Anyone got an indie game on Epic Game Store yet?

It says on their website that they will open up the store to "all developers" at some point like Steam. But still after 2 years I don't see how indie developers can submit a game to the store. Has anyone done this? I would like to get a piece of that 88% revenue share.

 

There's a form at the end of this page: https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/about

AFAIK they're only letting big name indie games on it so far.

 

Epic says lots of things. From what I can see, Epic wants to remain a curated store. Much like Steam was prior to adding the Greenlight system. You submit for inclusion, and they decide if they want you in, where any standards really come down to what their opinion of your game is. I don't expect that to change.

Opening up to all developers doesn't necessarily mean they will allow every game in. All that might mean is all developers can submit games for judgement.

 

Actually, they're letting any kind of indie games. I see tons of indie games I don't know and I would never care about
It's just not the automated App Store.

 

Really? I’ve only seen stuff that at worst are big name adjacent. Usually I know of the title, or the developer or the publisher, but maybe I haven’t browsed the store enough.

 

It's because it's not true unless you're paying the least amount of attention possible to the indie game space. Pretty much everything on EGS is an award winner of some sort and/or being published by a boutique publisher like Devolver Digital.

 

It would be better for us with attention to detail and quality if Steam didnt let in so much crap

 

Yeah that’s my impression as well.

 

I can promise you that, as somebody who has dealt with the pre-Greenlight process, the only reason it would be better for you is because you'd just have a desk job instead.

 

You really don't know what the process was like, huh? Lemme break it down for you.

1. You send an email to your official Valve contact
2. You don't have an official Valve contact? Send an email off to the Steamworks email
3. Okay, you don't have an official Valve contact because you haven't released a game on Steam, so you're put in a queue. You will be in this queue for 3-6 months
4. Do not send more than one email before you have an official Valve contact within 6 months
5. Good, you have an in! Provided 6 months didn't pass, at which point you might as well apply again because your application was either missed or part of a backlog purge
6. Now that you have a contact, you're ready to go through the initial approval process. This puts you on the track that will let you send them a game
7. You've gotten approved. This swift and speedy process tends to take 2-4 weeks
8. Spend about 1-7 days negotiating your release price
   
9. Send your first build
10. Wait about 1-2 weeks
11. Your build was rejected because of a minor Steamworks API issue, you fix it and submit again
12. Wait about 1-2 weeks
13. Hooray! You've been approved to release on Steam. The store management sucks but it's workable. Getting the page complete takes a few days
14. Wait for the date that you designated as your earliest release date with Valve, at which point your game will release unless you've said "I need to push this back"
15. I bet you thought we were done. Nope! It's patch time. You submit an update to Valve
16. Wait about 1-2 weeks unless you're able to convince them this is an emergency update, which is rare
17. Your game has updated

Do you have a game on Steam already? Good, then you have a working relationship already!

You get to skip all the way to start at step 8.

 

And the best part was this was the only option for years that didn't involve uploading a limited copy of your game to a server somewhere, hoping someone discovered it, downloaded it, played it, and decided they weren't happy with just the limited copy and sent you a check for the full version.

 

Shareware! Shareware sucked as a business model, but there were some indie gems that sadly I probably couldnt find anymore given they likely had like 20 purchases max and never uploaded it to the internet

 

If you can remember some of the details I might be able to find them.

 

Doom 1 shareware. Those were the days. Then there was the shovelware like

 

If you think Home Alone was shovelware then you haven't played real shovelware.

Spoiler

 

Both are just different decade

edit: I played the S*** out of home alone btw

 

Ok so, most of the ones I used to play a lot I have been able to find, but there are 2 that elude me. One I care about finding as I actually want to play, one i just want to see for nostalgic reasons.

So the one I care about:

It was like a sidescroller with retro simple pixel graphics, and you were a robot that looked like some sort of R2-D2 or Dalek type thing. It had like doors you would go through to get to other bits, and there was areas with like aliens buried under the ground and other stuff. It was really interesting little open world thing, and I cant remember the name as it came on a big CD compilation of like 1000 shareware games (I miss those) but I have never been able to find it

The second that I care less about was like a pokemon rip off where you were a wizard basically, was clearly made by 1 person but was pretty fun all things considered (but a bad game)

Neither of the above are "good" games so they probably might not have registered with people, but yeah if anyone knows the robot one or has suggestions what it could be I am all ears!

 

What Terminator 2 J.D. shovelware ?
I had to check if it is the same Terminator 2 with you using the bike to run from the truck..
The only problem with this game is it's length.

 

Ocean pumped out alot of games like these though But the VGA gfx and sounblaster sound was cool back in the day

edit: btw. did you play the The Terminator? It was probably one of the first open world games. It also had some very good looking VGA stills from the movie. And sound blaster support.. Thogh the ingame vector gfx wasnt that nice

 

Was thinking that there couldn't be that many games that fit that description... and there aren't but it's still more than I'd have thought there would be. I came across the following list on Mobygames and poked around it for a bit but quickly realized that I would be making more than just a few suggestions so it'd be better to give you the list.

https://www.mobygames.com/game-group/protagonist-robot/offset,350/so,1d/

 

No, but I laughed when I saw the screenshots

 

Holy hell, guess I found what I will be doing for a few weeks I genuinely am going to go through each and every one from the time period and see if its there Will get back to you if I do find it!

 

Back in 1991 it was high tech

 

And despite how many times I died because I got stuck in a geometry scene or because of mandatory fall damage from earlier, they're still on the less janky side of the Bethesda game spectrum.

 

Aren't you thinking of Terminator future shock now? Also a brilliant early Bethesda game from a time when they were the good guys

 

Oof, the Future Shock was an awful game (but great GFX at the time), it had too long drawing distance and too short AI activation distance. It was completely beatable just shooting giant pixels on the screen. The sequel (SkyNet - 1996) was a bit better, but the same mixed sprite-vector gfx with the same problems.

edit: also they were one of the firsts who allowed keyboard + mouse with real mouse-look, which was nice.

 

Come on, the game was a bad ass. Sure it had bugs. But all in all it was great. And it even beat quake 1 with a year for first truly 3d game.

But I was talking about the 1991 The Terminator game which was a open world game were you can choose to play as Kyle Reese or the Terminator

 

How are we defining truly 3d game here? Enemies and other objects in the world aren't sprites?

 

Actually I loved that one. Probably the best terminator game I played. It felt quite grim at the time.

Descent was released in 1995. Full 3d.
Ultimate Underworld was made in 1992...
Eelite is 1984 with Frontier being 1993, then we have games like DRILLER (1987) and Hard Driving (1989), and japanese released "Winning Run" in 1988 (same style as virtua racing (1992)).

 

Descent was released same year as Future shock.
Ultima underworld was not true 3D it was like with doom and wolfenstein. Fake 3D. Anyway. I should have said among the first.

 

I guess if world was real 3D and enemies was sprites it could have counted, but I do not know of a game that had real 3d world and sprite enemies? In fact future shock is the closest one in that regard since items was sprites like ammo etc. Enemies was geo. World was geo.

Doom used a binary tree (BSP) and wolftenstein raycasting to fake 3D

 

Wrong. Quoted below is from one of the developers of both Ultima Underworld and Ultima Underworld 2 stating that it is not a raycaster engine like Doom and Wolfenstein.

http://www.peroxide.dk/underworld.shtml

 

interesting since I cant remember they used the potential of real geo 3D, but i found some screens actually, like this bed

 

My son was talking about the only game he learned something by playing back in the late 80's early 90's, was an actual fun game unlike Math Blaster and involved choosing a fish species, customizing it to variant subspecies and then go out and eat what you are supposed to and dodge predators. Anybody know the name of this game? It gave him a lifelong interest in marine biology.

 

Sounds like it might be Odell Lake, but I haven't touched that in forever, so I may be misremembering.

 

Sounds a bit like Odell Down Under which is a sequel to the game mentioned by @Murgilod. Original game only gave you a few fish choices but the sequel allowed you to create your own fish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odell_Down_Under

 

I asked and he said it was newer than that. He had not seen Odell Lake before and thought it was cool.

 

He just replied that was the one. Thx.

 

Publishing a game on Epic Games Store: Three (not so) simple steps

Bit of an ad, but it does mention a couple things that seem unfortunate:

- Your game should be like already existing games on the platform
- Your game should be made with Unreal

 

There's also this:



This is literally just Steam's awful old system 2.0.

 

I think it is worse, because it is marketed as 'curation'.