One of the things Steam's 30% cut subsidizes is the generation of unlimited free license keys for developers to do with what they please. So, for instance, if I am an independent developer, I can sell my game on Steam. Say I sell 5,000 copies. I can then turn around and generate 25,000 keys gratis, and sell those on my website (paying maybe a 5-8% fee to my payment processor, but otherwise taking everything). Those keys activate on Steam, at which point my customers get the benefits of Steam and I pay nothing for the bandwidth or upkeep.<p>This also allows me to give keys to other vendors, like Humble or GreenManGaming, who do take a cut (in some cases close to Steam's 30%, in other cases closer to 10-12%). Those vendors may choose to discount my game beyond the discount I offer by giving up more of their margin to the consumer.<p>It is not uncommon to see games on Steam where the origin of user reviews is 50% Steam purchases, 50% off-site key activations, which implies that Steam's effective margin may be as low as 15%.<p>Now, I think most independent developers are willing to sell on any platform who will have them and for whom the marginal costs of submitting / uploading are lower than gross sales, so certainly I don't think Epic is making a bad move here and I suspect they'l get decent developer uptake, but I also think the sort of "topline sticker comparison" obscures some of what's going on.<p>To some extent there may be value in having this discussion a week from now when Epic has rolled out the store and we have a better idea of how other considerations stack up.
Official announcement - <a href="https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/announcing-the-epic-games-store" rel="nofollow">https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/announcing-the-epic-...</a><p><i>"Developers receive 88% of revenue. There are no tiers or thresholds. Epic takes 12%. And if you’re using Unreal Engine, Epic will cover the 5% engine royalty for sales on the Epic Games store, out of Epic’s 12%."</i><p><i>"From Epic’s 12% store fee, we’ll have a profitable business we’ll grow and reinvest in for years to come!"</i><p>This is great news for indies who Steam seems to be ignoring[1] lately in favor of AAA. Maybe that will eventually put enough pressure on them to at least reduce their cut. There's been increasing concern over whether it's worth it for indies given the lack of visibility. If you have to push an audience there anyway, is it worth the 30%? Jason Rohrer[2] and Positech Games[3] for example have been successful outside of Steam keeping a much larger piece of the pie.<p>1. <a href="http://greyaliengames.com/blog/steams-discovery-algorithm-killed-my-sales/" rel="nofollow">http://greyaliengames.com/blog/steams-discovery-algorithm-ki...</a><p>2. <a href="https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-03-12-jason-rohrers-off-steam-paid-off" rel="nofollow">https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-03-12-jason-rohr...</a><p>3. <a href="https://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2018/11/23/selling-games-direct-from-your-website-in-2018/" rel="nofollow">https://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2018/11/23/selling-gam...</a>
They've made their argument for why developers should publish there. Now, why should I want to use the Epic Games Store as a launcher?<p>Don't get me wrong. There's plenty of room for Steam to improve. I want launchers to compete for its <i>users</i>, but all they ever seem to compete for is <i>publishers</i>. For all of Steam's problems, people love it because it offers a huge feature set out of the box.<p>- Achievements
- Friends lists
- Voice and text chat
- Family sharing
- Streaming
- Multi-drive support
- A decent refund policy
- User reviews
- An easy-to-use mod workshop
- Cloud saves
- User-generated tags
- Independent curators<p>The list goes on...<p>So-called "competitors" never bring even half that feature set to their new platforms. Instead, they force users to switch by making games exclusive to their platform.<p>A lot of people have talked about publishers having incentives to distribute games on multiple platforms, but history has shown us that they simply don't.<p>I don't know what the solution is. I guess I just wanted to vent.
I keep repeating this: two things Steam does right are effortless no-questions-asked refunds, localized prices in many regions of the world, so that people in poorer countries pay affordable prices.<p>I do think that Steam is only going to grow bigger, because most of the growth in game sales are going to come from China, Russia, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Africa, Mexico, Brazil etc than US and Europe. But most other stores does not seem to understand that expanding to these markets is key, and seems to be operating in US&Europe centric strategy.<p>(Off-topic: Incidentally Indonesia is not far behind the US in population, but current predictions show that they aren't going to overtake the US anytime soon, however Nigeria is on track to overtake both US and Indonesia to become the 3rd most populous country by 2050).
Pulling from what I said in <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18600248" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18600248</a><p>I guess this explains Valve improving the revenue share a bit on Steam recently.<p>Also, at first I wasn't thinking this would be much of anything (yet another storefront), but the kicker per the article is that those developing in Unreal Engine would not pay a percentage for the use of Unreal Engine (~5%) on top of the store cut (~12%). That would probably be huge for developers so I could see this one actually taking off.
I wish Valve had pushed harder to compete with Origin, but this looks like the end of its complete dominance. Once EA demonstrated that anybody could hack together a launcher, it's become a free for all. As a consumer it's been a worse and worse experience since increasingly small companies felt the need to replace steam with technically inferior solutions. But this is different-now we get a competitor which is willing to sell more than just its own titles, and this will be a major blow to steam (because indies will go for this-fortnight will be the killer app for this new store just as Half Life 2 was for Steam.) I was really rooting for Valve because they where making a linux gaming future look possible.
I'd be more excited for this much needed competition if it weren't a company that survives by taking advantage of children's naivety of money and natural impulses to sell virtual outfits and animations at sickening prices. App store cuts are ridiculously high, but at least they're not taking candy directly from babies.
I absolutely welcome the competition, but it's going to take a lot for me to trust the Epic Games Store as much as I trust Valve.<p>Lots has been written about Valve (employee handbook, supposedly-not-there-but-actually-just-hidden political hierarchies), but I don't think of them as a normal for-profit company though they most certainly are. They've taken bets like steam for linux, the steam controller, steam boxes, their crazy no-hierarchy structure (no matter how misguided) and I just don't see other game companies or platform companies doing the same. They have my respect. I've also never seen them do anything blatantly greedy/money grubbing on a large scale (though their excuse is usually that they're a small company) and the gaming community absolutely <i>loves</i> to get out their pitchforks.<p>Maybe I've just been marketed to really well but I think it takes a certain kind of company to be who Valve is -- they're like a mozilla in my eyes.
If Apple loses their anti-trust case in court and is forced to open iOS to alternative app stores, does that mean the consoles would be forced to open up their platform as well? It would be nice to have some of these alternative stores on the PS4 and XBox.
At first glance, I thought Steam was in big trouble. Last MAU numbers I could find were 90m for Steam and 75m for Fortnite.<p>A game store is a marketplace, in startup terminology. Epic already has a lot of the consumer side, and 60% lower fees is a huge incentive for the developer side.<p>But UX-wise, so many games are built on top of Steam. In Rocket League, you get logged in with your Steam account. You invite friends to party via Steam.<p>And how would migrating work? Would Epic let me launch the game because I already own it in Steam? Or would I have to re-purchase? (No way people would do that)<p>If I'm playing on Epic, and my friend is on Steam, would we be able to party?<p>This introduces a ton of complexity, and while certainly troubling for Steam in the long run (once new games come out), I think their moat is still very strong.<p>Also 40% of Epic Games is owned by Tencent, so this would mean China's market share of the world's gamer market growing, for better or for worse (depending on your political opinions).
Obviously there's a non-zero cost for developers to publish thru multiple stores, so it makes sense to try to incentivize them with a greater share of revenue. It would be interesting if they tried to leverage the popularity of Fortnite to also do this on Android.
Epic seems to be really trying to kill the 30% cut game. First by bucking the Play Store on Android and now offering their own competitor to Steam on PC. Sort of impressive, glad to see we aren't going to be cemented into these cuts forever.<p>If everyone who has Fortnite has the Epic Games Store by default, there will be a huge initial market penetration as well.
Just yesterday I read a rant by an indie-game dev on Twitter, he complained that Steam would flush out good indie games by catering more to AAA studios and simultaneously watering down everything else with Steam direct.<p>Don't know if this is right and I don't know if the Epic Games Store has a solution to this problem, but more competition in the space is probably a good thing.
Everyone seems to be talking about Steam but the forthcoming Android store feels to me like a much, MUCH bigger deal.<p>I mean, nobody stops anyone from setting up a new PC game store, and the Epic PC store is just another entry added to the already long list of stores all competing with Steam. But on Android (outside China), the Google Play Store pretty much has a complete monopoly that they made sure was virtually impossible to break while still being able to be technically called "open." Sure, Amazon Appstore and a few other stores exist, but they haven't really been able to make any real impact due to Google erecting so many hoops for both developers and users to jump through in order to stray from the Google Play path. (eg. Google Play Services, "Unknown Sources" checkbox buried in Settings app, etc.)<p>But now Epic is forcibly prying it open by using Fortnite as their lure to induce people to actually jump through Google's hoops that were supposed to be insurmountably high user friction. Of all the past alternative Android app stores, this one sounds like it could actually work.<p>The ensuing Google/Epic all-out war should make last year's Google/Amazon Chromecast/FireTV/YouTube feud look tame. Break out the popcorn.
In my opinion taking a percentage cut on something that is not strongly correlated with any special effort, borders on scam.<p>And yes the scammers are everywhere: your bank, broker, recruitment agency, financial adviser, real estate agent, etc...<p>Call me bitter, but I paid way to many years 20% of my paycheck (yay, work for free on Fridays!) to some agency because they, for no good reason at all, somehow are into this percentage margin business as well.<p>The country I live in all major stockbrokers will charge you the higher of $90 or 1% (discount brokers take about half that), whereas a lot of other countries have enough competition that you get actual flat prices per trade.<p>You are selling some service, then please put some actual price on it.
E.g. $2000 to review your game and put it onto our platform.<p>If the service requires ongoing efforts than put some price on this as well.<p>Without price there can not be any free market.
And they throw in the Unreal Engine royalty with the 12% cut.<p>In response to this new competition, Valve reduced prices on Steam on Monday. Valve just reduced their cut from 30% to 25%, and down to 20% for the high-revenue titles.[2] Competition is a good thing.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.pcgamesinsider.biz/news/68183/valve-makes-changes-to-distribution-agreement-lowers-rev-share-for-successful-games/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pcgamesinsider.biz/news/68183/valve-makes-change...</a>
Well this makes me feel awkward as a Unity dev.<p>I saw that they'll allow unity based games on their new store but I wonder if that's just for the short term. Kind of makes me wonder if I should've chosen Unreal.
At least now Valve can play their Half Life 3 card if this new store gains some "steam", I'm sure Gabe N. has been dying to have a reason to.<p>I'm all for competition, Epic Games rocks!
Once upon a time, valve used to develop games.
Then it became big and realised where the money is, and stopped developing games.
Epic is currently developing games. Will they get big and stop? If they did, they still have Unreal. Steam has nothing other than the store.
This is sort of an interesting case study. Markets can be inelastic and see this sort of unspoken price collaboration... until a major player jumps in like this and undercuts all them. I think we’ll start seeing a lot more competition on revenue share thanks to this.
This is great news and I hope it shows up in the arguments for the iOS App Store that Apple's 30% harms consumers because no one is allowed to compete with a store that takes less of a cut. Valve (30%) vs Epic (12%) seems extremely relevant to that case.
Great news, I'm looking forward what Discord is pulling off. As far as I heard, they also want to push into the game distributing market?<p>Epic Games seem to me really as one of the very very few game companies who, beside of marketing, also act very generous.
What is the proportion of people with Fortnite who are likely to use this - like steam e.g. Consistently pay money for games- relative to Valve's playerbase when steam arrived?
I think eventually Steam will be replaced by some system built on open distributed systems such as torrents/webtorrents and cryptocurrency. At least that would make sense.. theoretically the cut that the distribution platform takes could be zero. So developers have a lot to gain from such a system.