That’s what I mean about their recent move. It’s only recently that they changed their policy and decided to allow basically everything.
I see nothing weird or shady at all going on. Exclusives are the most common way to launch new platforms and have been since gaming began. If anything the odd thing here is that someone didn’t come in to try and aggressively take on Steam earlier. 30% is a lot of margin to play with. Steam does add a lot of value but they have been enjoying a very high margin for a very long time.
Using exclusives is so non-noteworthy that the only conclusion I can come to is that this is a PC gamer specific issue. Possibly because the ecosystem has been so Steam centric for so long now. Well the store wars have begun, enjoy the show.
Here are some security problems with the Epic Game store:
They don’t verify the email given for account creation.
They read data from your Steam files.
Back in January a big breach with Epic Games/Fortnite was discovered.
Not sure if any or all of those have been fixed.
For now Epic Game Store is the young inexperienced kid on the block, Steam has had 15 years to figure their shit out and when Steam was new the Internet wasn’t as rife with hackers. Doesn’t mean I will be giving Epic my credit card information any time soon, will wait for it to mature.
30% is only for direct store sales. Due to Steam’s policy of issuing no-cost retail keys (for generation or redemption) they make no money off sales from Amazon, Green Man Gaming, Gamersgate, Humble, etc and their actual margin is a bit lower.
Steam really has proven to be a good service in almost every instance. I had no idea they made no money from non-Steam sales of Steam keys! So Steam provides the huge amount of infrastructure to activate and download games for free. That’s a pretty good deal.
Welp, they’ve done it again - retroactively, now ! I just got a mail informing me that one of the games on my Steam wishlist (Anno 1800) which had been available for pre-purchase for a while now is going to be removed from Steam, a week before launch, because it’s now an Epic exclusive.
Pricks.
In a very broad sense, it’s a good thing that a non-niche primary distributor is entering the market as competition for Steam.
Alternate platforms (Humble, GMG, etc) which sell Steam keys are not competition because they keep gamers in Steam’s ecosystem and encourage future sales.
The forced exclusivity thing feels like a shitty way to go about it, but how else do you compete with a near-monopoly like Steam? Only providing a better product (and Steam is a great product) isn’t enough by itself - you have to provide a product so much better that it makes up for the hassle of dealing with launcher fragmentation. So they go with exclusivity instead. It makes sense, even if it doesn’t make consumers happy.
I’m seeing multiple references to “GMG”, now. Is that just a weirdly-pervasive typo for “GOG”, or is it some other service?
Green Man Gaming.
Disagree. There’s a difference between the game client and the store. GMG, et al absolutely compete with Steam at the store level. Steam gets no money from keys sold via third party retailers so both Steam and retailers are incentivized to attract customers to their store and get their dollars. See my previous link about Steam’s true margin being notably lower than 30% because that number doesn’t account for the sales “lost” to other retailers.
Steam as a client benefits some from a wider net of sales since it ultimately has people using Steam. But that’s different from Steam as a store and there’s a number of different clients (Steam, Origin, Uplay, Blizzard, RSSC, etc) who still offer their games via a variety of retail sources.
I’m reminded of the old Hollywood studio and theater system where movies would be exclusive to certain (often studio-owned) theaters. And the current exclusive distributions studios and theaters make to keep movie off streaming services.
I can see pros and cons to both sides. Higher profits to game studios could let them invest more in future and better games. But I see a lot potential for rent-seeking behavior and raising the cost of entry (of both produces and consumers) into the market.
As for mine own game buying, I’m pretty much only buy Steam keys these days. If a game isn’t delivered by Steam, I simply pass on it. I also have no must-buy games, so it’s an easy stand for me to make. Hmm, one exception–I do play Sims which is on Origin’s platform, not Steam.
Best case the sales for these titles will be lackluster and these companies will re-evaluate exclusive distribution.
Well, that one’s an Ubisoft game, and they have their own storefront. They didn’t give up their own access to it, so it’s going to be more of a Steam-excluded rather than an Epic exclusive.
More so than that. While Ubi will have it on their store, they’re prohibited from selling Uplay keys through any other 3rd parties. Same story as Division 2 which got pulled from stores once the Epic deal went in.
So while it’s technically not Epic exclusive (since it’s on Ubi Store), it’s not available for wider distribution than those two and I wouldn’t be surprised if Ubi isn’t allowed to sell under Epic’s price.
This whole idea that Steam’s margins are lower because they give away keys is misguided at best.
First off most of the actual cost of servicing a sale is in the fees to the payment providers. So if Green Man Gaming or whoever is selling the key they are also the ones who have to pay for the payment provider. The cost of this varies quite a bit depending on territory but it’s often at least a few percent and sometimes quite a bit more. Downloading the actual bits at the scale of steam just doesn’t cost them much. A lot of that capacity is almost free because they need to have huge capacity for spikes anyway.
Secondly if you do use a Steam CD key you are contractually required to run the rest of the money for the game through steam. So, for example, if you buy a game on Green Man and then you buy a DLC or purchase anything inside of the game that money has to go through Steam. So yes, they may not get a cut of the initial sale but they get something more important, the customer! This is part of why Steam is so large. The key strategy has been part of their thinking for years because it allows developers to use steam as a one stop shop for everything but still sell some keys other places (like retail or other stores that may bring in customers who wouldn’t necessarily find the game on Steam).
Overall Steam has had brilliant customer focused strategy that has worked well. That being said 30% simply isn’t a sustainable margin because it’s simply too easy to buld technology to do it cheaper than that. Epic knows it, so do others.
The key to being competitive with Steam then isn’t really the tech (as you can always catch up on tech) but it’s about getting the customers in the door. Exclusives are a long time honored way of doing that. Backlashing against it is like backlashing against gravity, it’s pointless. There is really nothing unethical about exclusives and any developer who has an opportunity to risk reduce their game by taking a bunch chunk of money for an exclusive is very likely to do so.
I feel like you guys aren’t quite understanding how insanely risky and competitive the games industry is.
It’s not pointless, if enough people do actually not buy games through the Epic store that they would otherwise have bought through steam (or buy the stuff from the Ubisoft launcher) then that does send a message. And such messages have a recent history of working, such as with the very low sales of the Star Wars battlefield game vs expected.
Of course people will buy from the Epic game store, as is their right, and it’s not a poor choice for them to do so. It will be interesting to see what happens when a game like, say, Other Worlds (an Epic store exclusive for 6 months when it releases) does actually release on Steam.
And now EA has a bunch more games that people are putting hours into that aren’t on Steam (e.g. Apex). You might win a round or two but competition is going to come to the online marketplace. Why? Because the amount of money sloshing around is in the billions.
Notice that a lot of the big companies have already ditched Steam to move that money to their own store.
Steam is great but the time of 30% margins has come to an end. Again, welcome to the store wars.
I think that will depend on whether or not the game is any good more than anything. Also remember, Epic has the resources to go a long time here (they just raised $1.2B in capital + Fortnite profits) which means they can run this store forever basically. Almost all the services are required for Fortnite anyway.
Update: just got an email from Paradox telling me to link my Paradox and Steam accounts. Pictured prominently is a VtMB2 image. If they were planning on jumping ship to Epic in the future, I don’t think they’d push Steam so strongly now.
This has nothing at all to do with the fact that Valve gets nothing out of a sold retail key. When Rebellion requests a retail Steam key for Sniper Elite 4 (for example) and then sells that key through Amazon, Valve gets no money from it. Amazon gets a cut, Rebellion gets a cut, Valve gets zero.
Incorrect. The DLC agreement is simply that if you have a game hosted on Steam then any DLC you put out has to be available through Steam as well. This is to avoid situations like EA selling Bioware games via Steam but then requiring the use of EA-only “Bioware Points” to purchase DLC (which was done through EA’s website). Everyone hated the Bioware Points system and Valve probably got tired of fielding tech support from angry Dragon Age 2 purchasers who now had to go through some convoluted process to purchase DLC. Plus it ensured that you could uninstall and reinstall without it turning into a hot mess of getting your DLC back.
However, Steam DLC can have a key generated just like a Steam game. That copy of Sniper Elite 4 you bought from Amazon can get a Steam-activated season pass you buy from Gamersgate and, again, Valve gets no profit from it. It’s just another generated and redeemed Steam key.
In fact, the “Must be available through Steam” is weaker than it once was. It used to be that if you bought a Ubisoft game via Steam (such as R6 Siege) you had to buy the “Steam version” of the DLC. That’s no longer the case – recently I bought Watchdogs 2 (base game) from Steam and then bought the Season Pass as a Uplay key from another source and activated it through Uplay just fine. Ubisoft still needs to have a version of the DLC available via Steam but doesn’t have to restrict the DLC source any longer.
Yup. And in the immortal words of Starship Troopers, “I’m doing my part.”