Steam. We've heard you, and we're updating the confidentiality provisions to make it clear that the partner can share sales data about their game as they see fit.
Nameless Voice on 5/12/2018 at 09:46
Yes, that Steam announcement was a real joke.
Reduce the cut for the huge companies who can afford it, while letting indies and small studios who need every penny still pay the full 30%.
It's a very blatant attempt to try and stop the big studios from just opening their own storefronts and giving Valve 0%.