News Epic Games Store aims to dethrone Steam

Can't be worse than my experiences on the windows store, though I can't think of anyone who wants to use yet another launcher. Edit - I suppose they already are if they're playing Fortnite

So doing a valve then, make a store then "we’ll be sitting on a beach, earning twenty twelve percent". Kinda funny they're having to rely on GoG too. I wonder what GoG are getting out of it, just money or something else.

I don't suppose you know how much the other stores (Origin/GoG etc) take off the top of you head Gareth?

 

Someone's done their homework I'm not sure I like Steams staggered approach. Part of me thinks that it's good that they (steam) take less money if the game sells loads, but at the same time it feels like it penalises indie devs who will have a harder time getting there. Surprised at MS Store, though I suppose they need/want market share, IMO the store can get lost, though their customer service folks were nice.

I assume the humble stuff is for games just on humble and not ones that get a steam key?

 

Cheers Gareth, interesting info about the books, 10/90 with 90 going to them is crazy. Is it the same on digital platforms for you? I'd hope you'd get more simply because it's no longer a physical book, but I'm half expecting you to say it's not actually that much more.

Humble bundles i always send the money to the charities - sorry devs and humble!

 

I stopped caring and started hating when I heard about Unreal development being halted - what an absolute slap in the face to the community, as well as all the online FPS gamers that built Epic in the first place.

I really can't wait for this battle royale craze to go the same way as the zombie survival one... I was playing FFX HD on my laptop during my lunch break the other day and one of my colleagues came up and was like "is that Fortnite??". NO F*&%^ OFF NOT EVERY GAMER PLAYS F^%*&(%NG FORTNITE.

 

Everyone should think about where their money goes whenever they're buying a game. Steam has seemed increasingly ethically dodgy to me when there are so many other options that, for the same price to me, will send more money to the dev or even to charity.

 

That would imply that any Epic involvement in the development of it actually started... They just kinda threw the UT name out there to the wider community and went 'if you want a UT game, build it yourselves'...

 

Still better than music or film! With 'Hollywood accounting'* they can make sure they never turn a 'profit', so never need to give you a cut of those supposedly nonexistant profits. The music industry are happy to add an extra 'f$&% you' and charge the artist in advance for the cost of production and marketing (with the record studio also deciding how much to spend in production and marketing, natch) and graciously agreeing to not take that upfront and isntead 'docking your pay' until the album makes that amount back, out of your share of the profit. For example: Studio decides to spend £1,000,000 to produce and market your album. You get a 10% cut of album sales at £10 a pop (so £1 an album). You need 1,000,000 albums to sell before you start seeing any revenue from album sales after 'paying back' the record studio. Never sell 1 million units? You get squat from the endeavour, and have an extra bill your next album needs to pay off.

* Want to shoot a film? Form a production company to shoot that film and receive the revenue. The studio charges that production company fees to market the film, fees for studio space, fees for costumes, fees for editing, fees for equipment rent, fees for staff, fees for distribution, etc. If you cook your books well, you can make sure the fees the studio charges the production company remain greater than the reveue the film makes, meaning the film has 'made no profit' (ignoring the millions/billions the studio's wallet is now fatter by). This is why (for example) The Lord of the Rings has made nearly $3bn in revenue, but has supposedly not turned a profit.

 

Would have thought they would have been eager to get people onto digital books so they don't have to worry about making the book etc, whereas digital books are tiny in comparison to say games or films so distribution would have been less strenuous in comparison. TIL.

 

When Steam launched it subscribed to the same AAA price fixing cartel as brick and mortar shops as well as having shop / dev split parity with physical games, so the AAA publishers had no reason to fear Steam (and by extension digital distribution).

The same can't really be said about Amazon (who have a similar quasi monopoly on ebook distribution as Steam has with games), Amazon has been pushing down prices of physical books for years, plus wants even lower prices for ebooks and that is before we even get into stuff like Prime Reading and Kindle Unlimited...

 

The success of "yet another distribution/control channel" will depend greatly on the success of exclusives - Assassin's Creed etc for Uplay, Battlefield/FIFA/Madden for Origin etc. I've not paid any attention to Fortnite, so I basically blanked that Epic had a new thing that was popular enough to drive that.

The less said about the atrocious Microsoft Store the better.

As for digital distribution of books; I'm quite happy for novels/comics to be electronic, but reference texts I prefer to have physical editions - no ebook reader program I've tested has yet succeeded in making an interface which makes flicking between multiple sections a quick or simple process in the same way physical bookmarks and/or two or three fingers does. That said, the digital editions of the Discworld novels are annoying, at least on Google Play Books, as it will not reliably return to the page you were on if you follow one of the footnote links so even things that should be straightforward like novels have issues.

 

Let me know when the Epic Launcher is on Steam, then I'll take a look at it

 

I've launched UBIplay or whatever it's called more than Steam lately. Last two games I played were FC5 (bought it on the play store 'cause I had some coins from shooting people in the head). Then before that we were playing Ghost Recon Wildlands and before that The Division. Oh and before that South Park TFBW.

For me at least over the past two years UBI have been dominating with the sort of games I actually want to play. I like it more than Steam too.

I can't believe I am actually saying that. Like, all of that above. Thing is FC5 still remains one of the best co op experiences I have ever had and they have a new one coming too (in your eye, FO76 !) that looks to be superb. If they keep co op in it it's a definite buy for me.

 

you are kidding me UT is already dead i suppose they saw the bad take up of Quake Champions and so thought better of it ... but i am also really enjoying Quake Champions

 

Amazon are an interesting case for eBooks: the Amazon vs. Apple lawsuit was about how authors were paid: Amazon were paying authors a fixed price per book sold, and Amazon were then selling those books to consumers for whatever the hell they felt like (be it a big profit or a loss). Apple (teamed up with a cartel of publishers) wanted to switch the pricing model to a fixed percentage of the sale price, with the publisher getting to choose the sale price.
In that case, Apple got slapped down by the courts with the publishers settling beforehand to avoid going to court.

 

Take up of the UT Alpha has been pretty terrible anyway (it launched in 2014, don't think I've ever seen a player count over 500) and nobody seemed to have any idea how Epic intended to actually make any money out of it. The whole thing looked like a vanity project for a few of Epic's old hands more than a serious product. With Fortnite giving them such a large install base for their distribution platform it's not a surprise they would switch focus to growing that instead of trying to make Unreal Tournament a success.

I hope it's a success too. Steam appears to have turned into a system for money laundering as much as a platform for actually selling games to customers. If Epic carry out even the most basic level of curation they can avoid that and hopefully take Steam's old crown as the place to find interesting Indie games. With that percentage cut they'll no doubt have plenty of takers and might (maybe) be the first of the various publisher owned launcher to expand beyond their own catalogue.