Epic vs Steam

Raging_Ninja

nix wrote: »

Can you explain how more exclusivity is better for us?

Are you happy that Valve adds almost 50% on top of what the publisher and developer charge?

More competition is better - a handful of big name titles being exclusive helps make the competition that bit keener.

Remember - the only overhead for having the Epic launcher is disk space. There is no other cost.

[Deleted User]

Raging_Ninja wrote: »

Are you happy that Valve adds almost 50% on top of what the publisher and developer charge?

More competition is better - a handful of big name titles being exclusive helps make the competition that bit keener.

Remember - the only overhead for having the Epic launcher is disk space. There is no other cost.

Well the exclusives could be at very high prices and we cannot shop around to reduce the price

nix

partyjungle wrote: »

Well the exclusives could be at very high prices and we cannot shop around to reduce the price

Exactly, how people dont see this is beyond me

Raging_Ninja wrote: »

More competition is better - a handful of big name titles being exclusive helps make the competition that bit keener.

Them buying exclusivity is reducing any semblance of competition


With steam, you can buy off steam or dozens of other places.

Retr0gamer

Raging_Ninja wrote: »

Are you happy that Valve adds almost 50% on top of what the publisher and developer charge?

More competition is better - a handful of big name titles being exclusive helps make the competition that bit keener.

Remember - the only overhead for having the Epic launcher is disk space. There is no other cost.

Not sure why everyone is making out like the 30% valve charge is incredulous. It's the industry standard and similar to what the console platform holders charge.

What is scandalous is the incentives they give to lower that value only apply to massive triple A games and not Indies. And really I only see triple A developers benefitting from this epic deal. If epic wanted to be competitive they'd pass the savings on to the consumer and give them a lower price than steam.

As it stands you're paying the same or more and in a market so saturated with great releases I can wait 6 months and get a better experience for a lower price.

Kiith

Also, lets not kid ourselves by thinking we will benefit from the lower cut Steam/Epic takes. Savings won't trickle down, and games will stay priced as they currently are.

Nody

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Not sure why everyone is making out like the 30% valve charge is incredulous. It's the industry standard and similar to what the console platform holders charge.

What is scandalous is the incentives they give to lower that value only apply to massive triple A games and not Indies. And really I only see triple A developers benefitting from this epic deal. If epic wanted to be competitive they'd pass the savings on to the consumer and give them a lower price than steam.

As it stands you're paying the same or more and in a market so saturated with great releases I can wait 6 months and get a better experience for a lower price.

They would not even need to give the full cut back; let's say 10% discount (still 5% more profit for the game maker) would buy them swathes of market shares without going paid exclusive while pushing their engine.

Cordell

I really don't get the complete meltdown internet has over Epic while no one cares when Steam requires a Ubisoft account and makes you install Uplay if you buy Ubisoft games. And the community that review bombs SOTR for having a discounted price to early, and Metro 2033 and Last Light and now Borderlands 1/2/PS for launching on Epic, now, this community can simply f.o.

nix

Cordell wrote: »

I really don't get the complete meltdown internet has over Epic while no one cares when Steam requires a Ubisoft account and makes you install Uplay if you buy Ubisoft games. And the community that review bombs SOTR for having a discounted price to early, and Metro 2033 and Last Light and now Borderlands 1/2/PS for launching on Epic, now, this community can simply f.o.

Ummm, thats a ubisoft requirement, not Steam :rolleyes:

ED E

Raging_Ninja wrote: »

Remember - the only overhead for having the Epic launcher is disk space. There is no other cost.

Nope.

Every piece of software you run increases the attack surface. Your OS. Games. File sharing. Whatever. CS1.6 is currently heavily infected.

Good software exposes you some. Bad software exposes you more. Epic store is currently on Adobe Flash levels of bad software.

ED E

BTW steam is cheap.

According to Double Fine's Tim Schafer, the cost of getting a patch up on a modern console (presumably he means the Xbox 360 and/or PS3) is $40,000.

Cordell

nix wrote: »

Ummm, thats a ubisoft requirement, not Steam :rolleyes:

I don't care, I pay Steam, something bought from Steam installs yet another launcher/DRM on my PC...

The point I'm trying to make is that the amount of hate Epic gets these days is totally unjustified, unreal even

Sonics2k

Raging_Ninja wrote: »

Are you happy that Valve adds almost 50% on top of what the publisher and developer charge?

More competition is better - a handful of big name titles being exclusive helps make the competition that bit keener.

Remember - the only overhead for having the Epic launcher is disk space. There is no other cost.

Slightly off here.

Competition is good. Competition will typically result in better prices for the consumer.

Exclusives do not. If Steam/Epic has a game set as exclusive to them, then they can charge any price they wish knowing it will sell.

TitianGerm

Sonics2k wrote: »

S
Exclusives do not. If Steam/Epic has a game set as exclusive to them, then they can charge any price they wish knowing it will sell.

That's not right at all. They can't charge any price they want because if the customer views the price as to high they will simply not buy it.

No one will pay €1000 (extreme example) for an exclusive game.

Cordell

Lots of games have launched exclusively on either Steam, Uplay or Origin in their PC version, and no one seemed to care.
At this point all this rage seems a bit artificial, so maybe you may want to question it.

Dravokivich

ED E wrote: »

BTW steam is cheap.

And how much does it cost a publisher to patch via Steam?

Why wouldn't you expect them to pay for it? I work in IT and software roll out changes would cost far more, for a lower user base, than a games console. $40,000 is relatively cheap.

Cordell

40k is pocket change for big publishers, but for small indies it is not.
There should be no cost for patches, it should be covered by the distribution fee/percentage. Having a cost for pushing in addition to the actual cost for development may bring a dev/publisher to the decision to not do it in the first place.

Dravokivich

Cordell wrote: »

40k is pocket change for big publishers, but for small indies it is not.
There should be no cost for patches, it should be covered by the distribution fee/percentage. Having a cost for pushing in addition to the actual cost for development may bring a dev/publisher to the decision to not do it in the first place.

Then they need to focus more on QA instead of Day 1 DLC content.

Yermande

As a console gamer I find the comparisons to console exclusivity hilarious. At the moment I have a PS4, meaning I cannot play Nintendo Switch games. I cannot just download a Nintendo launcher and be playing a Switch game in a matter of minutes. What a ridiculous comparison.

Cordell

Dravokivich wrote: »

Then they need to focus more on QA instead of Day 1 DLC content.

They need to balance the quality and the money grabbing, otherwise they will not be there the second time around, this is how it works unfortunately. Day 1 DLC is fine as long as there is no impact on the main game, both quality and content wise - it should be an addition, not a missing piece that you need to pay extra.

ArrBee

I'm too far out of the loop on all this, but how does all this debate compare to when Origin was launched?

EoinHef

Yermande wrote: »

As a console gamer I find the comparisons to console exclusivity hilarious. At the moment I have a PS4, meaning I cannot play Nintendo Switch games. I cannot just download a Nintendo launcher and be playing a Switch game in a matter of minutes. What a ridiculous comparison.

Except not one person here has made that comparison.

They have stated they dont like companies buying up third party games so they can remove competition in the market place.

Not sure why people keep ignoring that,willfully or otherwise.

Same with the point about competition,people keep saying competition is good yet are totally happy that competition is being removed from the marketplace by exclusivity.

TitianGerm

EoinHef wrote: »

Except not one person here has made that comparison.

They have stated they dont like companies buying up third party games so they can remove competition in the market place.

Not sure why people keep ignoring that,willfully or otherwise.

Same with the point about competition,people keep saying competition is good yet are totally happy that competition is being removed from the marketplace by exclusivity.

Do those people do the same when Sky buy the rights to TV shows?

Varik

Sonics2k wrote: »

Slightly off here.

Competition is good. Competition will typically result in better prices for the consumer.

Exclusives do not. If Steam/Epic has a game set as exclusive to them, then they can charge any price they wish knowing it will sell.

Publishers set the price not the stores

Cordell

ArrBee wrote: »

I'm too far out of the loop on all this, but how does all this debate compare to when Origin was launched?

It's exactly the same only with some over the top unjustified rage.

Origin games are Origin exclusive, Steam may retail them
Epic games are Epic exclusive, others, including Steam at some point, may retail them.

They charge a reasonable 12% and they get the blame for it, it's not their fault that the publishers choose to pocket the difference instead of trickle it down.

Epic wants a piece of the pie, just like all others, and they get a lot of ****e, mostly undeserved (the only questionable move was Metro withdrawal from Steam, but they honored the preorders)

EoinHef

Cordell wrote: »

It's exactly the same only with some over the top unjustified rage.

Origin games are Origin exclusive, Steam may retail them
Epic games are Epic exclusive, others, including Steam at some point, may retail them.

They charge a reasonable 12% and they get the blame for it, it's not their fault that the publishers choose to pocket the difference instead of trickle it down.

Epic wants a piece of the pie, just like all others, and they get a lot of ****e, mostly undeserved (the only questionable move was Metro withdrawal from Steam, but they honored the preorders)

Do you understand what 1st party and 3rd party games are?

I dont really see anyone raging here. I see people making an arguement that Epics practise of buying up 3rd party games and removing competition from the marketplace is not wanted or good for the consumer.

Kiith

Cordell wrote: »

It's exactly the same only with some over the top unjustified rage.

Origin games are Origin exclusive, Steam may retail them
Epic games are Epic exclusive, others, including Steam at some point, may retail them.

They charge a reasonable 12% and they get the blame for it, it's not their fault that the publishers choose to pocket the difference instead of trickle it down.

Epic wants a piece of the pie, just like all others, and they get a lot of ****e, mostly undeserved (the only questionable move was Metro withdrawal from Steam, but they honored the preorders)

It's no in any way the same as Origins launch. As others have said, Origin make their 1st party games exclusive. As much as i don't like having multiple launchers, they are absolutely within their rights to do that.

Epic have come along and paid large sums of money to make games exclusive to their store. Some of these games got advertisement and sold keys for Steam during their marketing/crowd funding, only to reverse that once they got cash from Epic. That's an unquestionably ****ty practise.

And as already said, competition is essential for any market. I welcome that. But exclusivity isn't competition.

Cordell

The only bullying I see is towards Epic.
There is no competition between Origin, Steam and Uplay. There are partnerships.
Origin doesn't make games, EA does. If Origin exclusive are well within EA corporation rights, then so are Epic and their exclusive deals.

The competition is Epic, with their lower cut they are moving things in the right direction. Only the publishers are to blame if the price stays the same. If there is something hurting the competition and the consumers and the devs then that is the hate Epic receives and the review bombing happening on Steam.

gizmo

EoinHef wrote: »

I dont really see anyone raging here. I see people making an arguement that Epics practise of buying up 3rd party games and removing competition from the marketplace is not wanted or good for the consumer.

Depends on what you consider raging I suppose but, thus far, the conversation has often been bogged down by both factual inaccuracies and false equivalences.

For instance, the feature comparison list in the OP is still out of date and also has that ridiculous "Chi-Com Spying" entry. In the cases where Epic are found to have accessed data they absolutely should be hauled over the coals for it and in cases of GDPR breaches, they should be fined for it. The Chinese element is abject nonsense though and was thankfully torn apart in an article that Sweeney linked himself at the beginning of the tweet chain from the OP. Technical debunking aside, I find it odd that people weren't similarly worried about Tencent's outright ownership of Riot for LoL or their 5% stake in Activision and Ubisoft. What stake holding is required for people to be worried about Chinese spying via the Battle.net and uPlay?

The Monthly Security Breaches topic is also a weird one with a couple of issues being conflated, primarily the email leak from awhile back which related to pre-EGS Epic accounts, and the news reports from January which said there could have been a leak due to an exploit discovered by security researchers which was subsequently fixed by Epic. On a related note, you can enable 2FA on your Account Page.

The conversation then linked with Sweeney with regard to Windows 10 Cloud is that false equivalency rearing its head again. This flavor of the OS would only have allowed software built on UWP whose sole means of distribution at the time the tweets were made was the Windows Store. There is no reasonable comparison between this OS-level lock-down of available software and EGS.

Still, with all that aside, there's a pretty interesting debate to be had here. For instance, on the subject of the feature list, if the EGS offered feature parity with Steam, do you think people would start using it or would they rather stick with the store where the rest of their purchases would live? Outside of pricing, which is outside the control of the store, what feature or feature set would be enough for people to move away from Steam?

Cordell

For me, there is no moving away from Steam, Epic, Uplay, Origin and if I need yet another launcher I would have absolutely no issue using whatever. I play the games, not the launchers.

johnny_ultimate

Cordell wrote: »

At this point all this rage seems a bit artificial

Hyperbole, in online conversations about video games?! Never :pac: