Fortnite dev launches Epic Games Store that takes 12% of revenue | Hacker News Reader

Fortnite dev launches Epic Games Store that takes 12% of revenue

venturebeat.com

274 pointsrichardboegli229 comments

One of the things Steam's 30% cut subsidizes is the generation of unlimited free license keys for developers to do with what they please. So, for instance, if I am an independent developer, I can sell my game on Steam. Say I sell 5,000 copies. I can then turn around and generate 25,000 keys gratis, and sell those on my website (paying maybe a 5-8% fee to my payment processor, but otherwise taking everything). Those keys activate on Steam, at which point my customers get the benefits of Steam and I pay nothing for the bandwidth or upkeep.

This also allows me to give keys to other vendors, like Humble or GreenManGaming, who do take a cut (in some cases close to Steam's 30%, in other cases closer to 10-12%). Those vendors may choose to discount my game beyond the discount I offer by giving up more of their margin to the consumer.

It is not uncommon to see games on Steam where the origin of user reviews is 50% Steam purchases, 50% off-site key activations, which implies that Steam's effective margin may be as low as 15%.

Now, I think most independent developers are willing to sell on any platform who will have them and for whom the marginal costs of submitting / uploading are lower than gross sales, so certainly I don't think Epic is making a bad move here and I suspect they'l get decent developer uptake, but I also think the sort of "topline sticker comparison" obscures some of what's going on.

To some extent there may be value in having this discussion a week from now when Epic has rolled out the store and we have a better idea of how other considerations stack up.

Didn't they restrict the practice somewhat?

https://www.vg247.com/2017/08/18/valves-new-policy-on-large-...

They've tried to prevent people from publishing shell games that no one actually buys to play, that exist only for the sake of generating keys that e.g. make the discounts on game bundles look more attractive, yes.

But in general what notafraudster said is true, and generating keys to sell is in fact explicitly condoned:

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

> Steam keys are meant to be a convenient tool for game developers to sell their game on other stores and at retail. Steam keys are free and can be activated by customers on Steam to grant a license to a product.

> Valve provides the same free bandwidth and services to customers activating a Steam key that it provides to customers buying a license on Steam. We ask you to treat Steam customers no worse than customers buying Steam keys outside of Steam. While there is no fee to generate keys on Steam, we ask that partners use the service judiciously.

In practice, as long as you're selling a real product and your keys are for legitimate sales then you'll face no restrictions. Pretty much common sense.

The keys are not unlimited. They cracked down on this quite a while ago. You have to submit a request for keys which Valve may or may not approve, and they will definitely not approve a request for 25K keys on a game you have sold 5K copies of.

Most of the reporting suggesting this was coming from spam games that sold literally <10 copies on Steam and requested 100k copies for Russian penny bundles. If that foreshadows further cracking down, then fair enough, but as-is it's fair to say that any legitimate commercial request by a developer would be approved.

I've heard rumors from people I trust that they are going to crack down even further on keys, possibly to the point of making it so you can't resell elsewhere.

This may not be a bad thing, though. (As long as they're doing it with discretion.)

A comment by 'vatueil' in this thread hinted at an important point: Steam is currently battling the massive library of half-baked 'crapware' that snuck onto the platform for the _sole purpose_ of being sold off as cheap keys in bulk. It's really more of a scam than anything.

Valve has a reputation to uphold, and it's no wonder they want to put this practice to and end.

Ditching the keys thing sounds strange. It seems like the perfect vendor lock-in approach.

It's a huge insentive to remain on platform despite other sales channels. It basically prevents competition, why build a steam clone when you can just build out the front end and let people use steam keys?

As a user I actually prefer it.

I already maintain a small handful of steam copy cats that annoy me to no end.

Maybe they should not have let crapware onto their platform in the first place?

It did not passively sneak in, it was actively let in by Steam.

I feel like there's some hindsight bias here. By that I mean:

If I took two equally bad games-- one by a legitimate developer who may need some practice, and another by a developer whose intention is to scam the system-- would you be able to tell which is which?

I would argue that the former has a right to be on the platform (good luck trying to objectively define what constitutes a 'good' game, after all) and the latter does not. But there's no way to tell them apart until the devs show their true colors.

Seems fair to me.

> Valve has a reputation to uphold

They're not doing very well there though. See any of e.g. Jim Sterling's videos about Steam over the last couple of years for excellent "Why are Steam sliding into the crapper?" commentary.

If Valve are going to drop their commissions to compete with Epic, they will pull in third-party key sales. Those third-party stores and bundles will die off.

Valve really needed a kick in the pants though. Their store is thoroughly out of date. Crowdfunding new games and sales bundles should have been a part of their offering. They are too worried about being a monopoly, and not focused enough on innovating their offering. The quality of games on the platform needs to be dramatically stepped up, and all of the porn/hentai games kicked out to avoid national censorship.

Those other stores only made sense because they offered a lower commission than Steam.

If you already have the lower commission, you don't need the ability to print keys.

Instead of going through a bundle, which yielded about 50c per copy then sunk your later sales since tens of thousands of keys ended up on G2A etc, just sell your game for 95% off - same result (mass appeal, even to people who are not really interested in your game), doesn't impact your future sales, and probably yields more revenue.

However, the one gap I can see is from Kickstarters - backers need some method to access the game on Epic Store.

Official announcement - https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/announcing-the-epic-...

"Developers receive 88% of revenue. There are no tiers or thresholds. Epic takes 12%. And if you’re using Unreal Engine, Epic will cover the 5% engine royalty for sales on the Epic Games store, out of Epic’s 12%."

"From Epic’s 12% store fee, we’ll have a profitable business we’ll grow and reinvest in for years to come!"

This is great news for indies who Steam seems to be ignoring[1] lately in favor of AAA. Maybe that will eventually put enough pressure on them to at least reduce their cut. There's been increasing concern over whether it's worth it for indies given the lack of visibility. If you have to push an audience there anyway, is it worth the 30%? Jason Rohrer[2] and Positech Games[3] for example have been successful outside of Steam keeping a much larger piece of the pie.

1. http://greyaliengames.com/blog/steams-discovery-algorithm-ki...

2. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-03-12-jason-rohr...

3. https://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2018/11/23/selling-gam...

This link has some Q&A with Tim too with more details:

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-12-04-fortnite-maker...

More Q&A https://www.gameinformer.com/2018/12/03/tim-sweeney-answers-...

Sounds like they took a page from Bezos' playbook. Your margin is my opportunity.

"In our analysis, stores are marking up their costs 300 percent to 400 percent. We simply aim to give developers a better deal."

The timing of yesterdays hn post and this announcement...hhmmmmm. almost as if it was coordinated.

Hmmmmmmm

Edit - i love the silent dv brigade for making an observation and starti ng dialogue.

Dont go changing onme hn!!!

They let Valve know in advance I’m sure, it’s a small industry and the polite thing to do with friends.

Absolutely, especially since they already work together. I don't think there is anything wrong with this, but it made me think, when does it cross the line into collusion or price fixing?

When the prices are the same :) But I don't think they told them the prices, just that they were going to announce a store.

Other articles on hn mention correctly that right now in technology monopolies are the norm and anti-trust is dead (maybe a little dramatization there).

The 30% cut from distribution platforms is arbitrary, not based on cost, but rather implicit collusion based on what apple can extract from their flock.

I'd say this Epic launcher is a great exception to this and I hope it sticks.

What HN post yesterday?

Greyaliengames posted a blog about the steam marketplace algo killing sales

"This is great news for indies who Steam seems to be ignoring[1]"

Your citation suggests that in this context, ignoring means "potentially offering them fewer page referrals from advertising slots, relying on them to generate organic traffic".

I mention this, because the interview with Tim Sweeney posted in response to your comment says: "Generally, we want to enable a more direct relationship between developers and gamers, and more efficient economics and discovery. Developers will control their product pages, free of advertising for competing games."

The reduced margin will definitely benefit all developers, but the Grey Alien guy recently tweeted that margin wasn't the problem because 30% of nothing is nothing, and his issue is no one discovering his games.

I would say who the Epic approach benefits is sort of "Big Indie" -- developers large enough to self-generate momentum but small enough not to benefit from the improved revenue split. Thinking of teams like Double Fine and games like Stardew Valley here.

> ... margin wasn't the problem because 30% of nothing is nothing, and his issue is no one discovering his games.

Doesn't that make the 30% all the more problematic? If you have to bring eyes to your Steam page anyway, you might as well just sell direct.

From Grey Alien, "In the past I have felt positive about Steam, but these discovery changes and the recent revenue share changes that are only relevant to hugely successful games don’t make me feel particularly positive about the future of selling games on Steam."

I can say with confidence that I am much more willing to drop $5 on a game via Steam than <random 3rd party site>. Aside from the obvious "is this a scam" aspects, Steam means that I will have the game even when the dev goes under in 5 years, that my save states will be backed up, and that at least some of the reviews might not be faked.

That 30% might be painful, but at the same time Steam provides a LOT of utility to the buyer.

How is the Epic launcher 'a random third party site' ? Especially someone that already has Fortnite or has heard of it enough to know its maker is not going to be a credit card skimmer.

Way more people use Steam than Epic Launcher. The oldest Steam accounts are 15 years old now, people have been using it for a long time when it was largely the only game in town. People may use another company's platform because they have to to play a certain game. But a lot of times it's just that other platform trying to be Steam, but not in the same league.

Are we sure that's true? Fortnite is the most popular game in the world right now.

Steam[1] still has more peak concurrent users than Fortnite at 14 million if you add the games up, while Fortnite is over 8 million[2]. Fortnite does have a huge install base, but I imagine most of them that need a store (i.e. not consoles, so basically PCs) already have Steam, and at least one game in it.

For new users that don't have steam, there might be an inventive to use the Epic games launcher, especially if there's a discount, but having games split across two systems is really annoying (but it's not too bad for one game), so I imagine without an incentive most existing Steam users will opt out, thus preserving Steam's dominance.

1: https://store.steampowered.com/stats/

2: https://thenextweb.com/gaming/2018/11/08/fortnites-concurren...

> I imagine most of them that need a store (i.e. not consoles, so basically PCs) already have Steam, and at least one game in it

125 million fortnite installs - https://www.businessinsider.com/fortnite-size-statistics-pla...

70+ million steam installs - https://galyonk.in/steam-in-2017-129c0e6be260

Not saying what's right and what's wrong but I heard these kind of numbers reported after the announcement. I see a lot of different numbers being thrown around and I'm not sure what to believe anymore.

Steamcharts consistently surprises me at how few people play the popular games I like, so I'm beginning to think Steam isn't as big.

Here's a more recent source[1] (unfortunately poorly sourced, but it does have a timestamp for each item). It shows 200 million installs (11/11), but 74.2 million iOS installs (11/7), 11.5 million downloads on the switch (10/30).

Android usage is complex, because it's still only available officially to Samsung Galaxy devices, but the amount of players looks like it might be similar to iOS (there are usage numbers from the link, but for different times).

So, just from the total installs number and the somewhat recent iOS and Nintendo Switch numbers, we can put the maximum number of PC installs at around 114 million, before we account for Xbox (released mid 2017), PS4 (released mid-2017) and Android (Samsung Galaxy only but I think it may well be in the tens of millions anyway, especially since there are tutorials on how to get it on other devices).

I think that will leave us well within the territory where Steam and Fortnite have a largely overlapping PC user base.

> Steamcharts consistently surprises me at how few people play the popular games I like, so I'm beginning to think Steam isn't as big.

I think most people just don't game on PC as much anymore. Most PC games are available for consoles now too, and it's much cheaper to buy a new console every few years than to keep a gaming PC updated. My brother bought a keyboard and mouse for his PS4, and played Overwatch with that. Probably just as good an experience as the PC version for much cheaper total platform cost over time.

1: https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/fortnite-facts-and-s...

It is a random third-party site to anyone that doesn't play Fortnite, which is a lot of people.

Steam also has the bonus of supporting linux releases and I can go into just about any store and buy a $20 or $50 steam card I can use to add money to my account without using PayPal or linking a bank account or credit card.

Thesemuch the only reasons I use steam. Though I have to admit, their refund policy has been pretty great so far.

I've heard of the horror stories of steam but I don't play a lot of multiplayer games and don't interact on the community or anything so I think it should be ok. I am kind of leery of the idea of not really owning any of the games I buy and the possibility of them being taken away. But i'm guessing epic's store may work like this also.

"...if you’re using Unreal Engine, Epic will cover the 5% engine royalty for sales on the Epic Games store, out of Epic’s 12%."

So there is a bias in the Epic store towards Unreal titles then, contrary to what I just read.

Only in the same sense that there's a bias in the Epic store towards listing your game in the Epic store rather than somewhere else with higher fees.

No bias. If you sell a Unity game, the fee to Epic is 12%. If you sell an Unreal Game, the fee would have been 12% for the store plus 5% for engine royalties for a total of 17%, which would strongly dis-incentivize developers from using Epic's own engine. Epic is simply waiving that 5% engine royalty so that its store is game-engine-agnostic.

You forgot to mention the Unity cut in your sum.

Epic is certainly not making the store engine neutral. It costs less to use unreal than unity.

Unity is royalty-free altogether, you pay a subscription for the development tools (think Adobe CC or MS Office365) and get all upgrades during your subscription. You can alternatively not pay a subscription fee at all, and accept certain restrictions on your engine's capabilities, mostly on the use of enterprise-level features an indie developer wouldn't have the resources to use anyway.

So, by eliminating the 5% engine royalty for its own store, Epic is making Unreal also free and thus engine choice is not a deciding factor in whether to use Epic's store.

IOW/tldr: Unity and Unreal cost the same amount of money to use and license if you sell through the Epic store.

> You can alternatively not pay a subscription fee at all, and accept certain restrictions on your engine's capabilities

Just fyi: that is not how the unity license works. Unity's license is if your company makes >= $100k a year you're required to buy the $400 per seat license. If your company makes >= $200k year you're required to by the $1500 per seat license. Period. So for example if you're employee of Google and in your 20% time you download Unity you are not allowed to use it for free. Google makes X billion a year. That's greater than $200k a year. All employees of Google who download Unity for work related purposes are required to have the $1500 per year seat license.

This has nothing to do with whether or not you publish a game. Unity is sold similar to Photoshop. It's a subscription. The only difference is unlike Photoshop, Unity has a free tier for people and companies that make less than $100k a year.

From the unity site

Free version eligibility: I or my company generate annual revenues or raised funds less than $100k

Plus version eligibility: I or my company generate annual revenue or funds raised of $200k or less

You're not required to buy the $1500 license unless your company has already made $200k. If your first game goes bonkers and sells $1 million on the free version, you do not have to pay $1500 for the Plus version unless you make DLC or a new game after your bonanza. The license is prospective, not retrospective.

Other than that, you've just restated what I already said. Unity provides the tools on subscription, but does not charge a royalty anymore.

It isn't Epic's fault that Unity doesn't have a royalty program.

Unity doesn't get a "cut" of your game profits, anyway. They get $1500/year/developer.

This does not detract from the fact that it is offering an unreal developer better terms than a unity dev.

No, they are not. The Epic store takes 12% whatever engine you use. They are simply waiving the 5% unreal engine royalty to unreal developers so they don't pay more than 12%.

Game budget $200k. Team 3 people

    Unreal Engine: 
    +$200k
    -$24k   12% epic store fee
    -0      5% epic fee (would be $10k)
    ------
    $176k   income

    Unity Engine:  
    +$200k
    -$24k   12% epic store fee
    -$3.6k  3 copies of unity pro for $200k budget game
    ------
    $172.4k income (-4.6k vs unreal)

So yes, they are.

If you publish on Steam then the numbers change

    Unreal Engine: 
    +$200k
    -$60k   30% steam fee
    -$10    5% epic fee
    ------
    $130k   income

    Unity Engine:  
    +$200k
    -$60k   30% steam fee
    -$3.6k  3 copies of unity pro for $200k budget game
    ------
    $136.4k income (+6.4k vs unreal)

Why not use alternatives like itch.io? Revenue sharing looks hard to beat [1].

[1]https://itch.io/updates/introducing-open-revenue-sharing

This is actually a genius move. Everyone is so concerned about the 12% and its rivalry between Steam, and not see this from an Unreal Engine perspective. Instead of Getting 5% from the Game sold as EPIC are currently used to now, they are now getting 12% with an additional Gaming App Store. That is an 240% increase in revenue with very little additional offering.

Unfortunately I think Unity May see this as a threat, Now what if Unity decide to make an App Store for 7% revenue, which should effectively be a non profit model after you take away the 3% Credit Card charges and CDN cost.

Anyway both would be good as we continue to push forward the Middleware Gaming Engine.

They've made their argument for why developers should publish there. Now, why should I want to use the Epic Games Store as a launcher?

Don't get me wrong. There's plenty of room for Steam to improve. I want launchers to compete for its users, but all they ever seem to compete for is publishers. For all of Steam's problems, people love it because it offers a huge feature set out of the box.

- Achievements - Friends lists - Voice and text chat - Family sharing - Streaming - Multi-drive support - A decent refund policy - User reviews - An easy-to-use mod workshop - Cloud saves - User-generated tags - Independent curators

The list goes on...

So-called "competitors" never bring even half that feature set to their new platforms. Instead, they force users to switch by making games exclusive to their platform.

A lot of people have talked about publishers having incentives to distribute games on multiple platforms, but history has shown us that they simply don't.

I don't know what the solution is. I guess I just wanted to vent.

> - Achievements - Friends lists - Voice and text chat - Family sharing - Streaming - Multi-drive support - A decent refund policy - User reviews - An easy-to-use mod workshop - Cloud saves - User-generated tags - Independent curators

Do people really care about this stuff? I've started holding my nose and grudgingly using Steam, and really all I want is a way to buy a game and get it on my hard drive. I don't need a middle-man to launch it for me or clutter my system up with achievements and friends and yet-another-chat-app. Every time I run a game, Steam even shows that little pop-up--as if I needed a reminder that it's constantly sitting there in memory, eagerly waiting for me to hit SHIFT-TAB and "engage" with it. Can't I just play the damn game I bought without the distributor trying to insert itself into the experience at every opportunity?

So the shift-tab thing feature was copied from a chat program called Xfire, which back in the days of AIM and such was a neat way to be able to talk to your online friends while in a full-screen game.

Steam copied that feature and added a web browser, and the rest of those interactions some time after.

I agree that it feels like marketing BS but it is cool to be able to chat with out-of-game Steam friends in-game.

I remember that for quite a long time, Xfire also did it way better than steam did.

Xfire worked quite well accross all games - they had a nice variety of skins you could install (compared to Steam's 3 skins including the default one, IIRC).

It saved your screenshots and videos in 'the cloud', had some neat 'join server' feature that worked in almost every game and it mostly worked without any issues.

You could also use their server browser so you didn't have to even launch a game beforehand, you could just browse for your servers in their program and then jump right into the game.

Seeing Xfire mentioned brought some nostalgia to me, thank you :D

(Also, Xfire changed to a tournament system and eventually died. Which is a shame but steam does probably everything and more than Xfire does nowadays. Except custom skins?)

> Do people really care about this stuff?

The short answer is yes. I don't care that much about achievements, but things I've used and value in Steam certainly include a friends list, a decent refund policy, user reviews, an easy way to install mods and cloud saves.

I use those features all the time. A lot of people do.

I keep repeating this: two things Steam does right are effortless no-questions-asked refunds, localized prices in many regions of the world, so that people in poorer countries pay affordable prices.

I do think that Steam is only going to grow bigger, because most of the growth in game sales are going to come from China, Russia, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Africa, Mexico, Brazil etc than US and Europe. But most other stores does not seem to understand that expanding to these markets is key, and seems to be operating in US&Europe centric strategy.

(Off-topic: Incidentally Indonesia is not far behind the US in population, but current predictions show that they aren't going to overtake the US anytime soon, however Nigeria is on track to overtake both US and Indonesia to become the 3rd most populous country by 2050).

Their refund policy is good but it's worth nothing they only give those refunds because they were taken to court in Australia, where a judge said their previous refund policy was designed to give no refunds and used to deny an estimated 21,000 refunds just within Australia. They changed their policy and escaped punishment everywhere else.

https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/video-games-websit...

GoG does both of these, and have done so for much longer than Steam.

It doesn't not to do either of them as wholeheartedly as steam: GOG refunds are for technical issues not no-questions-asked. Similarly in my region Steam prices are lower than GOG prices. Moreover like GOG, steam also supports DRM free games(if the developer wants a game to be DRM free).

Valve's refund process is certainly better than nothing, but it's not consistent. I don't think you can get a refund for Artifact (Valve's own game). You can do a credit card chargeback, but then they'll ban your entire account.

The question will be: how will developers respond to this lower commission? Will it result in cheaper games for the end user?

Personally I'm being conservative, that the Epic Store will lack of a lot of features upfront and need a higher advertising budget, and some additional support costs if I have to self-administer cloud saves (eg. via AWS) if Epic don't have that feature yet.

So I've budgeted for about 10% lower sales, 50% increased advertising spend, about $10k extra development costs. I come out slightly less profitable than Steam, but I calculate that the risks of launching on Epic are much lower, since there's a chance that the game can just flop and die immediately on Steam on launch, whereas at least on Epic I have the boost from being selected. Plus, the potential upside on Epic is much higher.

Pulling from what I said in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18600248

I guess this explains Valve improving the revenue share a bit on Steam recently.

Also, at first I wasn't thinking this would be much of anything (yet another storefront), but the kicker per the article is that those developing in Unreal Engine would not pay a percentage for the use of Unreal Engine (~5%) on top of the store cut (~12%). That would probably be huge for developers so I could see this one actually taking off.

I wish Valve had pushed harder to compete with Origin, but this looks like the end of its complete dominance. Once EA demonstrated that anybody could hack together a launcher, it's become a free for all. As a consumer it's been a worse and worse experience since increasingly small companies felt the need to replace steam with technically inferior solutions. But this is different-now we get a competitor which is willing to sell more than just its own titles, and this will be a major blow to steam (because indies will go for this-fortnight will be the killer app for this new store just as Half Life 2 was for Steam.) I was really rooting for Valve because they where making a linux gaming future look possible.

I've found as a consumer that its gotten much better. Steam's customer support is absolutely atrocious and hugely anti-consumer whereas both Origin and Battle.net have great customer support. I hope this competition drives Steam to be better.

I've found Steam support to be great on the occasions i've had to use it (refunds etc - pretty much no questions asked).

> this will be a major blow to steam

we'll see. i'm in no hurry to rush out and buy anything that isn't on Steam. all these articles talk about the cut Epic will take, but as a customer, I couldn't care less. what i do care about is e.g. Steam's excellent return policy. maybe i'm just getting old and am not that interested in games, but i'm happy to pass up games if they aren't on Steam.

i'd venture a guess that Steam and Epic Games Store may not be competing for quite the same market; Steam is likely to remain dominant for PC gaming (maybe rightly so, they have worked hard to get there), and Epic Games Store might focus more on mobile gaming instead. so it's a bigger threat to the App Store/Google Play than Steam IMO.

> maybe i'm just getting old and am not that interested in games

I'm in the same boat, but don't underestimate the number of eyeballs of moldable children fortnite is getting right now. Would steam be the client it is today without the masses from Counterstrike?

I think this will take a big piece of the growing pie that is game sale.

The popularity of Fortnite means that there's already a huge install base on PC. As a customer I don't like to see total vertical integration of platform and engine tech-I don't want to see Unreal go the way of Source, and I don't want to see Unity squeezed out.

Don't forget that Epic has built-in 5% affiliate commissions, which they will cover for the first 24 months.

This whole thing will get huge advertising and popular support, developers will just need to take advantage of it.

I'm sure there will be some great exclusive games on there too.

Compete with Origin? Origin hosts EA games only they are no competitor to Steam.

EA had some titles on Steam before Origin.

> Technically inferior solutions

It wasn't just EA - Blizzard, uPlay, GOG, etc. All with different strengths and weaknesses.

> compete with Origin

Origin is garbage and a reason I won't own games that are connected to it (I really wanted to play ME3 and the newer FarCry's) - as is u(dont)Play (couple games ruined by uPlay that were purchased via Steam... boo)

bNet is decent in that it's contained to only Blizzard so it's very contained.

Valve still has the best platform, hands down.

Now, their gaming division on the other hand... Half Life Episodic content? HL3?

The Battlenet app contains Activision Blizzard games, Destiny 2 and the latest Call of Duty is on there now aswell.

I don't think it will be a major blow. Ubisoft followed suit and just sells games on Steam but tacks on their awful DRM on top of steam. Origin is a joke in terms of functionality and ease of use. The only advantage it has is the library of games if you so happen to like EA games, which has been very mixed in the last few years to say the least. I only own two games from there and would rather just buy a used PS4 copy than have to deal with that bad store.

GoG is the only good alternative but they don't even aim to compete with steam since they offer a service of maintaining old games to be played on modern OS's. I was shocked that Steam sells games that quite literally do not work on anything more modern than XP!

I'd like you to define "Origin is a joke in terms of functionality and ease of use"

Because the shity Steam UI that is almost 15 y/o with multiple windows is good lol.

The reason why major publisher went with their own is to not pay the crazy 30% fee on Steam.

Origin and Steam both have problems but frustratingly they're different problems, so the fact that I've learned to get to the tiny text that represents the Steam game I want to play does not help me find the incantation for getting the latest version of Origin to just list the games I have installed. Battle.net does a pretty good job-big game names, a big "PLAY" button, etc.

What's wrong with multiple windows? It's desktop, not mobile

> I was shocked that Steam sells games that quite > literally do not work on anything more modern than XP!

Interesting since they have EOLed the client on pre-Win7 systems. https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=1558-AFC...

This annoys me because I had Skyrim[1] in Wine on Linux for the occasional run but after the update I'm faced with working out what broke as I can't back out.

[1] Purchased as a real physical DVD. Except the installer requires the use of the Steam client even for the base game.

I like Steam, but I have no problem using other game stores such as Origin as well. If others stores want to co-exist with Steam, why not? Many people have Netflix, HBO Go, Amazon Prime, Hulu..

On my Roku I can fairly seemlessly switch between Netflix, HBO, Hulu, etc. I hate that they don't just expose shows to a common list I can browse through, but whatever. The UX is generally uniform and I can find the things I want no problem. On PC, despite the fact that I'm running a much more powerful machine, they all have a laggy start up because they need to make sure they're up to date, they all have radically different UX, etc. I need to maintain friends lists separately on all of them. My friends need to learn how to invite people to a group and such on all of them.

That is a good point about friend lists. But really I don't switch game like I switch channels. If I am sitting down to play a game, it is one game. And my clan in World of Warships is generally different people than who I would play League of Legends with.

You can also see that Discord is trying to create a communications service that runs alongside of other DRMs like WoW / LoL / Steam etc. That is fine with me.

I'm totally the opposite-I have friends that I play all of my MP with and we tend to have a stable of games (current lineup includes Pubg, WoWS, StarCraft, Far Cry 5) split across launchers.

I'd be more excited for this much needed competition if it weren't a company that survives by taking advantage of children's naivety of money and natural impulses to sell virtual outfits and animations at sickening prices. App store cuts are ridiculously high, but at least they're not taking candy directly from babies.

Companies have sought to take money from parents via their children for as long as childrens' products have existed. Epic isn't doing anything new here.

At least skins and other virtual assets aren't filling our landfills with plastic crap.

Just to add to that, as a fortnite player, I don't see any glaring psychological attempt to make purchases addicting. Buy shit and you unlock cool outfits, thats it.

What if you're addicted to style?

Not all of us are really ridiculously good looking.

It's even better than that. They key mentioning that the crap you buy gives you no competitive advantage, it's cosmetic only. In an age of loot-boxes and pay-to-win, this is super refreshing for a 100% free game.

I think if one of your classmates has a lot of different skins and plays the game for a long time most days you would likely be inclined to try and match what they have and do in the game if you want to continue to be part of this social circle. This is probably even more pronounced today than it was 5-10 years ago, because now there are youtubers and twitch streamers who can spend 4-12 hours every day playing the game and they have massive incomes to spend on virtual items.

The same thing happens with real clothes, and those get made often by child labor. If some of that status signaling can be diverted to digital goods instead of contributing to child labor and deforestation from cotton farming it seems like a net win.

Lawyer'd.

Or at least let's not pretend that this 21st century version of status symbol nonsense is really any different than what kids have always been doing. Some kid has a SNES and you only have a NES... Who's got Air Jordans? Who's got the best lunch? The best toys. Whatever. It's all the same. It's always been the same.

Hell I remember 1990 my elementary school installed a pencil machine. And you got like two random pencils with whatever graphics on them for a quarter (or maybe two quarters) and people were dumping money into that thing like they were going to hit the jackpot and become pencil barons of the midwest.

It's always been the same song and dance, kids are morons, and they are subject to the whims of whatever fad.

Popular YouTuber has a skin that's no longer available. Epic brings it back for an arbitrary limited time. It cost more v-bucks than could realistically be earned in-game. Every kid wants it.

"Hey kid, how does it feel to want?"

If they want it that bad, let them go mow lawns or shovel driveways or whatever. You know, like kids have often had to do when there was something they wanted, no matter how silly it seems to adults.

Is your beef with them purely that they sell things that kids want?

It's that they sell something that cost relatively noting to make or distribute, put an imaginary wall around it and charge insane access fees. The only value provided is entirely in the targeted mind, the minds of children; the uneducated; the impulsive.

Maybe it irks me so much because it represents the bottom of capitalism barrel and it's wildly successful.

I'm mad at Epic for making the trap, but I'm equally as aggravated at people for falling into the trap, even though it's clearly marked with giant neon lights.

So what? Kids want a lot of things. Among those things, a 10 dollar video game skin seems pretty benign.

That's an interesting take, most people I know find that Fortnite is a much better alternative than let's say 90% of apps that are aimed at children that are literal gambling simulators. In Fortnite you get what you pay for, no BS. No pay-to-win power ups, just cosmetic items that are fairly high quality and often referencing the hottest memes at the moment. Even the seasonal battlepass can be quite fair with rewards.

If you want to see a game that actively preys on the young you should look into Fifa Ultimate team. It forces you to spend hundreds of dollars opening packs of cards like in hearthstone but in the end of the day all of it goes down the drain because it doesn't carry over to next year's game. This is so absurdly predatory and they keep making it a heavier focus for the game every year.

Getting punched in the face is better than getting stabbed in the stomach.

I wouldn't equate purchasable cosmetics where you direct purchase the item you want with no RNG to being assaulted in either of those ways.

I'm not a fan of Fortnite but that is extremely disingenuous. In your interpretation, parents are completely absolved from responsibility and apparently children have free access to credit cards that can't legally even be issued to them.

Want to know the responsible answer to "mommy can I buy a Fortnite skin"? It's "no". Simple as that. Same as it was when the question was "dad can I buy this Harry Potter poster" or "mom can I get this GI Joe" or "grandma can I buy a stick to roll my hoop with" or anything marketed to kids over the past literally forever.

Don't want your kids spending money on video games? Don't give them your credit card number. Don't blame Epic for making a fun and free-to-play video game that kids enjoy. The people actually spending the money aren't kids being taken advantage of, they're actual consenting adults. Kids don't have credit cards so they cannot make digital purchases.

I say no, every time. However, I don't want to be the all-controlling parent that dictates what can purchased with gift cards. I try to demonstrate what's being given up, what's gotten in return (nothing but a few bit flips in a database in this case) and break down why he wants whatever thing it is. After a few years of Roblox and now Fortnite, I can see the wheels starting to turn on their own and I think he's forgone quite a few purchases of his own will.

Fortnite skins have become somewhat of a social status amongst kids and their friends, especially since its a game where they play with their friends. Many times kids are asking parents to buy these add ons to keep up with their friends, and may feel excluded (or even bullied) if not staying with the latest trends (AKA latest Fortnite skins). Parents denying kids that can definitely impact the kids even outside of the game itself. To these kids it is much more than bit flips in a database even if that's actually what it is.

Grandparent advocated for education as it shields young consumers from sales trickery.

It's a good thing that such education "impacts the kids even outside of the game itself".

It's the equivalent of not having the latest sneakers (which was a thing in my age bracket).

Regarding the bullying: That's not related to brand choices but group dynamics. A skilled bully doesn't need you not to buy a skin for your child to bully her or him.

> Don't blame Epic for making a fun and free-to-play video game that kids enjoy.

You had me up until this point. No one can deny the extreme amounts of psychology (read: manipulation) used in children's marketing. (Or any marketing...)

Marketing can only go so far. There are plenty of things (video games included) marketed towards kids with big budgets that the children are completely ambivalent about. If they didn't enjoy Minecraft or Roblox or Fortnite or Pokemon or JUUL or McDonald's Happy Meals or light-up sneakers, they'd join the ranks of EZ Squirt ketchup, ET for Atari, New Coke, or the Virtual Boy.

Virtual clothes to look cool are not really any different from real life clothes. I mean, some dads refuse to let their daughters buy makeup, I guess that's kind of the same thing.

What? One is bits and bytes, once is a REAL GOOD you can wear, sell, recycle, use, change, trade etc.

Fortnite has actually helped my son understand the concept of saving money (V-Bucks, the in-app currency). He has started asking himself, "Do I really want this? Or should I save my V-Bucks for something I know I'll love."

Mine too, but he still says things like "I can't wait to get my own credit card so I can buy all the v-bucks I want". So there is still much to learn :)

I mean basically every company creating anything for children's entertainment is doing this. Unless it's an educational product, and even many of those are included, it's getting your kid interested in some useless thing (a game, a cartoon, a cereal, whatever) so that they will bug their parents to give them money for this thing.

Are you upset by the pricing? Would you be happier if the virtual outfits cost less? Are you upset that they're marketed to children at all? How is this different from My Little Pony making a child interested in their toys through their cartoon? Do you just hate capitalism as a concept (not sarcastic, that's generally my stance on things)?

I'm a gamer, and I'm not a fan of micro-transactions for components of a game you NEED in order to play (ie, extra lives in time based games, cards to play hearthstone/etc) but I really can't hate on a game maker saying "hey, if you want to play my game AND look like a panda, there's an extra charge for that". You're received the "complete" game for free and being charged for the game equivalent of a table with a better view at a restaurant. Food still tastes the same, game still plays the same.

I'd agree, except that Fortnite is hardly the originator of this sort of model. Blizzard has been doing similar things for years. And once upon a time Team Fortress 2 being dubbed a hat simulator comes to mind. And then there was Counter-Strike.

I don't buy into the "please, won't someone think of the children", type arguments like this is a new problem or that this game is specifically for kids. Or that Epic should change their business model when it turns out lots of children end up playing their wildly popular game.

I absolutely welcome the competition, but it's going to take a lot for me to trust the Epic Games Store as much as I trust Valve.

Lots has been written about Valve (employee handbook, supposedly-not-there-but-actually-just-hidden political hierarchies), but I don't think of them as a normal for-profit company though they most certainly are. They've taken bets like steam for linux, the steam controller, steam boxes, their crazy no-hierarchy structure (no matter how misguided) and I just don't see other game companies or platform companies doing the same. They have my respect. I've also never seen them do anything blatantly greedy/money grubbing on a large scale (though their excuse is usually that they're a small company) and the gaming community absolutely loves to get out their pitchforks.

Maybe I've just been marketed to really well but I think it takes a certain kind of company to be who Valve is -- they're like a mozilla in my eyes.

Agreed, but their recent bootlicking of Chinese authorities stemming from a minor Dota2 drama is just sad and embarassing to be honest.

> I've also never seen them do anything blatantly greedy/money grubbing on a large scale

Have you ever heard of TF2?

I feel like they just wandered into a crazy profitable business model and didn't know what to do?

Could you be more specific -- I never played TF2 for very long, and I know hats were basically a huge thing, but from what I understand they allowed people to make hats right? Did they like take all the profit from community made hats or something?

This must just be a controversy I didn't see because I don't play TF2

They basically turned the game into a testbed for extremely exploitative practices. It's been a while since I walked away in disgust, but one example I remember is the crates system.

Essentially, they added "item drops" called crates. These crates do absolutely nothing unless you spend $2.50 to buy a key to open them with. It's basically an extremely insulting lootbox model.

Aside from turning the game into a hat simulator, they also introduced loads of game-breaking straight upgrade weapons for you to grind for, and continually piled them on over the years, often just taking community-supplied models and slapping stats on them. At some point they even tried to add full sets of expensive cosmetic items that would give you straight stat bonuses when worn, which even they had to back down from.

I've never seen more aggressive monetization while ruining the base product than I saw Valve apply to TF2, hence my surprise at your impression that Valve wasn't capable of money grubbing. In the case of TF2, they were somehow actually worse than Activision-Blizzard.

Hahha that's exactly like Counter Strike:Global Offensive (which I do play). It's definitely some dark UX/a manipulative practice, but well within their rights to do, as long as the stuff that comes out doesn't actually affect gameplay.

Breaking the games balance with pay/gamble-to-win stuff is pretty shitty IMO though, yikes.

Now that I think about it, Counter Strike: Source didn't have any of the crate nonsense or skins... Yeah they probably learned that from TF2.

Interesting, since I remember how controversial the Steam DRM was at the time of its launch.

But Valve have outcompeted and outlasted other vendors by being the least anti-consumer DRM system with the best discounts that doesn't interfere with playing your games. If anyone remembers Games For Windows Live, that's an example of how not to do it. Here's the cheering on RPS when its closure was announced: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/08/20/it-liiiiiiiiives...

UPlay and Origin exist but are tolerated through gritted teeth. It remains to be seen whether Epic get a good or bad reputation.

Point taken, that particular controversy definitely slipped my mind... There was a time when it didn't have that.

This annoucement definitely made me think of UPlay and Origin, I think I played a demo of "The District" (?) and there was much gritting of teeth.

I might also be biased against fortnite....

> I've also never seen them do anything blatantly greedy/money grubbing on a large scale

Well... Steam launched with Half Life 2, and you had to install it and have an internet connection to play the game on the CD you just bought. And Steam didn't work for several days after HL2's launch, so everyone who bought the game day one was forced to wait for the Steam gatekeeper to let you into your own game (again, that was sitting in the physical box). And it was quite buggy for a long time, even though it did very little for the user. They eventually rewrote the entire thing as an embedded web app!

Also besides the Half-Life IP, many of Valve's franchises are either takeovers of user-created mods (Team Fortress, Counter Strike, DotA 2), and now Artifact appears to be heavily "inspired" by hearthstone.

As for Steam for Linux, that was a contingency against the Windows Store when it was released. Valve recognized Microsoft could theoretically kick app and game stores off it's platform, leaving Valve with nothing.

> Well... Steam launched with Half Life 2, and you had to install it and have an internet connection to play the game on the CD you just bought. And Steam didn't work for several days after HL2's launch, so everyone who bought the game day one was forced to wait for the Steam gatekeeper to let you into your own game (again, that was sitting in the physical box). And it was quite buggy for a long time, even though it did very little for the user. They eventually rewrote the entire thing as an embedded web app!

This has definitely colored my view of valve, thanks for sharing. I bought HL2 on CD (DVD?) to play counter strike and didn't remember this happening since I got it so late.

> Also besides the Half-Life IP, many of Valve's franchises are either takeovers of user-created mods (Team Fortress, Counter Strike, DotA 2), and now Artifact appears to be heavily "inspired" by hearthstone.

Maybe this is the difference -- they don't actively kill things that made them successful. I feel like I've seen things like that happen to other companies and they step in and ruin it/don't know how to just let the community be and let it grow.

> As for Steam for Linux, that was a contingency against the Windows Store when it was released. Valve recognized Microsoft could theoretically kick app and game stores off it's platform, leaving Valve with nothing.

While I'm not sure that windows store was ever a real competitor to steam I definitely see the point here. Glad they did it though!

If Apple loses their anti-trust case in court and is forced to open iOS to alternative app stores, does that mean the consoles would be forced to open up their platform as well? It would be nice to have some of these alternative stores on the PS4 and XBox.

That's an interesting thought, but I wonder if it's a different context. Today, you can go to many physical stores to purchase console games, you don't HAVE to use the PS4/Xbox digital stores only. You can even purchase the digital codes from many stores to redeem. I don't know much about the Apple case, but I assume that's maybe different because you HAVE to use Apple's iOS store. There isn't alternatives like physical stores to buy your apps to load them onto your phone.

Every console game must be approved by the console maker for sale and pay a fee for every copy sold. That's how manufacturers make money.

They also impose stringent requirements like the first menu must be "press start" and the X key for menu actions.

It's very unlikely for the consoles to be opened up in a technical sense. At least on the Xbox, the store is not very pluggable, and allowing third parties to sign code just ain't going to happen.

I would expect relief here to be financial. No way is MS going to relinquish platform control.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that console hardware is usually sold below cost to get people into the ecosystem and make that back as people buy games.

So forcing console makers to allow other stores would probably have a much more dramatic impact on the console market.

And while IANAL, it seems a bit of a stretch to apply anti-trust law here.

I'm not sure I see why the level of hardware profitability is at issue?

It's use of platform power to lock in profit and exclusivty that appears to be at issue.

Yeah if anything that's even worse. Dropping the price of your product to unsustainable levels to gain a competitive advantage is called "predatory pricing" and is a valid cause for anti-trust suits.

This isn't really predatory pricing though.

This is structuring your costs, such that you are profitable over the lifetime value of the customer, even if you are not necessarily making a profit right away.

And this has benefits to consumers, who can get into the ecosystem more cheaply, and developers who can sell to a larger audience, because people can get in more cheaply.

Console hardware is sold at a loss, yes, but the recuperated costs are traditionally made on game licensing for the platform. The online markets are a newer phenomenon.

Sounds interesting but I don't think so. My reasoning stems from the fact that App stores are pretty much the only way to download and purchase software on iPhones. Meanwhile console games can be bought in the digital marketplace and Physical with physical being much more open option. This pretty much breaks any monopoly that sony could hope to have. Theoretically, if the next generation of consoles aims to follow suite with PCs and do away with Physical copies then we could see a stronger case.

Sony and Microsoft still have monopoly power on the consoles because no matter where you buy the software, it has to be approved and signed by Sony or Microsoft. They charge a big fee for that and it gets passed on to the consumer.

So I think it depends on how the Supreme Court rules. If Apple has to allow software signed by third parties, then I don't see why that wouldn't translate to the PS4 and XBox.

I think it's going to end up the other way round. Apple will cite consoles as an example and not lose the case (at least as far as opening up the platform is concerned). The alternative scenario would have too many far reaching effects making it extremely unlikely.

At first glance, I thought Steam was in big trouble. Last MAU numbers I could find were 90m for Steam and 75m for Fortnite.

A game store is a marketplace, in startup terminology. Epic already has a lot of the consumer side, and 60% lower fees is a huge incentive for the developer side.

But UX-wise, so many games are built on top of Steam. In Rocket League, you get logged in with your Steam account. You invite friends to party via Steam.

And how would migrating work? Would Epic let me launch the game because I already own it in Steam? Or would I have to re-purchase? (No way people would do that)

If I'm playing on Epic, and my friend is on Steam, would we be able to party?

This introduces a ton of complexity, and while certainly troubling for Steam in the long run (once new games come out), I think their moat is still very strong.

Also 40% of Epic Games is owned by Tencent, so this would mean China's market share of the world's gamer market growing, for better or for worse (depending on your political opinions).

I believe there's a decent amount of prior art for games supporting cross-platform play across Steam and traditional consoles (PS4 / Xbone / Switch). Presumably you'd need to re-buy a game like Rocket League to get it to show up in your Epic library, but the Steam version could likely be patched to allow Epic players to play alongside Steam players?

Obviously there's a non-zero cost for developers to publish thru multiple stores, so it makes sense to try to incentivize them with a greater share of revenue. It would be interesting if they tried to leverage the popularity of Fortnite to also do this on Android.

Ditto, I'd love to see this pushed out to the mobile platforms as well.

Just wait until digital distribution services catch up to console levels of bullshit and start licencing exclusives or "exclusive for X months after launch" for bigger titles.

Epic is in fact planning to buy third-party exclusives for their new store:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/12/epic-undercuts-steam-...

> Sweeney told Ars that the company plans to "start small" and will "sometimes fund developers to release games exclusively through the store," Sweeney told Ars.

There's also a cost for the customer; they have to use multiple launchers.

Only sort of. All applications use one master launcher: The operating system. Battle.net, Origin, Steam, etc. all can put desktop shortcuts to individual games.

Steam is much more than a launcher, it's a social networking platform for games. Everyone has their friends lists on there, groups, etc.

Network effects make it difficult to move your contact list over to a new platform.

I've found that Discord has largely replaced both Steam and Battle.net as the social platform.

Agree, but a lot of games use the Steam service for adding and playing together with friends in ingame lobbies. Battlenet also has it's own social service that all games on it use, same with Epic.

In some circles yes, but discord is more replacing teamspeak/skype than steam directly. They are clearly pushing in valves direction, however (Discord has games too etc.).

Also, Discord looks pretty is depressingly badly constructed software.

Haven't we proven time and time again that if a product is attractive enough, it will attract people and you won't really be porting everyone over as much as locating them on the platform?

Plus having the largest game in the world (at the moment) helps build some inertia towards early adoption if they use that to funnel people into the system. I don't need to "rebuild my contacts" if Fornite suddenly requires me to add myself to the EGS, because that just sort of sorts itself out.

The Network effect can be used by Epic as well.

Having to manage all those accounts, installing all that launcher software, and running always on "agents" is anti-consumer.

I've found historically with software that the better something works, the more likely it is to get screwed up. Netflix has made browsing a chore, Amazon Video introduced ads, Spotify is getting clunky as they "optimize" the UI, Gmail taking time to load in 2018 when it didn't in 2015, Android requiring root to install an app to prevent album art from replacing your lock-screen background and apps from making obnoxious color choices on notifications.

Ah well, maybe I'm just getting old and people want less robust, clunky software! /rant

I'm absolutely amazed at how bad Gmail has been running lately. Slow to load initially, UI not updating in a timely manner, keyboard shortcuts stuttering - the list goes on. At first I thought this was a browser issue (I run Firefox Nightly), but it's the same in Chrome. It's all very vexing

I think part of the problem is that services and clients are coupled together. Imagine there were an official, maintained Spotify API and no official client. Nobody would use (and more importantly, have to use) crap like today's Spotify client.

Tim Sweeney said in an interview that they are planning on launching their store on Android in 2019.

https://www.gameinformer.com/2018/12/04/tim-sweeney-answers-...

Epic seems to be really trying to kill the 30% cut game. First by bucking the Play Store on Android and now offering their own competitor to Steam on PC. Sort of impressive, glad to see we aren't going to be cemented into these cuts forever.

If everyone who has Fortnite has the Epic Games Store by default, there will be a huge initial market penetration as well.

I love that this is the same play that Valve used to launch Steam - They used the success of Counter-Strike and then Half-Life 2 to create a massive install-base for Steam.

Nice to see some resistance to the 30% cuts, with Apple recently having to deal with a lawsuit regarding the AppStore as well. Not to diminish the value of the service, but 30% for what amounts to CDN + Payment Processing, is too much.

The deal used to come with some amount of marketing & discover-ability, but that has basically shifted to the developer as well.

But even then, in a normal world you should have to bear some risk of the product to get that kind of cut.

Just yesterday I read a rant by an indie-game dev on Twitter, he complained that Steam would flush out good indie games by catering more to AAA studios and simultaneously watering down everything else with Steam direct.

Don't know if this is right and I don't know if the Epic Games Store has a solution to this problem, but more competition in the space is probably a good thing.

Everyone seems to be talking about Steam but the forthcoming Android store feels to me like a much, MUCH bigger deal.

I mean, nobody stops anyone from setting up a new PC game store, and the Epic PC store is just another entry added to the already long list of stores all competing with Steam. But on Android (outside China), the Google Play Store pretty much has a complete monopoly that they made sure was virtually impossible to break while still being able to be technically called "open." Sure, Amazon Appstore and a few other stores exist, but they haven't really been able to make any real impact due to Google erecting so many hoops for both developers and users to jump through in order to stray from the Google Play path. (eg. Google Play Services, "Unknown Sources" checkbox buried in Settings app, etc.)

But now Epic is forcibly prying it open by using Fortnite as their lure to induce people to actually jump through Google's hoops that were supposed to be insurmountably high user friction. Of all the past alternative Android app stores, this one sounds like it could actually work.

The ensuing Google/Epic all-out war should make last year's Google/Amazon Chromecast/FireTV/YouTube feud look tame. Break out the popcorn.

Indeed, I feel like people missed the bigger news here. And I was always surprised Steam never tried to take this on: Many Steam library apps are also available for Android, but Steam has never tried to support cross-platform access to it.

Another highlight of this: Do bear in mind there's a class action antitrust lawsuit being bandied about by the Supreme Court right now against Apple and the App Store. If that doesn't go Apple's way, Epic is potentially poised to be one of the first players in that as well.

I was half expecting Valve to expand to mobile stores back when they first released their mobile apps. But no, it never went beyond a companion app and 2-factor authenticator.

None of their other initiatives (Big Picture Mode, Steam Controller, Steam Machine, Steam Link, SteamVR, etc.) ever steered in the general direction of mobile gaming, either. They've been married to PC gaming since their inception over 20 years ago, I guess mobile gaming is just not in their DNA.

In my opinion taking a percentage cut on something that is not strongly correlated with any special effort, borders on scam.

And yes the scammers are everywhere: your bank, broker, recruitment agency, financial adviser, real estate agent, etc...

Call me bitter, but I paid way to many years 20% of my paycheck (yay, work for free on Fridays!) to some agency because they, for no good reason at all, somehow are into this percentage margin business as well.

The country I live in all major stockbrokers will charge you the higher of $90 or 1% (discount brokers take about half that), whereas a lot of other countries have enough competition that you get actual flat prices per trade.

You are selling some service, then please put some actual price on it. E.g. $2000 to review your game and put it onto our platform.

If the service requires ongoing efforts than put some price on this as well.

Without price there can not be any free market.

I think we're going to see a lot of Unreal Engine games on this store. With the UE royalty being absorbed by Epic, it seems like a no brainer.

Are game launchers becoming a race to the bottom?

No. Ubisoft already tried and even gave out a bunch of games for free. Didn’t work.

What is Ubisoft's carrot? They don't command a game engine ecosystem. What can they offer that others do not?

Ubisoft's carrot is wasting hours of your time fighting a crippled UPlay launcher that doesn't even work, so that you can access a mediocre Ubisoft exclusive.

It's a hard pass for me.

> Didn’t work.

When you say didn't work, does that mean they've given up? Is it safe to buy ubisoft games without the uPlay cripple ware required?

And they throw in the Unreal Engine royalty with the 12% cut.

In response to this new competition, Valve reduced prices on Steam on Monday. Valve just reduced their cut from 30% to 25%, and down to 20% for the high-revenue titles.[2] Competition is a good thing.

[1] https://www.pcgamesinsider.biz/news/68183/valve-makes-change...

Well this makes me feel awkward as a Unity dev.

I saw that they'll allow unity based games on their new store but I wonder if that's just for the short term. Kind of makes me wonder if I should've chosen Unreal.

I see absolutely no reason to believe the Epic Store is ever going to be for just Unreal games.

No I’m sure they wouldn’t do that, at least as long as Tim is in charge.

Choose the engine that works for you. They just announced their store. There is a very long way to go before it becomes the next steam.

Tons of unity devs switched over to Unreal back in the day. Most came back. Unity is still, by very far, the dominate engine.

Considering Tim Sweeney's pretty strong stance against walling in marketplaces too hard, I think it's.. relatively safe at least.

They have indicated that the epic store will have third party exclusives, so I wouldn't be too sure about that.

At least now Valve can play their Half Life 3 card if this new store gains some "steam", I'm sure Gabe N. has been dying to have a reason to.

I'm all for competition, Epic Games rocks!

If they pair this with a 10% discount on games to the consumer they can attract both devs and consumers.

Why do they need to attract consumers? Isn't Fortnite already the most popular game in the world?

From what I can find, latest report of Steam MAU is 90 million people, and latest report of Fortnite MAU is 75 million.

They already have the consumers.

But Fortnite is free to play crap, so like 0.1% of those 75 million actually paid something?

Valve got the initial userbase for Steam via, among other things, giving away "free to play crap" as well as their award-winning Portal. It was several years before my Steam account had a single purchase on it, Valve correctly guessed that users who never buy anything at all help generate those enormous userbase numbers and don't cost that much to service so it's fine.

Hmm, wasn't it Half Life 2 (paid for) and only then their award-winning Portal (also paid for)? There were no or very few free to play abominations back then.

Portal was free on Steam. That was the incentive. Heard about this cool game but not sure you can justify full price for what sounds like a weird tech demo? Install Steam and it's free (for a limited time). Most people I know who play some games but not many installed Steam precisely to try Portal for free. Valve has doubtless made back the investment many times over, even if you ignore the fact that Portal was already wildly successful and so didn't need to earn Valve one single extra penny.

Fortnite is making hundreds of millions of dollars a month{1}. IDK what "free to play crap" is, but if it can pull in over a billion a year I think most companies would be happy to have it on their ledger.

1- https://www.recode.net/2018/6/26/17502072/fortnite-revenue-g...

It's simple. 99.9% of the users play without paying a dime, and the game has to cater to the "whales" that spend thousands.

That's fine when you peddle digital hats, but if they want to open a store, they want paying customers in it don't they? Most actual games they'd want to sell need to be paid for upfront... and I don't see the average Fortnite (or any other free to play abomination) player doing that.

Yeah, you'd think, but this survey of 1,000 players said 68.8% had spent money on in-game purchases.

Maybe they somehow managed to target just the 0.1% of players who spend money (according to you), but it seems highly unlikely that the numbers are that low.

https://lendedu.com/blog/finances-of-fortnite/

That's interesting. Personally, I'll still think I'm too poor to afford free games though.

My kids have put more of their money into Fortnite stuff in 1 year than they have paid for in total for any other AAA title game. So have all of their friends.

It isn't whales, its the 10-18 yo disposable money. They get into the stage where physical toys don't hold interest, their birthday and allowance money piles up and social/peer pressure comes into play.

Lower posts have shown that your math is off on this 99.9% thing you made up, so we're not going to address that.

We're talking about user base and network effect. Fortnite is your gateway to getting people to install Epic Game Store. You've already shown people will pay real human money to buy digital hats, so use those digital hats to get them to install EGS. (you just give a free skin every month if you have an EGS account. easy peasy). Now you've got a few million installs of your platform. Pretty good starting place to start selling the other games if you ask me.

Sounds like you just have a lot of problems with FTP and Pay to Win type games based on how you talk about them. That's fine, you don't need to play them, but the rest of the gaming community seems to be using them pretty regularly. Don't assume everyone else is like you.

Once upon a time, valve used to develop games. Then it became big and realised where the money is, and stopped developing games. Epic is currently developing games. Will they get big and stop? If they did, they still have Unreal. Steam has nothing other than the store.

Valve has several extremely profitable games, such as DotA2.

Good point. Insert "just a " next to games developer :)

Epic has been relying a lot on their engine sales to sustain game dev.

This is sort of an interesting case study. Markets can be inelastic and see this sort of unspoken price collaboration... until a major player jumps in like this and undercuts all them. I think we’ll start seeing a lot more competition on revenue share thanks to this.

This is great news and I hope it shows up in the arguments for the iOS App Store that Apple's 30% harms consumers because no one is allowed to compete with a store that takes less of a cut. Valve (30%) vs Epic (12%) seems extremely relevant to that case.

Great news, I'm looking forward what Discord is pulling off. As far as I heard, they also want to push into the game distributing market?

Epic Games seem to me really as one of the very very few game companies who, beside of marketing, also act very generous.

Discord are already distributing, with a 30% commission.

By all available accounts their launch has been unremarkable, no Indies getting rich.

Their service is now obsolete with this Epic announcement. They are best just offering affiliate banner advertising to the Epic Store and getting the 5% from that.

No matter how much I like Steam, breaking their monoculture would be objectively good.

I generally agree with this, although I worry about too many stores having exclusives. Steam doesn't have many exclusives, but Blizzard games are only on their launcher; new EA games are only on Origin; Bethesda looks to be exploring this route by having Fallout 76 only on their launcher.

I fear having to keep a separate launcher for every major publisher in the future.

I don't know if that's really a problem. When a AAA title that I want to play comes out, I will buy it regardless of what launcher it comes through. I'll download the installer straight from their site if that's what they want to do.

I think having something like Steam is great primarily for discovery and ratings.

I'd be game with the multiple storefronts if the library aspect were decoupled. If I bought Sea of Thieves in Microsoft Store and I bought Destiny 2 in Battle.NET, having a launcher that was able to download and install both of them with little configuration beyond linking to the MS Store/Battle.net accounts (not quite Movies Anywhere in that your library moves between services, but the launcher has discoverability and download capability for all of them), I'd be 100% fine with all of this. Instead, I find it to be a chore sometimes where if I have an urge to play a Uplay game and my password needs to be re-entered and I either need to locate it via 1password or if that isn't available, reset password and all that jazz.

Discord Library is an attempt to launch all games from a single application. You can also configure steam to be able to launch non-steam exes.

Not sure on Discord Library, but with Steam that is configuration and I can't uninstall the game and then install it again later from within Steam.

What would make me be a fan of being agnostic would take something similar to Movies Anywhere, where if I buy a movie on Vudu and it automatically shows up in my Movies Anywhere "library" or more tangibly, in my iTunes, Microsoft Movies & TV, and Play Movies libraries.

Prior to Disney Movies Anywhere, I would forego the deals on Vudu due to being yet another library to manage. After DMA, I started to buy Disney/Marvel/Pixar movies where the best deal was at. After Movies Anywhere, that expanded to titles that were part of Movies Anywhere.

Many of these have existed; I remember using The All-Seeing Eye and XFire. But the integration with stores is what makes these new launchers like Steam and UPlay valuable to game publishers.

Well, from a consumer's prospective, there's no compelling reason to spread out one's purchases (if the option exists to get them all in one place.) Having to download a separate launcher for each game isn't necessarily a deal breaker, but it's certainly not convenient either.

Imagine having to manage all your phone's apps through different stores, launchers, and website downloads. Sure, you can. But it's not as seamless as having all your apps in one place.

If a game is 15% cheaper or has a larger discount in a different store then why not buy from that one, and if I have to choose I will buy from GOG because of DRM free, if that is not possible and prices would be equal on store A and B I would buy from the store that gets more money to the developers because I want them to get enough money to continue the games.

Each launcher comes with a fixed cost of some sort - one more process checking for and downloading updates, sending analytics to yet another company, and potentially adding an attack vector. I think it's sensible to be reluctant to install software which shouldn't be necessary.

Maybe it's not a problem for you but it certainly is for others. Personally, I don't want to have to install a client (DRM) just to be able to download a game. Thus, I stick with stores like GOG instead and don't play anything that is limited to Steam and the like.

I understand your situation. I think there's no avoiding the fact that you'll be missing on big titles due to it. But the great thing is that new games are always around the corner and sooner or later some will fall into your net (GoG, etc.) Also, big titles sometimes end up on GoG-like fronts after aging.

It's arguable that you're actually missing something with most "big" titles. I randomly look at what EA and Ubisoft put out every few years... and it doesn't look like I'm missing anything by ignoring Origin and UPlay.

There's already quite a few contenders, like GOG, Origin

GOG offers only DRM free games, so you remain with 2 big ones Steam and Origin, more competition will be better for all, more money to the actual developers.

I agree, I would also like developers to directly sell the games.

As much as I love Valve I really want them to wake up. Epic Games capturing a huge portion of their market share would seriously help that.

Maybe I'll see Half Life 3 in my lifetime after all.

They are trying to counter it with reducing %cut down already, so they are not completely oblivious to the problem.

I think Valve are keeping Half Life 3 for a rainy day (Given that, if they played their cards right, they could make significant $$$ just by pushing out a crappy game 'cos of the name)

What is the proportion of people with Fortnite who are likely to use this - like steam e.g. Consistently pay money for games- relative to Valve's playerbase when steam arrived?

Good! - The steam hasn't changed for the last 10 years. Maybe epic will actually value their user's experience.

Awesome idea EPIC. Steam had some bullshit for wayyyy too long!

Are they cross platform, or Windows only?

Unreal Engine & Epic Launcher, and most (all?) epic games are at least macOS + Windows. I hope & assume their store will be as well

I think it's safe to believe it when you see it, not assume.

In this age of free to play games, why not? The amazon way.

One major upside for publishers in steam is DRM which epic won't offer.

At this point, it is just features... Unless Epic has something against DRM?

Sucks that games on Epic don't (yet?) have cloud save/item store/gifting/whatever but Epic can copy if they want to.

Why? Steam DRM gets cracked all the time.

Right. Back in the day when CS:Source was still one of the main games played on steam, whenever they released a new single player game, the limiting factor for how long until it was on the pirate forums was how long it took to write up the forum post. The Steam DRM itself was generally cracked at all times.

I've not kept track, but I'd not be shocked if this was pretty much still the case. It would certainly explain why so many games still have another layer of DRM when sold on steam.

I was completely unaware. Thank you.

The cracks are often where the malware is injected, and what is detected by Windows/AntiVirus.

Without DRM your product can just be repackaged and resold, like what happened to the GoG version of Frostpunk being sold on Amazon.

I would have liked some basic version of DRM as well. This will drive a lot of developers to Denuvo, which might be overkill.

I think eventually Steam will be replaced by some system built on open distributed systems such as torrents/webtorrents and cryptocurrency. At least that would make sense.. theoretically the cut that the distribution platform takes could be zero. So developers have a lot to gain from such a system.

> theoretically the cut that the distribution platform takes could be zero.

Then there is no reason for a distributed system to remain cohesive. Each node in the system takes some responsibilities for hosting, bandwidth, etc. Without giving the distributors a cut, no one will want to distribute. Likewise, not everyone who buys your game on the network will want to use there space and bandwidth for distribution.

For a distributed system to actually be functional, all participants need incentives.

You're basically arguing that the concept of torrents isn't workable. It's been proven.

To me the tricky part is licensing but I think technologies like Ethereum could handle that.

Torrents work but the incentive there is the opportunity cost(? not an economics student...) of getting the software/porn/etc for free.

Also, why ETH as opposed to regular money?

Licensing is the easy part.

The hard part is discovery (there is always money for someone who can do a marginally better job matching games to gamers), marketing, financial infrastructure (dealing with returns, credit card fraud, beta keys, review keys, DLC, crowdfunding campaigns, microtransactions), social matchmaking, mod management, etc.

Those are mostly not distributed problems. They are services problems. Steam is all of those things. The core licensing component is only the most obvious part.

Torrents only cover distribution. Ethereum only covers cash exchange.

> You're basically arguing that the concept of torrents isn't workable. It's been proven.

Everyone has incentives with torrents. You can interact with the content you distribute.

But if I'm torrenting a game - and haven't purchased it - and I'm unable to play the thing, I have no incentive to keep it on my computer and distribute it to others. It is literally a waste of my energy and bandwidth.

/edit - punctuation!

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