Epic Games Store

Or, if we're being realistic, it's that they didn't want to hire anyone to do the job. It isn't like it would be difficult to find staff for the position either. Getting free games with the expectation that they provide a review and fill out a survey for the game is practically a dream job for someone fresh out of high school or a college student.

 

Over 7,500 games released on Steam last year. If you look at a release numbers graph it's going up nearly exponentially year-on-year from around 2012. If every game got a full hour of attention then they would need 4 full time staff dedicated to that alone. I suspect that in a properly curated system with developer support most games would need far more than an hour.

And that number is only for released games. It doesn't account for games applying for the platform pre-release (many of which wouldn't ultimately make it, but would still require some amount of curation time).

@Ryiah is right that they could hire people to handle this, but according to that graph they'd have to keep hiring people to handle an increasing flood of games of which most will make little or no money. Apple chose to do that because they're defending a quality bar, and it's worked for them. Valve have a different philosophy so they've taken a different approach. Edit: I don't necessarily like the approach (I've written about that elsewhere), but I do respect it.

They're a business, not a charity. When you're looking to do business with someone it needs to be mutually beneficial. If you're going to ask for something then you should indeed have a very clear idea about why they should help you.

 

Interesting move, and I hope it has a better strategy behind it than "we're swimming in money from Fortnite, let's do something unexpected". I doubt it'll end up being very well curated, but as long as the engine keeps being mildly beastly to handle, the games should have a way of curating themselves. Anyway, I like it.

 

lol do you need an hour to analyse this game? https://store.steampowered.com/app/684050/Achievement_Idler_Black/
how about this this one? https://store.steampowered.com/app/745510/Fidget_Spinner_In_Space/

This is a problem of their own making, they could easily fix it but they refuse to do so.

Who said they need to behave like a charity? I said they were apathetic to small devs. I could go on about how valve need to wake up on multiple fronts, but its getting off topic now. Good luck to Epic.

 

If "why should we help you?" is seen as an apathetic question then that implies an expectation that they do things when it's not mutually beneficial.

 

This is worse than most idle clicker.

 

Yeah and I would disagree that they couldn't find anyone to do the job, what everyone does at Valve is anyone's guess, barely making games or anything decent seems like the main thing. Automating things to algorithms seems like another thing.

It's vbulletin last i checked, they could do far worse, like some lithium or some javascrap nodebb looking thing.

 

Yet I wish I had thought of it.

 

If you go tot he Epic Launcher and see the store, you only going to see the 3 main games from Epic (Fortnite, UT, and Shadow Complex) Alongside a dozen mods. I'm suspecting that they are issuing many games from different companies for this upcoming weeks.

 

This is a pretty smart move in my eyes. Epic can cherry pick "the good games" as part of their curated selection which make millions of dollars, get lots of players of those popular titles to use their store, plus the catchy indie titles of the week, and leave the expensive volumes of trash that generate low profit per title on steam. I don't think scale is their objective, they can pull an Apple and cater to the elite(at least initially) to get off the ground.

 

Pirating is a bad thing. Making lemonade out of lemons is one thing but framing it like pirates are doing you a favor by stealing your game is another. Unless there is some research that shows pirates are better at spreading word of mouth than giving out demos of your game or a week trial.

 

4 full time staff? A billion dollar company could never afford such extravagance!
Actually now you have to pay them $80 and they do take the time to play through your games properly and make sure they're all working. For my last game on Steam I was surprised how thorough they were. And it was actually quite helpful.
I think it's partly about that tech companies are run by geeks who just don't put a value on human relations. They want to solve everything with technology and the fewer actual human beings in the pipeline the better. Replace as much as possible by robots because robots are predictable.

 

I'm not arguing whether or not they can afford it. I'm arguing that I can see why they'd try to find solutions which don't require that.

Neat. If that's a consistent thing then it kills my argument that time is an issue. It's also a pretty good indicator that they do care, at least to some degree, which was the underlying point of contention.

This is quite possible, it wouldn't surprise me. If you've got a hammer things often look like nails, and all that.

Still, I see no reason not to believe their stated desire of simply "giv[ing] every game developer a chance to get their game in front of players" and letting the market determine success from there.

 

It seems very appealing for developers (highly curated, good revenue share) and I like that.

I’m not 100% sure what’s their plan on being appealing for consumers. I could see people going to see what games it has (if it’s properly curated) and then buying them on Steam (solving Steam’s mess of algorithmic based filtering). They do mention exclusives, but that didn’t work that great for Origin (I mean it did, but it was not enough).

But I hope it catches on, Steam needs some competition.

 

I can see why too. But that doesn't mean that it's a good idea. Maximizing profits at the expense of the product you're offering is a short-term solution. It runs a very real risk of damaging your reputation, and your brand. That's what we're seeing now. Once upon a time Valve was the savior of the PC gaming space. Steam took what many considered a dying market and revitalized it through their on-line distribution. But over time they have become victims of their own success, and began encountering problems that they have still failed to solve.

Over time, Valve has continued to attempt to automate as much of their system as they can, offloading work and effort at every turn to the community, instead of opting to expand their own workload. From a profitability perspective, this is a smart move. But the problems that this approach has caused are coming back to bite them in the ass. And their over-dependence on automation and community-driven efforts has left them scrambling in the face of fresh competition. The system they made was great for raking in cash while minimizing their personal risk and accountability. But it is also vulnerable to anyone prepared to address the issues that Valve has been ignoring or failing to properly solve.

I'm not saying that Epic is necessarily going to solve discoverability, or community management, or curation. But thanks to Valve's bungling of some of these issues the opportunity exists for a competitor to eat a healthy portion of Valve's proverbial lunch. Automation and burdening the fan community with your problems is great for the bottom line. But too much focus on short-term solutions leaves you open to long-term problems. And if you can't solve the real issues, sooner or later someone else will try.

 

It's completely dependent on the game. If I made a game that I wasn't able to market myself, choose to take the marketing route of least effort (like Jeff Vogel), or my own marketing was having little to no effects, I might be willing to view it as a favor to me if the game suddenly gained a few sales after it happened. That's a whole lot of ifs though.

Good luck getting anyone to pay for that research.

 

Got interesting thought regarding pirating vs advertising game.

We now advertising can be quite expensive. What worse, people get paid, just to watch adverts, even they don't care what they watch. So that is wasted campaign money on them. For which, some adds will hit right target, with small chance of conversion.

Now if releasing pirated / demo edition, I know, I am targeting high volume, of audience. From which, there will be potentially % who will buy, and is likely generate word of mouth well. But good option for targeting low income economical communities.

My thought is, advertising may be an option, if someone want to spread awareness in short period of time.
While the second may work, maybe even better for long term campaign, with low, to none cost effort.

 

People have already tried this and saw extremely limited returns because people who pirate games do not buy games.

 

Yeah, I heard this multiple times but it was never supported with any hard data other than this is the opinion of the speaker. Do you have any hard data?

 

Indeed, without data, is just word throwing in a wind. Obviously anti pirating campaigns will be promoting as such. They will not show otherwise, even if is true.

In fact I know quite few people, who bought once pirated game many years later, or even after playing demo, providing game is really worth. Or offer multiplier. Hence, such citation fall apart against a wall, while is very short sited. + mentioned multiple times, "word of mouth".

 

I grew up in Hungary at the end of the socialist era. Piracy was the way of getting games. We held copy-parties even, when everyone brought some drinks, some snacks and all the disk and cassettes we had. Oh and the hand-written list of games with metadata (genre, theme, where is it on the cassette or disks).
People was getting through each other's lists and copied the games left and right. So yeah, I know piracy first hand.
(It's kinda' the same as the guys over the CD Projekt Red told what was happening in Poland.)

When it has been changed and actual news came to the country mostly unfiltered and the copyright laws have changed as well I started to buy games from my hard earned money.

 

https://www.greenheartgames.com/201...lator-and-then-go-bankrupt-because-of-piracy/

https://kotaku.com/what-happened-after-three-developers-pirated-their-own-1819695100

edit: there's more, but you try searching for "piracy" on Gamasutra.

 

If only they'd purchased the game back when the developers were still in business...

 

Or at full price. Games drop dramatically in selling price as the years go on. So pirating something early and then buying it when the price has dropped to 5% doesn't help the developers significantly.

 

Interesting reading.
However, regarding first article,



It is not guranteed, that any of that 93% would buy his game. Is uknown also, if any of his sells, were generated because of spread word. Also, he failed in his experiment, by releasing exact same copy, without any constrains. Whats more, dev is not showing, where there players comes from. If lets say majority would be from low economical regions (most likely), they wouldn't probably even think about buying. What guy should have done, release post updates, which would be only compatible with genuine version. That what big companies do.

Second article mention about both desktops and mobile market. I think mobile market is screwed anyway by itself.
But generally articles seams be positive on this aspect.

Generally I wouldn't say pirating is steeling. Not saying weather is good either. But in most cases, is just not generated profit. Steeling is happening mainly on mobile market, where game products are copied widely, and released under different name. That is steeling. This wasn't the case, in older days, with pirated PC games.

I remember guy was coming to school with big bag of CD back days and selling copies cheaply. None of us back then even would though playing certain titles. And that was before internet era. Years later I remember shelf of few my friends, who could afford, genuine later editions.

But for whom are from western / developed countries, need to think, than many other countries salary can be easily 5 times lower. Mean any game is technically 5 or even more times expensive. Not to mention the hardware itself.

Imagine you decide to pay new AAA game at 60$, oh hay other guy need spend equivalent of 300$. Nice 1/3 of monthly salary for a just game. Of course, can wait for sales etc. But that besides the point.

So such groups of people, will be in first line for pirating.

CD Project Red knew and understood well such situations. They new how to tackle it and what to expect. Developed countries devs taking lot of things for granted as well, in terms of expectations.

We simply need be realistic. And some of us pointed out on this forum somewhere already, we as devs, should be ready for a worse, but aim for the best.


Ah one more thing:
If only piracy would be by itself only the issue, of bad sales, then no one would ever make money on games. So the problem may be completely somewhere else.

 

I'm just saying that piracy exists, and it should be a non factor in your thought process because there's no point in courting a crowd that has no demonstrable interest in buying a game.

 

You probably have to use their engine to develop your games if you want to publish them on their store.

 

You don't.

 

Yeah, they even have a chart explicitly saying so:

 

It did not generate profit because it was stolen, or am I missing something?

 

Did you read the article?

 

Also no upfront fee for submission, at least that I’m aware of. Epic have been setting this up for a long time and in my book they are solid tacticians when they make a move. Of course is going to succeed, what’s not to like about it. Go Epic.

 

What I am interested is, what made Epic to choose 12%? Why not 10, or 15, or even 13%?
Any thoughts?

 

I guess they wanted to make the same as their Unreal Market which gets 12% as well.

 

An interesting thing I read was this:

This immediately got my hopes up, because Steam's sale pricing is increasingly aggressive while showing less than stellar returns for developers. This has actually been a long standing issue I've had with the platform, quickly followed by this...

Steam forums are, in as diplomatic words as possible, an unending nightmare hellscape from which there is no escape. If you spend any amount of time on a random game's forums, you'll quickly see how quickly they descend into madness, especially compared to Reddit or Discord. They are excessively hard to moderate, and often any moderation at all results in cries of censorship. I saw this happen when somebody posted outright piracy links for the game the forum was for specifically. The situation isn't great.

Also a ticketing system would be a godsend, as right now a lot of people use the review section as their primary method of bug reporting, which isn't great to say the least.

https://kotaku.com/the-guy-behind-steam-spy-has-been-working-on-epics-stor-1830890162

 

Yea, I read the article but I was responding to this "Generally I wouldn't say pirating is steeling. Not saying weather is good either. But in most cases, is just not generated profit."

 

One of the biggest advantages Epic has going for it is that they are coming to the party later. That might actually sound like a disadvantage, and it can be in some ways. Coming in fresh means that they won't have the same level of built-in user-base, and that is problematic. But the popularity and ubiquity of Fortnite mitigates that factor somewhat, as existing Fortnite players will be very easy to convert into customers for the new store.

What makes it an advantage is that they aren't going to be burdened by a decade's worth of legacy systems, and they get to benefit from the lessons learned from their competition. Steam has never really gotten a from-the-ground-up revision. They built the original system back in 2002-2003, and have been piling stuff on top of it for more than 10 years. Legacy systems frequently suffer from outdated designs. Often times it helps to refactor them down the line. I don't believe Steam has ever gotten this treatment. This is why they still have issues with a lot of their search options in the Steam store. It's what's lead to some of the discoverability issues that plague them. By starting fresh, with modern standards and a more modern understanding of the market, Epic can build a more efficient back-end. And of course, they have years of watching Steam struggling with problems to inform a lot of the decisions they make now.

 

I think you guys should drop the piracy discussion. Not only is it a tired subject, but it isn't really significant to the discussion at hand. Steam's anti-piracy measures are a joke, and don't actually work. It's Steam's non-piracy-related features that keep people coming back, not copy protection. The chat, community, and multi-player support in Steam games are what really serve as "anti-piracy" measures, not DRM. Systems like GoG do just fine without any DRM, even if they aren't dominating the market.

Epic's new store doesn't need baked-in DRM to succeed. Making a game on-line multi-player focused is the best modern approach to avoid piracy, as on-line server checks allow the developer themselves to qualify paying customers. DRM isn't going to have much, if any, influence over whether or not Epic's on-line store succeeds.

 

So why you putting stick into ants nest and continue the subject, if is not significant, at least to you?

 

The quote is my personal opinion. Is not conclusion of the article, for which you would understand, if you would read it.

But anyway, lets back to the topic.

 

That stuff is awesome.

One of the major things I've learned in my working life is to not give people "wrong ways" of doing things.

If a client has your email address and a link to your ticketing system, they will email you bug reports. They might also send tickets, but you will get some by email, and it's a little spanner in the works every time. And anything that you miss causes some kind of friction, whether it was using an appropriate channel or not.

Multiply that out by many forms of communication and thousands or millions of customers. You'll never get them all doing things the right way, but the more you can shepherd stuff in the right direction the better it is for everyone.

 

I'd be thinking more about their partial owners, Tencent:

They've had their own game platform for ages, and it has more active users than Steam, though many people won't be aware of that because it's primarily focused on China. It looks like they've had plans to start competing globally on games distribution for a while, and may have even given it a crack before now. Epic is a well recognised brand outside of Asia, and Fortnight has bagged them plenty of active users, so it makes loads of sense to capitalise on those things.

 

Is there a registration page for developers?

 

You just register an Epic account whether you're buying or selling, from what I can gather.

 

I haven't bothered with my Epic account since earlier this year, did they ever bother to fix the lsass.exe security issues with there naff login launcher?

 

Interesting... so Epic is sending their client base to Discord.... which has it's own game store. Things are getting interesting! Now Reddit just needs to open a game store and the pincer movement is complete!

Also, I disagree that the social media aspect of Steam is unimportant. The community section where people post screenshots, artworks, memes etc. is very interesting to me as a developer. Especially for indies where people feel like they have a connection with the developer. I think Epic just doesn't get it on this one.

 

I just hope, their front page selling store, will be much better than Steam's. While I don't look at Steam too often, but once a week or so, and still see mostly same games advertised on front page. Feeling like being there for months. Not giving opportunity to other titles.

 

I've just noticed also they've got the dates wrong for the UK market. They've got 12/14 which means "12th of Fortember". What? Epic. You suck. Long live the Queen.

The Store looks really bad. Like the Microsoft store.

Isn't "Early Access" phrase copyright?

Mind you... I might be getting my free game every 2 weeks...

 

I'm sure they've seen that aspect, but figured they could just ignore it completely.. and I guess they can, if they can still games on the platform and with the %cut allow those selling games on the platform to offer a better price then more gamers will come.. All the extras offered on Steam almost become less relevant, and I've never really found any of the community features on Steam that interesting, sure they are nice to have, but essential.. no not really.

A bit like how some developers don't like the game forums, because it allows the community to just post feedback directly where everyone can see it, I see this as an advantage for the consumer. Epic see it as completely worth not bothering with supporting it for there store.. So yeah will be interesting to see how this plays out.... personally I don't care, the competition will be good for Valve to start doing more really.

 

While I personally also don't really bother about general discussions, specially due to plenty of 'salt', but I am really up for review system, similar to Valve has.

I think is important to see, what people like, what don't.
I rarely read positive reviews. I look mainly on negative reviews, to see, how many of them are actually genuine and if they bring constructive critique.

While general forums like reddit, are potentially good alternatives, I think (I may be wrong), private forums are much more censored. Which potentially fakes real value of the product.