Epic CEO would stop exclusivity deals "if Steam committed to a 88% Revenue Share"

that games can use any online systems that they choose for free, such as friends lists and other platform features and the games players purchase are available everywhere

Wouldn't this just mean that the Epic store wouldn't need to implement things people like on the steam store thus reducing their overheads where valve would have that overhead cost, this part screams of let us run a cut down store and sell games that people will then activate on steam for the better features
 
Letting people choose whatever online systems they want is about cross-platform play(An area Epic have been industry leaders on). At the moment Steams friends lists & multiplayer systems present a hurdle when it comes to integrating multiple systems together, which is why titles like Rocket League that want to include Steam have to create a completely separate system to everything as a gateway for all the platforms to interact with. You can host a game on Steam without using Valve's API's and systems, but it'll lose out on a lot of exposure on their store.
 
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How obvious does it have to be that he's lying? Is anyone really buying this excuse? Exclusivity deals that force gamers to use his platform exist because Steam doesn't give a big enough cut to developers and publishers. It's a completely mental excuse. And even if it were true, it would basically mean that he cares more about devs and publishers than about consumers. But we already knew that part from way before.
 
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He's saying this because he knows Steam cannot reduce their cut without better curation because their business model relies on taking a big cut from loads of small titles. Epic can take a small cut because they know every game on the platform will sell well. In order for Steam to replicate that model they'd have to spend more money on curating & moderating their platform, which would negate the benefits.

This is, for all intents and purposes, him shouting "checkmate". They've already shown they can grow to the same customer size as other gaming platforms. He's already proven exclusives on their store can have equal or increased sales as other platforms. Those two points are no longer in contention, they are now fact. All he has to do now is prove to developers they have a concept that is stable and not just a flash in the pan.

What is good for developers is undeniably good for consumers. The problem with the gaming industry at the moment is that the money isn't going to the talent, it's going to the established heads who already had the money.

At the moment Valve is like a Victorian landlord, they can earn money just by existing because people rely on them, they have no motivation to maintain or invest in their "land" because it is a necessity that people use them to exist. Without competition, Valve would have little motivation for investments, they'd merely have to exist to earn 30% of revenue in the PC gaming industry.

Epic has certainly bullied their way into the "store industry" to disrupt this status quo, but the ends justify the means, in my opinion.

Imagine what the CPU & GPU industries would be like if AMD didn't exist, and it were only Intel & Nvidia respectively. No one would complain about the prices because no one would have a point of comparison. People would idolise these two companies because they're automatically the best at doing what they do regardless of how they do it. That's basically what the PC gaming industry has been.
 
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And paying for exclusives would be the only way for them to continue to exist. So they'd do more of that.

Not necessarily. They own UE4, the most popular game engine ever, they could still incentivize people. They could make it so if you do use it, you must publish it on the Epic store but still let studios have the freedom to choose where else they can publish their games.
 
And paying for exclusives would be the only way for them to continue to exist. So they'd do more of that.


That's not what they do. They take a much smaller percentage for commission which adds up to a couple extra million for the developer. Epic doesn't pay developers a big chunk of money flat out... They simply outbid Steam by offering a commission a third of Steam's.
 
That's not what they do. They take a much smaller percentage for commission which adds up to a couple extra million for the developer. Epic doesn't pay developers a big chunk of money flat out... They simply outbid Steam by offering a commission a third of Steam's.

That's not entirely true Phoenix point was given a cash advance on sales which is different to steam where a developer may have to wait 2-3 months before seeing money from sales, so though it isn't free money unless your game doesn't sell it's a high incentive to go exclusive especially for a small developer who still has wages to pay for those first initial months
 
That's not entirely true Phoenix point was given a cash advance on sales which is different to steam where a developer may have to wait 2-3 months before seeing money from sales, so though it isn't free money unless your game doesn't sell it's a high incentive to go exclusive especially for a small developer who still has wages to pay for those first initial months

I haven't read that anywhere. Not saying it's not true, just first I've heard of it.

Still, it's still based in their smaller commission and an advance on sales is different than a straight up payout in addition to the commission. That would be like what Intel did years ago, paying Dell and HP a big chunk of cash to not offer AMD chips in their builds.

A retailer telling developers "sell your game with me and my commission will be 1/3 of what the other retailer will take which could mean millions in extra revenue but you have to be exclusive to us" isn't illegal, unethical or shady. It's actually not even uncommon. There are several products you can only buy at a specific retail store.

I used to be big into car audio and ALL the manufacturers had exclusivity deals with retailers.... In fact you had to pay THEM in order to sell their products with some brands.

Point is, this isn't anything new. It's just something new to pc gaming because we've only ever had Steam. And gamers being the angry bunch we are, jump on anything new to complain about. After years of hating on Steam for not having any competition and taking customers for granted, we're now hating on Epic for offering competition to Steam!
 
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