Epic vs Steam

TitianGerm

Star Lord wrote: »

Do you want ants pirates? Because that's how you get ants pirates!

Buying up exclusivity will undoubtedly lead to a lead in piracy of games, that competition would greatly reduce.

Don't try to justify piracy because of exclusivity. Piracy is a crime, exclusivity is not.

Edit: and anyway the only thing stopping you getting the game is your own choice. You (Whoever) are choosing to not use Epic store. So there is no barrier to entry here.

Star Lord

TitianGerm wrote: »

Don't try to justify piracy because of exclusivity. Piracy is a crime, exclusivity is not.

Did I justify it, or even try to? No, I'm simply stating a fact.

TitianGerm

Star Lord wrote: »

Did I justify it, or even try to? No, I'm simply stating a fact.

I was editing my post. Your not the first person I've seen mention piracy though. You have to laugh at the online "warriors" complaining about Epic security and then they say they'll pirate in the next sentence :pac:

Star Lord

TitianGerm wrote: »

I was editing my post. Your not the first person I've seen mention piracy though. You have to laugh at the online "warriors" complaining about Epic security and then they say they'll pirate in the next sentence :pac:

You may have edited it, but still suggests I'm advocating or justifying piracy. I'm not. And I don't. I'll happily wait out any exclusivity, should I think the price is too steep. I dislike third party games being made exclusives or timed exclusives, so I'll just wait it out and just get it wherever it's cheapest, or when it's on sale.

But we all know others will simply pirate the game instead of waiting, because they don't want to use this launcher. (Which I already have, so I'm not opposed to it in any way)

TitianGerm

Star Lord wrote: »

You may have edited it, but still suggests I'm advocating or justifying piracy. I'm not. And I don't. I'll happily wait out any exclusivity, should I think the price is too steep. I dislike third party games being made exclusives or timed exclusives, so I'll just wait it out and just get it wherever it's cheapest, or when it's on sale.

But the only thing stopping someone from playing the game is them not downloading the Epic Store. It's not like a person has to buy a new device to access the game, so is it really exclusive?

There were Borderlands 3 keys on CD Keys the other day for £32 so I imagine it'll be cheaper closer to release from other key sites.

BeerWolf

Whelp, I'm buying into the whole security issue of Epic Game's Launcher... just had a log in attempt by some ****er from Pakistan, even though I've never used it once since playing Metro back when it was released.

Retr0gamer

TitianGerm wrote: »

Don't try to justify piracy because of exclusivity. Piracy is a crime, exclusivity is not.

Edit: and anyway the only thing stopping you getting the game is your own choice. You (Whoever) are choosing to not use Epic store. So there is no barrier to entry here.

He isn't justifying it. It's just a fact that there will be an increase due to people not wanting to use the epic store but wanting to play the game.

TitianGerm

Retr0gamer wrote: »

He isn't justifying it. It's just a fact that there will be an increase due to people not wanting to use the epic store but wanting to play the game.

Why steal the game when you can play it day one on Epic or wait 6 months and play it on Steam.

Retr0gamer

TitianGerm wrote: »

Why steal the game when you can play it day one on Epic or wait 6 months and play it on Steam.

Don't ask me. Ask the people that would do it.

nix

TitianGerm wrote: »

Why steal the game when you can play it day one on Epic or wait 6 months and play it on Steam.

Because f_ck epic and f_ck waiting i think would be their answer :pac:

Robert ninja

Also f__c paying.

Then f__c paying a company using anti-consumer business strategies
And now it's f__c paying a chinese owned company whose launcher is spyware.

No mystery here.

Kirby

TitianGerm wrote: »

Why steal the game when you can play it day one on Epic or wait 6 months and play it on Steam.

For the same reason a large chunk of people voted for Peter Casey. Or voted for Brexit. Or for Trump.

To "stick it to" the establishment. You may be too young to remember but I remember millions of people illegally downloading Spore and not playing it just to prove a point. It may be silly and juvenile but thats the human race.

Mickeroo

Robert ninja wrote: »

Also f__c paying.

Then f__c paying a company using anti-consumer business strategies
And now it's f__c paying a chinese owned company whose launcher is spyware.

No mystery here.

The only words I could find that fit the blanks in this post are Flic, Fisc and Floc.

nix

Mickeroo wrote: »

The only words I could find that fit the blanks in this post are Flic, Fisc and Floc.

haha yer off yer flicing rocker :pac:

Robert ninja

Doh. I'm used to uncensored forums. Need to up my self-censorship skill.

K.O.Kiki

Ironically, there wasn't this much outcry when games on Steam failed to make their way to GOG!

deceit

K.O.Kiki wrote: »

Ironically, there wasn't this much outcry when games on Steam failed to make their way to GOG!

As much as I would love to purchase all my games on GOG instead of Steam, its understandable why publishers decide not to publish to GOG. DRM Free..

EoinHef

K.O.Kiki wrote: »

Ironically, there wasn't this much outcry when games on Steam failed to make their way to GOG!

Why would there be,was steam paying devs to stop them publishing on GOG?

BloodBath

Epic games store is amazing for the developers, especially indies using unreal engine.

If you release a game on steam using unreal engine its 30% steam cut, and 5% to epic for engine royalties.

It's a straight up flat 12% on the epic store including the 5% royalty. 35% vs 12%.

For this reason alone it will succeed.

nix

BloodBath wrote: »

Epic games store is amazing for the developers, especially indies using unreal engine.

If you release a game on steam using unreal engine its 30% steam cut, and 5% to epic for engine royalties.

It's a straight up flat 12% on the epic store including the 5% royalty. 35% vs 12%.

For this reason alone it will succeed.

Heh, this has been covered. We end up paying the same amount of money for the games, more if paying for Epic exclusives

The system is good for developers, bad for customers, especially with what steam offers in terms of service vs what Epic offers.

BloodBath

nix wrote: »

Heh, this has been covered. We end up paying the same amount of money for the games, more if paying for Epic exclusives

The system is good for developers, bad for customers, especially with what steam offers in terms of service vs what Epic offers.

That's a fair point but lower publisher cuts could lead to lower game prices as has been mentioned.

Epic store is in it's infancy. It's feature set will be expanded upon.

I'm not a fan of exclusivity deals either but I have a lot of respect for Epic and what they are doing to help indies.

Millions in free assets, the best toolset and engine out there for indies, $100 million in grants for indies and the best platform to launch on if you want to keep 88% of your sales instead of only 65% on steam.

A €20 game on steam could be sold for €15 on epic store with roughly the same profit to the developer.

Retr0gamer

BloodBath wrote: »

A €20 game on steam could be sold for €15 on epic store with roughly the same profit to the developer.

But publishers aren't doing this. Which means as a customer you can pay the same or more and get a worse experience on Epic store.

Also 5% sounds great in practice. However your potential reach on the epic store is far less than on steam. Less customers means far less potential sales and it's why Epic have to incentivize exclusives by moneyhatting them.

As it stands there's absolutely no reason to choose epic over steam and a myriad of reasons to choose steam over epic.

Unreal is a great engine but Unity offer a very capable engine for a lot less.

deceit

BloodBath wrote: »

That's a fair point but lower publisher cuts could lead to lower game prices as has been mentioned.

Epic store is in it's infancy. It's feature set will be expanded upon.

I'm not a fan of exclusivity deals either but I have a lot of respect for Epic and what they are doing to help indies.

Millions in free assets, the best toolset and engine out there for indies, $100 million in grants for indies and the best platform to launch on if you want to keep 88% of your sales instead of only 65% on steam.

A €20 game on steam could be sold for €15 on epic store with roughly the same profit to the developer.

Why not give the option of getting a game with the premium added onto the cost of the steam version. I'm sure most that prefer steam would happily pay the extra few euro to cover the cost so the dev still gets their fair share. If the game was 30 on epic or 70 on steam, I would choose steam because of epic's practises. I would be happy to pay more for a better quality product/service combo.

BloodBath

Retr0gamer wrote: »

But publishers aren't doing this. Which means as a customer you can pay the same or more and get a worse experience on Epic store.

Also 5% sounds great in practice. However your potential reach on the epic store is far less than on steam. Less customers means far less potential sales and it's why Epic have to incentivize exclusives by moneyhatting them.

As it stands there's absolutely no reason to choose epic over steam and a myriad of reasons to choose steam over epic.

Unreal is a great engine but Unity offer a very capable engine for a lot less.

I hear ya. People aren't going to be ditching steam anytime soon. It has the userbase and that has value. I understand Epic's attempt to pull users in with exclusives even if I don't agree with it.

There's a reason the game's aren't cheaper and that is because Steam don't allow games to be sold for less than their store outside of some sales. You could call that anti competitive.

Unity offers what for less? Unreal Engine has been free to use for years and offers far more than Unity in terms of high quality free assets, grants and a simply better engine and toolset.

deceit wrote: »

Why not give the option of getting a game with the premium added onto the cost of the steam version. I'm sure most that prefer steam would happily pay the extra few euro to cover the cost so the dev still gets their fair share. If the game was 30 on epic or 70 on steam, I would choose steam because of epic's practises. I would be happy to pay more for a better quality product/service combo.

You won't have to by looks of things anyway. Selling the games for less would have been the best way to attract an audience but they can't so they decided to pay for some exclusives. That obviously hasn't gone down well but I don't know what they are supposed to do.

Any competition for valve is a good thing. We should see a normalising of rates for developers. I think valve are already offering 80% for top sellers.

Retr0gamer

BloodBath wrote: »

I hear ya. People aren't going to be ditching steam anytime soon. It has the userbase and that has value. I understand Epic's attempt to pull users in with exclusives even if I don't agree with it.

There's a reason the game's aren't cheaper and that is because Steam don't allow games to be sold for less than their store outside of some sales. You could call that anti competitive.

Epic really need to attract customers if they want to compete with Steam. It would be great if Steam had more competition, the PC market even with one very dominant player is far healthier than the console monopolies. Epic just are going about it in the wrong way.

Also it's not steam that has decided to not compete with store prices, that's on the publishers.

BloodBath wrote: »

Unity offers what for less? Unreal Engine has been free to use for years and offers far more than Unity in terms of high quality free assets, grants and a simply better engine and toolset.

While it's free to use and develop for there's a charge that kicks in after a certain amount of units sold. It's a much steeper cost than Unity. Unreal is a better engine but it comes at a cost to developers, although if you know how to code well Unity can give results not far off Unreal.

gizmo

Retr0gamer wrote: »

While it's free to use and develop for there's a charge that kicks in after a certain amount of units sold. It's a much steeper cost than Unity. Unreal is a better engine but it comes at a cost to developers, although if you know how to code well Unity can give results not far off Unreal.

Unreal Engine is indeed royalty based with Epic being owed 5% of all gross revenue after the first $3k made per quarter on the product. How steep that cost is compared to Unity's per seat monthly subscription model depends entirely on the studio though.

As for the second part, there's a myriad of ways to address that topic but, in the context of AAA development, there's a reason UE4 is the most popular third party engine being used.

K.O.Kiki

deceit wrote: »

Why not give the option of getting a game with the premium added onto the cost of the steam version. I'm sure most that prefer steam would happily pay the extra few euro to cover the cost so the dev still gets their fair share. If the game was 30 on epic or 70 on steam, I would choose steam because of epic's practises. I would be happy to pay more for a better quality product/service combo.

While I would be happy to pay more - I can't.
My wage has stagnated & my real-life costs have only gone up.
I very rarely buy a game at full-price; even at launch I'll have to hunt a deal.

And before you go "Get a better job!" - if only it was that easy :rolleyes:

deceit

K.O.Kiki wrote: »

While I would be happy to pay more - I can't.
My wage has stagnated & my real-life costs have only gone up.
I very rarely buy a game at full-price; even at launch I'll have to hunt a deal.

And before you go "Get a better job!" - if only it was that easy :rolleyes:

At least it wouldn't be exclusive then.
I'm in another boat where my job rose and about 3.5k of my wage is disposable each month after bills/monthly flights (live between germany/ireland)/ rent etc so I'd happily pay more for a better service. This could be why I'm seeing this as an option.

Robert ninja

Epic isn't a money slanted topic for me. I rarely buy full-priced games (not into them usually) so the gaming budget ends up with more than I know what to do with but I still wouldn't buy anything on Epic. There's discount stores like gamebillet and others where you can get legit keys quite cheap if you're going that route. Cheaper than epic or steam standard most of the time. I'd always go for a steam or gog key for the features they provide.

TerrorFirmer

nix wrote: »

The system is good for developers, bad for customers, especially with what steam offers in terms of service vs what Epic offers.

To be perfectly honest, this is very debatable.

Obviously, there is a hate train out there for Epic, but the average gamer really, as a customer, isn't too bothered by it.

As to what Steam offers above Epic...again, the average gamer isn't that bothered.

Steam has loads of amazing features to be fair. However...features the majority of gamers aren't that pushed about.

Epic has offline mode. Cloud saves coming soon (I admit it's ridiculous they didn't have that as standard).

Beyond that, the vast majority of gamers don't really care. I mean look at that chart that constantly gets posted.

Inaccurate and biased as it is, the vast majority of positive things it attributes to Steam are things 90% of gamers aren't bothered by.

Same way that the majority of gamers don't have any issues with Origin/Uplay/GOG/etc. Epic are using exclusivity to get a foothold in market dominated by Steam for the past 15 years. Just simply having slightly lower prices was never going to achieve that being honest.