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- cross-posted to:
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From the opinion piece:
Last year, I pointed out how many big publishers came crawlin’ back to Steam after trying their own things: EA, Activision, Microsoft. This year, for the first time ever, two Blizzard games released on Steam: Overwatch and Diablo 4.
If Epic had required developers to, say, sell games 15% cheaper (they only take a 12% cut instead of 30%, so the devs would still win out!) then they could have had a really cool argument on their hands. “Look how much Steam costs you as the consumer just from them enriching themselves!”. Then the dearth of features would have been excusable, sure the shop is shit and does ˜nothing but hey, 10% cheaper in return!
Instead, as you say, they wanted to completely brute-force consumers onto the platform by putting their big fortnite money dick on the table, and it backfires and they spent a ton of money on a fat load of nothing.
Plus they’ve nicely trained their consumers that all the EGS client is for is launching it once on Thursdays to get your free game. Not the thing you want customers to associate with your supposedly money-making scheme.
Epic cannot do that because
(source)
However, Epic regularly offers coupons out of pocket. Right now you can get 33% off any game above $14.99 or the regional equivalent, as many times as you want, even if the game is already discounted by the publisher. You also get 10% as cashback.
What’s in your wallet?
Thursday games: they made that harder. I’d have to login in again and 2FA every week. I stopped doing that because it wasn’t worth my time. Uninstalled EGL and didn’t install it on my new computer. Not worth it.
Steam doesn’t allow games to be cheaper elsewhere if they want to also sell on Steam. So the only way Epic can do that is by … (gasp) exclusives.
Pretty anti-consumer of the store that “keeps on winning” if you ask me.
How does that work when there is the humble bundle store, and IsThereAnyDeal with a shit ton of stores almost always cheaper than Steam?
Don’t they sell Steam keys? Maybe the rules are different in this case.
They do but some sell direct downloads along with Steam Keys.
That seems to be incorrect, and quite possibly originating from Tim Sweeney.
The only thing I found is that steam keys, which (as a publisher/developer) you get from steam without paying, cannot be sold for cheaper off-steam. The reason for that is obvious, since steam doesn’t get their cut on keys, but they still have to provide the support and infrastructure for those users.
If you have a source on that claim though, I’d love to see it - I tried finding anything else on it once and failed.
Even if your initial premise was correct (the comment from KubeRoot suggests it’s not), you claim that only Epic exsclusives were a way around that is obviously BS. The most obvious way around Steam would be to sell everywhere except Steam, so EGS, Microsoft Store, GOG, EA Origin, Uplay,… and whatever else is out there.
Yeah but while they’re not allowed to be on sale within X time of launch, I’ve seen games be part of variable discount bundles or run coupon systems before. Clearly Steam isn’t investing infinite resources into tracking this, and probably doesn’t actually care for anything but AAA games.
That is assuming the language in the contract even includes such coupon or bundle schemes.