didnt steam already release something this past week or two about cutting their margin for games with a minimum of (metric shit ton of buyers)
Yes, only at $10 million and above. Steam is concerned about losing the biggest games. They’re dropping their cut from 30% to 25% (+5% for Unreal engine, if you use it), while Epic’s cut is 12% and you don’t have to pay for Unreal.
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Im sure that epic understand that to enter the market… they have to use something to break into the market… margins seem to be that thing…
but after they get similar in size to the competitors… I bet you they start taking a larger share.
They aren’t likely to overtake steam anytime soon, yea, but they’ll have games right out the gate for sure, even if not as many. There’s a big enough market for markets, I guess.
We are starting to see some bloat with numbers of these online market places, but then again how many different retail stores are there for physical games? There is certainly a difference due to distance and space being a bigger deal, but there are still frequently multiple stores selling games within the same mall.
Eventually, it’ll probably trim down, and most likely Steam will stay the top dog for the foreseeable future when things trim down. We’re seeing the same thing happen right now with subscription video streaming services too, with everyone wanting to get away from Netflix and make their own service. Likely it’ll eventually die down to just a handful again, but who will be in that handful isn’t certain.
The more storefronts the better. Competition is good. I want them to have razor-thin profit margins, because that means developers make more money from their games, and that leads to more games for me to play.
It’s not like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, splintering into dozens of various services for content creators like CBS, Disney, etc. That sucks balls, because it hinders both content discovery and navigation. You need to remember what service your show is on, because you constantly consume and switch between shows. Games are different, you won’t play 15 different games in a week and all the services create shortcuts on your desktop anyway.
Now think about Unity. It’s certainly improved over the years, but compared to Unreal? C’mon. Imagine all those indie, kickstarted, and even mid-tier games that run on Unity had the opportunity to use Unreal instead.
I can actually see Epic doing pretty well if they make it very easy for people to upload UE games for free as that alone could increase users a lot.
EDIT : I’m talking about free games from hobbyists here.
All they really need to do is build their store front end INTO fortnite via a mandatory update
and BANG
Instant audience for the ‘platform’
easiest way to bootstrap your way to success
That’s what they did. The store is in Epic’s launcher, the same launcher used to start fortnite. So every single fortnite player has epic’s store installed right now.
Wasnt aware, I was just stating the obvious 
If that is the case then steam should be extremely worried
Just goes to show how free can make you tonnes of money, if used intelligently
With physical stores I do see it as choice, even though most of them all have the same stuff at same prices.
But when it comes to the stores fronts for digital good, especially games, they almost always comes with a mandatory launcher too. This is what drive me away. While there is choice for sure I do not want the rest of their stuff after the fact.
If they can get other developers on board. So far there’s fortnite, shadow complex, unreal tournament and some mod editors in the store. That’s it.
Epic still has to fight an uphill battle.
Getting devs won’t be the problem, the attractive pricing structure means many will put their games up on Epic and Steam, if they aren’t forced to use DRM. The problem will be getting gamers to use it.
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The audience will basically sell itself
Numbers of titles will rapidly swell as most publishers will put their product on both… unless steam adjusts their terms to lock people in.
Yea, it’s not going to appeal to everyone, but there’s enough people in the market that will put up with it, or enough people that want Epic games specifically but don’t care about GOG so they’ll have Steam and Epic rather than Steam and GOG, etc.
And, to be fair, launching another marketplace is less of a hassle then driving a few miles to a store or even walking across a mall. Sure, you don’t have to like it, but I’m just saying they’ll probably have some success for some amount of time at least.
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Still prefer hard copies but in this digital world I am glad to see a new competitor. Hope this works out for the consumer and hey hope this forces Steam and that the new company will create some new jobs for people.
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epic has played fast and loose with linux support and currently is terrible for linux support so screw them, I’ll buy on steam, havent bought an epic game anyways since the turd that was unreal 3
I have over 1,500 games on steam and around 2/3rds will run without steam even being installed. I have them installed to a separate HDD so I can play them from Windows or Linux. Got to change that soon since I’m not using steam proton and I might as well be. Now if GoG would just release a Linux client I could put them all on another HDD and have them separate from my main install.
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The messed up part of steams library, is that titles under different platforms are secluded to their respective platforms, unless they run with wine/proton. (ms titles, ms compatible servers) Which takes the drm nonsense even further.
Meanwhile gog galaxy has still not released their linux compatible version, even though the gog thread has been bombarbed with requests, even recently
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/galaxy/release_the_gog_galaxy_client_for_linux
Exactly. It’s the one thing I can’t argue with about PC games with friends, consoles have made this dummy proof. Discord is the closest bridge between all of the DRMs if only because of the profile connectivity, and the fact that it just works as a text and voice chat platform.
Epic isn’t going to make waves any more than the Battle.net client or any other small time DRM, if anything its just more annoyance to have to add my same playgroup of friends on yet another DRM where I likely can’t have the same name. It’s also likely the UI is garbage (ahem Origin) so I have to struggle to get us in another party.
Steam is about the best ‘standard’ I’ve seen thus far by a long shot- and it has a variety of glaring issues (I mean, who uses it to chat?). But compared to some of the others, like Origin, well, I’d rather ‘deal’ with Steam.
Eh, I think its a waste.
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OK, how the hell did they got Journey on PC and Steam didn’t? Also some new game from Supergiant…