Tim Sweeney to Steam: Don't want timed-exclusives? Match our revenue split

[Fasterthannothing]

Go away Epic we don't want your stupid exclusives! Also pay your dang employees and stop working them 70+hrs a week. Epic is scum!

[HXRT900]

Epic Games is actually cancer.

[GoldenLag]

5 hours ago, Valentyn said:

It's never been about the revenue share, as Discord offer a 90% share, and barely anyone supports it.

The Discord store is not suppose to be a large store. Its entire gimmick is for it to be a couple of titles that they will feature themselves. Almost exclusivly indie-titles

[GoldenLag]

This is why i refuse to download EGS. 

 

Im not in a rush to download the titles and i can wait for it to be avavible elsewhere.

 

Would love to see a good competitor to Steam, but they have honestly done a good job without any competition aswell.

[ravenshrike]

3 hours ago, Taf the Ghost said:

It's definitely a stunt, and one that doesn't point to things going too well.

He's probably looking at his balance sheets and wondering how long he can keep the bleed going before shareholders pull the plug.

[LukaH]

should be Tim Sweeney to gamers. I don't recall steam ever saying anything about their exclusive deals - everybody else on the other hand... It's as if he wants people to put pressure on steam so that Epic can stop throwing away money with exclusive deals.

 

(haven't read any of the replays maybe someone already said something similar)

[Stefan Payne]

The Problem I see with the EGS vs. Valve War is that XBox and Playstation will benefit.

People don't want this bullshit, they know that Epic isn't safe.

So they move to other places -> XBox and Playstation.

And that's also why I bought Shadow of the Tomb Raider on Playstation 4 as well. Because I don't want to support the nVidia bullshit in that game on PC...

Many other could do the same...

 

The Problem is that we don't have a line of communication to the Companies...

[jagdtigger]

6 minutes ago, Stefan Payne said:

The Problem is that we don't have a line of communication to the Companies... 

We have, but they pretty much ignoring it most of the time....

[Humbug]

nice PR move.

 

2 hours ago, HXRT900 said:

Epic Games is actually cancer.

If they just stop asking devs to sign contracts giving up the right to be on other stores they can be a positive force.

[jaggysnake57]

this thread =

8 hours ago, mr moose said:

I promise we won't won't try and be competitive if you change your business model to make less money, hmmmm 

they dont need to promise shit, if your a dev and you have 2 platforms that charge the same which one do you put your game on? both. at this point the amount of money needed to secure exclusivity would be too much.

5 hours ago, Taf the Ghost said:

Tesla is rather different. Tesla had to make all of the Design technology to make the products work and learn how to do high-end manufacturing at reasonable prices. The latter part has actually been harder than the first.

 

As for EGS, I did some basic math when this came up and 18% was the lowest rate I could come up with where EGS wasn't a poorly run company. What this means is Tim is taking the fact Valve won't really say anything and trying to get free publicity from it. However, what it really means is that this approach is already having problems.

id love to see this math of yours

[S w a t s o n]

Just came in here to point out that:

1. EGS exclusives sold on places like Green Man Gaming are still a 30/70 split

2. Retail stores (Gamestop/EBGames/GAMEUK) and I assume Xbox Live/PSN are a 30/70 split as well.

 

Steam was in line with the entire marketplace

[D13H4RD]

17 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

Also, these are business, not your friends, they don't care about you.

^ This

 

Still baffles me how people still want to defend companies like how they would do for their friends.

 

Their lawyers will do a perfectly good job of that, you know.

[RejZoR]

2 hours ago, valdyrgramr said:

You literally said you won't buy their games I was just asking why you would pay for free products.  <.<  Calm down.  I don't think Epic cares if you don't play it or Unreal.  Fortnite makes them a lot of money, and you not playing it won't change that.   Also, these are business, not your friends, they don't care about you.

Who gives a shit about THEIR OWN games? The problem are those you have to pay that are exclusives to their garbage store and their scummy policies. I'm not just making sure not to play them, I'll make sure others also won't support this garbage because it's bad for PC gaming long term.

[Giganthrax]

As a gamer, I couldn't care less about how much % the devs get from each sale. 

 

What I do care about is having a quality, transparent platform that offers a multitude of useful features and that people actually game on. Epic Store isn't that, so unless they bring over something like Bloodborne from PS4, I'm never going to buy anything from their store. Their singleplayer exclusives are of no consequence to me anything because I can generally pirate those and not lose out on any features.

[Ravendarat]

8 hours ago, Taf the Ghost said:

Tesla is rather different. Tesla had to make all of the Design technology to make the products work and learn how to do high-end manufacturing at reasonable prices. The latter part has actually been harder than the first.

 

As for EGS, I did some basic math when this came up and 18% was the lowest rate I could come up with where EGS wasn't a poorly run company. What this means is Tim is taking the fact Valve won't really say anything and trying to get free publicity from it. However, what it really means is that this approach is already having problems.

How could you possibly be able to come up with that 18% figure? To do that you would need to know all of the operating costs (which aren't public) and factor in the cost of business overseas which is extremely difficult to actually predict accurately. Im not saying you're wrong, more just saying I wanna know exactly how you came to that exact number?

[poochyena]

7 minutes ago, Giganthrax said:

As a gamer, I couldn't care less about how much % the devs get from each sale. 

you should, because that factors into which platform publishers decide to sell on.

[pipnina]

5 hours ago, D13H4RD said:

So in essence, a PR stunt. 

 

What I'm thinking of right now is just how sustainable it is. Because my wisdom leads me to think that it's more likely that the increased operational expenditure that will come when Epic adds more features may lead them to rethink their strategy when it comes to the dev/store cut. 

 

On a side note, what I mean by the Tesla strategy is mostly just the whole "spend a heap now and profits come later". Though now I feel the term "startup strategy" is more fitting. 

Also, Valve has to spend a lot more money keeping servers up I'd imagine. I think it's fair to say that Steam has a considerably larger player-base than EGS (More steam users each month than PS4+Xbones sold, to put it in perspective) as well as vastly more services for consumers and developers.

[Misanthrope]

Mr Tim Sweeney is, quite frankly, lying to you. I can tell you this simply because he knows full well that the revenue split is not the main reason he gets exclusives. The main reason is the same main reason Microsoft and Sony get third party studios to release third party content exclusively: money.

 

Not a bigger potential for money with a bigger revenue split. An immediate payout. I would be willing to bet both my fucking testicles all of these exclusivity and timed exclusivity deals for Epic Games store involve upfront, direct payments.

 

The revenue split it's just a fucking talking point for the press and consumers. It is intended to create a distraction, to have a "legitimate concern for the plight of developers" and such. It's fucking dog and pony show at it's worst because they know unlike console gamers, PC gamers are bout to have far more resistance to the concept of exclusivity particularly when it doesn't involves first party companies (i.e. If you hear exclusivity deals we have been conditioned to accept this "isn't that bad" if it's a company using their own IPs to promote their own store: Origin and EA titles, Uplay and Ubisoft titles, Blizzard and their titles, even Bethesda has quietly moved to their own store front too now, without much resistance)

 

Mr Sweeney knows that they have a relatively tiny (almost microscopical) store in terms of total products and revenue. It's also basically featureless so the can't really criticize a mature store like Steam on functionality he doesn't has. So he is able to give this "big revenue split" and act like some fucking type of indie folk hero saying Valve should change their revenue split because for Epic Game Store well there's very little upkeep costs right now. Very little maintenance to be doing (It is easier and cheaper to maintain a digital store when you basically have no fucking features and henceforth nothing to go wrong) whereas Valve (That in all fairness, has fucked themselves out of their own making by not having adapted to this kind of criticism already when they had fucking years of direct competitors to figure this shit out) would basically be crippled by lowering their own revenue split: their operational costs being a very mature and feature rich store front with bigger catalog by orders of magnitude would go in the red by trying to offer the same revenue split. Not that they couldn't afford to be in the red for a while, a good long fucking while, but I digress.

 

This little guy/underdog tactics by Mr Sweeney are designed to create a huge controversy and divert atention to the fact that he is basically turning the PC gaming into a set of console exclusive storefronts: he is turning PC gaming into Console gaming and not only that but he wants to sell you back his own shit by passing it up as a great product and feature when the main reason any company takes the deal has to be upfront cash payments and deals. As soon as their position gets more solid and they wear down PC gamer resistance to embrace epic game store I guarantee they will walk this revenue split shit back very quickly by going "We're still offering bigger revenue split...but only to games that become exclusive to us"

[Taf the Ghost]

58 minutes ago, Ravendarat said:

How could you possibly be able to come up with that 18% figure? To do that you would need to know all of the operating costs (which aren't public) and factor in the cost of business overseas which is extremely difficult to actually predict accurately. Im not saying you're wrong, more just saying I wanna know exactly how you came to that exact number?

It was a couple of weeks ago and I'm not sure where the paper I did the calculations on is at the moment, but it's really just a matter of looking at the known splits in other markets (Digital Distribution is a pretty old market, at this point) then doing some upper & low bound guesses for what Epic's Fixed Costs likely are. Steam's scaling split gives away a lot of information, then you guess at staff size need, CDN costs and what type of volume you think they'll do.  

 

Doing the actual numbers would take a lot more information and a couple of days of work to really produce, but the 30-40% margin for a lot of Retail industries is quite standard for a reason.  If you want another view of it, see the twitter thread linked in the OP:

 

https://twitter.com/Mortiel/status/1120357103267278848?ref_src=twsrc^tfw

 

Since I was doing it on the fly, I went at the numbers the other direction. 12% was way too specific, which means their clearing cost is probably between 10-12%. 18% puts you on roughly 50% gross margin (depending on your volume/cost assumptions) with room to compress the effective percentage you get depending on things like Humble Bundle and other sales. Being an international platform, those transaction costs are going to be higher than you think per unit sold. Those Transaction costs will also wax & wane a bit by currency fluctuations over the course of a year.

[mr moose]

4 hours ago, jaggysnake57 said:

this thread =

they dont need to promise shit, if your a dev and you have 2 platforms that charge the same which one do you put your game on? both.

The one that gave me the best deal,  we have no guarantees he won't make deals with devs outside of the basic fee structure.

 

Because as i said earlier, asking your competition to match your price in exchange for not competing is price fixing and is illegal.

[Trik'Stari]

Majority of the gaming community to Valve: Make fucking games again, and not MOBA's and card games that real gamers don't give a shit about.

[Guest]

19 hours ago, Valentyn said:

It's never been about the revenue share, as Discord offer a 90% share, and barely anyone supports it.

 

Developers know of Discord, and if it was all about revenue split they'd be praising it all over. The difference is the cash lump sum Epic gives them as an incentive; despite having even less features, and a worse revenue split than Discord.

Yeah nah people forget you actually have to have the reach to sell a game on a bigger scale for a larger cut. It’s  probably not worth it to list on discord or epic

[Taf the Ghost]

As a note, EGS actually isn't really paying anyone upfront cash. (Which is part of why the fact companies signed on is sort of funny.) What they do is offer a Minimum Sales Floor. Epic is only on the hook for sales short falls. So EGS isn't even actually doing a Forward-type deal and no money is directly going for the exclusivity deals. Though I've yet to see any info on when EGS would need to pay out any shortfalls. (I'd assume at the end of the exclusivity deal.) 

 

For all intents and purposes, EGS is actually lowballing publishers but they are assuring a return (at some specific point). If you aren't on Unreal, it makes sense to publish to more than just EGS, or if you're a really small indie dev team and you're having to swing loans to stay afloat. (I.e. you don't have a business model that works but you're looking to hop on the next Hot Startup Train.)

[brownninja97]

1 hour ago, Taf the Ghost said:

As a note, EGS actually isn't really paying anyone upfront cash. (Which is part of why the fact companies signed on is sort of funny.) What they do is offer a Minimum Sales Floor. Epic is only on the hook for sales short falls. So EGS isn't even actually doing a Forward-type deal and no money is directly going for the exclusivity deals. Though I've yet to see any info on when EGS would need to pay out any shortfalls. (I'd assume at the end of the exclusivity deal.) 

 

For all intents and purposes, EGS is actually lowballing publishers but they are assuring a return (at some specific point). If you aren't on Unreal, it makes sense to publish to more than just EGS, or if you're a really small indie dev team and you're having to swing loans to stay afloat. (I.e. you don't have a business model that works but you're looking to hop on the next Hot Startup Train.)

I dont think this is true at least in one case, my mate backed phoenix point and based off the dividend they must have gotten up front cash. Not sure if thats with all epic deals, im sure they are all slightly different.

[Phentos]

cOmPeTItIoN iS gOoD!

 

Between working their employees like they are in a sweatshop in Bangladesh, buying exclusivity left and right with their Fortnite fun bucks, and having a still-insecure platform and sweeping that issue under the rug, Epic can go piss off.

 

However Valve is not blameless in this. They have been neglecting to make real games for almost a decade now, instead making MOBA and card game garbage like DOTA 2, Artifact, and microtransaction purchases for everything, instead of returning to some of their roots which is developing great games. That is one thing I agree with Sweeney on, motive notwithstanding. 

 

And people wonder why piracy is making a comeback...