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

[Eaglerino]

9 minutes ago, Phentos said:

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...

Competition is a good thing...

 

Valve goes where the money is, like any developer. The amount of time they have to spend in Dota and Artifact to make a million dollars is a lot less than the time they would have to spend making anything else to make maybe a million dollars. It's the player's fault for playing and buying things in these games, not Valve's

[Phentos]

2 minutes ago, Eaglerino said:

Valve goes where the money is, like any developer. The amount of time they have to spend in Dota and Artifact to make a million dollars is a lot less than the time they would have to spend making anything else to make maybe a million dollars. It's the player's fault for playing and buying things in these games, not Valve's

Unfortunately. 

 

And yes competition is a good thing, but when the consumer gets the short end of the stick with a barebones platform, poor security, and the competitor's workforce getting worked to the bone, you have to ask yourself "Is this going too far?"

[RejZoR]

12 hours ago, valdyrgramr said:

Lots of people as Fortnite is one of the most played games today and one of most downloaded across all platforms.  So, 10s of million of people on that one alone.  Who cares about Unreal?  Well, Unreal and Quake are the 2 most popular arena shooter franchises of all time.  So, oh IDK?  Lots of fucking people.  Oh no exclusives!  Whatever will you do?  Lots of people buy consoles for the fucking exclusives same with PC.  But, because it's on a competing launcher people suddenly give a shit?  News flash!  All companies have shitty policies!  Steam, Sony, MS, Apple, and pretty much everyone else has them.  it's just that Epic is everyone's current target because "meh steam!"  "Praiseth lord Gaben!"  Again, these are companies not your friends not a single one of them cares since they're making money regardless of  you and a few of your friends not playing on them.  They all will do shit you don't like for profit that's just how businesses operate.  You can have your little vendetta against them, but most people will stop caring when they find a new target to go after on the internet, as always, and Epic will not vanish because you and a few others have a personal problem with them.  Last time you all hated Origin and oh look it's still fucking there.

You're telling this to a big fan of Unreal franchise. And I used to love Unreal Engine as it had special feeling no other engine (apart from Dark Engine) had. Now I can't stand anything related to anything of it, especially not the two faced idiot Tim Sweeney. He was my idol next to John Carmack back in the day. I still respect Carmack despite what happened to his original company and almost everything he built, I don't Tim, because he fucked it up all by himself. It's just sad how people don't give a shit about it and just eat the "we're helping developers" narrative while supporting fucking exclusivity bullshit. Like, COME ON people, how can you be so god damn blind?!

 

I'd actually have no problem with EGS if they were just pushing their "lower revenue cut". Fine, whatever, but forcing consumers to buy ONLY from their store is the exact OPPOSITE of competition. And being dishonest at it is even worse. Dishonesty being at pretending and straight up lying that Valve has a fixed % cut while that's not even true when they clearly provide a far superior platform and even take 0% cut when key is sold outside of Steam. ZERO PERCENT CUT! Match that Epic, you dishonest lying hacks. It has to be done by yourself without the access to Steam's large audience, but if you can do it, 100% of a sold copy goes to you. And Valve doesn't seem to mind it. Never has actually. Not everything is black and white, but no one seems to care when there is bullshit to be fed to clueless people and piss on Valve because "reasons". I'm not defending Steam because I'm a fanboy, I'm defending them because I hate bullshit and lies that are ultimately hurting my favorite platform of choice, that being PC.

[mr moose]

6 hours ago, valdyrgramr said:

Worst case scenario is they pay a small fine since it's a US company.  

In Australia they'll be forced to stop it with individuals facing fines (sometimes jail time) and repeat fines to the company.   Unlike the US our independent Umpires have teeth and are independent.   

 

https://www.accc.gov.au/business/anti-competitive-behaviour/cartels/cartels-case-studies-legal-cases#price-fixing

 

 

[Bouzoo]

4 hours 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.

Except Phoenix Point devs said they would still be in the black even if they refunded all backers from Kickstarter. Unless they have >$1.2M in their bank account, which is how much money they got from Kickstarter, they received money from Epic. 

 

 

Yeah you're dead wrong on this one.

And that's a small no name game. Don't even want to imagine how much Borderlands costed. 

[xAcid9]

4 hours ago, Taf the Ghost said:

As a note, EGS actually isn't really paying anyone upfront cash.

They did?  https://www.resetera.com/threads/phoenix-point-fig-backers-have-accrued-191-return-to-date-can-we-calculate-the-epic-moneyhat.112525/

The game isn't even out yet.

[jaggysnake57]

11 hours ago, mr moose said:

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.

1 if they both offer the same price then..............

2 we dont have a guarantee but we do have common sense. the reason devs are taking the current deals is money. if thats no longer an option ie both platforms charge the same then why risk loosing sales with an exclusivity deal? in fact when you think about it devs would be more likly to sign a deal with steam given there huge user base and "fan base"

3 straw man much. thats not what this is and you know it. he has not been secretly caught trying to price fix it was a tweet. this is not price fixing its him stating a fact. the fact that you have to strawman shows how weak your argument is.

[mr moose]

2 minutes ago, jaggysnake57 said:

1 if they both offer the same price then..............

2 we dont have a guarantee but we do have common sense. the reason devs are taking the current deals is money. if thats no longer an option ie both platforms charge the same then why risk loosing sales with an exclusivity deal? in fact when you think about it devs would be more likly to sign a deal with steam given there huge user base and "fan base"

3 straw man much. thats not what this is and you know it. he has not been secretly caught trying to price fix it was a tweet. this is not price fixing its him stating a fact. the fact that you have to strawman shows how weak your argument is.

It's o.k if you don't think he'll make alternative deals in addition to the 88/12 contract, but I don;t trust them to do that, they are already making exclusive deals with devs who had made contractual promises to backers once.  No one is that altruistic. 

 

Also you don't know what a strawman is.

[mr moose]

1 minute ago, valdyrgramr said:

Not really trying to defend EGS or Tim, but honestly the more I read what he says it sounds more like sarcasm than price fixing.

Elon thought it was harmless banter when he tweeted about taking tesla private,  There is a legal ramification for such things when they are publicly said by CEO's.   So, I guess I really don't care what he thinks he is saying, what he is actually inferring is illegal and what it means to me is I don't want to support that kind of business. 

[D13H4RD]

The way I see it, it's just a pissing contest

 

And guess who gets the short end of the toilet? 

 

Then again, I shouldn't be surprised 

[D13H4RD]

34 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

but at the same time it's a business and they're not going to suddenly stop doing what makes them more money because I and a few others have a problem with it.  

Honestly, I kinda feel that Sweeney and the executives over at Epic Games feel that this strategy may be worth it over in the long term, even if it means having a significant hit in their PR. Also worth noting that it's unlikely that many EGS users (a majority of which primarily use it for Fortnite) probably don't know (or care) about what's going on. 

 

The sad thing is that even though you and I hate it, it seems to be working. Maybe not as well as Epic may have hoped, but how the exclusive games didn't just flat out flop does sorta make it not fail. 

 

And as much as it hurts me to say this, Epic does have one advantage on its side; a hugely popular first-party game that people are still willing to play. Valve currently doesn't, as Artifact was basically DOA and the games that people still play are between 7-12 years old (some of which are barely updated, like my beloved Team Fortress 2) 

[Dylanc1500]

I'm curious as to how different regions and groups will respond to this. 

 

This thread is getting muy picante

[Bouzoo]

I will put this here again, Valve stance on competition from 2013:

Quote

This will also apply to third-party titles, Valve’s Anna Sweet told us. “Whenever we talk to third-party partners, we encourage them to put their games in as many places as possible, including not on our platforms," she said. "Because we think that customers are everywhere, and they want to put their games wherever customers are. That would go against our whole philosophy, to launch something that’s exclusive to SteamOS or Steam machines.”

Valve has had many wrong moves, this is not one of them. This is healthy competition. 

[D13H4RD]

1 hour ago, Dylanc1500 said:

I'm curious as to how different regions and groups will respond to this. 

As of now, quite hostile, mostly due to how the EGS currently lacks proper regional pricing. 

 

It'll be added soon, but stuff like this should be in there from the beginning. 

[bradwiggo]

19 hours ago, D13H4RD said:

^ 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.

*coughs* Nintendo Fanboys *coughs* 

 

I agree, I have see many people defending huge companies and I just wonder what benefit it is to them? 

[D13H4RD]

13 minutes ago, bradwiggo said:

I agree, I have see many people defending huge companies and I just wonder what benefit it is to them? 

Being egotistical and shit? 

 

To be honest, combating misinformation with facts and such is fine. But trying to defend a company like how one would defend a friend even against shit that does not require a defense is a bit of a stretch. 

 

I mean, legal teams exist for a reason. Let them do their work. 

[leadeater]

Thread cleanup, keep it civil. 

[XenosTech]

This feels like a lot of fake outrage. What's so bad about having more than one launcher again?

[D13H4RD]

17 minutes ago, XenosTech said:

This feels like a lot of fake outrage. What's so bad about having more than one launcher again?

I don't think people are mad over having another launcher. It's more to do with Epic's controversial strategy of timed exclusivity deals in order to gain traction. 

[Bouzoo]

6 minutes ago, D13H4RD said:

I don't think people are mad over having another launcher. It's more to do with Epic's controversial strategy of timed exclusivity deals in order to gain traction. 

Jackpot. Especially since some games have their own Steam pages, advertised as a Steam release for months, and then literally days before release Epic takes them. Needless to say it's a shitty practice on both Epics and publishers end. 

[XenosTech]

Just now, D13H4RD said:

I don't think people are mad over having another launcher. It's more to do with Epic's controversial strategy of timed exclusivity deals in order to gain traction. 

Still feels like fake outrage to me. It's not like timed exclusives are a new thing, some games have timed exclusives for certain platforms or regions, so I don't see the big deal about this all of a sudden. If you were going to buy the game then you were either gonna buy it at launch or wait til it comes to your preferred platform.

[pipnina]

Just now, D13H4RD said:

I don't think people are mad over having another launcher. It's more to do with Epic's controversial strategy of timed exclusivity deals in order to gain traction. 

I don't like the idea of a company attempting to strong-arm me to use their product. A product which until very recently had huge and glaring security issues (As a result, how can I trust them going forward when security is clearly not even close to being their top priority??), and lacks so many of the features I take for granted.

 

On top of that, I'm a Linux gamer. EGS does not support Linux at all desipite selling games that have Linux support on Steam. The old Borderlands games all have native Linux versions so EGS buying out Borderlands 3 basically takes a game away from me entirely (of course a Linux port was never confirmed, but easy to see as a distinct possibility otherwise). Meanwhile Steam not only provides toolkits and environments for Linux games, but a full-blown compatability layer built into the Steam client that runs Windows games on Linux like native games.

 

Yeah, I got good reasons to dislike EGS at the moment.

[XenosTech]

5 minutes ago, Bouzoo said:

Jackpot. Especially since some games have their own Steam pages, advertised as a Steam release for months, and then literally days before release Epic takes them. Needless to say it's a shitty practice on both Epics and publishers end. 

You'd have to place the blame on the devs for that one. Epic is merely doing what businesses do and offering another business an incentive to work with them over another. In the end the devs had the choice to tell Epic to fuck off or agree to their terms, it's not like Epic did a hostile take over and shifted the game to their launcher.

[Bouzoo]

47 minutes ago, XenosTech said:

You'd have to place the blame on the devs for that one. Epic is merely doing what businesses do and offering another business an incentive to work with them over another. In the end the devs had the choice to tell Epic to fuck off or agree to their terms, it's not like Epic did a hostile take over and shifted the game to their launcher.

You mean publishers, not devs. And no, I blame both. Publishers gave the middle finger to the community but Epic is the one who made the system in the first place and had the initial idea of what actually is a hostile take over towards the community. Phoenix point is an example. Then Steve Allison comes and says "No, we won't repeat what we did with with Metro", just to announce the next week that they did the very thing they promised they wouldn't do. To be fair I can see why Ubi is doing it, they have their own mini game but that just shows how full of shit Epic is. Again, both are to blame. 

[XenosTech]

3 minutes ago, Bouzoo said:

You mean publishers, not devs. And no, I blame both. Publishers gave the middle finger to the community but Epic is the one who made the system in the first place and had the initial idea of what actually is a hostile take over towards the community. Phoenix point is an example. Then Tim Sweeney comes and says No, we won't repeat what we did with with Metro, just to announce the next week that they did the exactly very thing they promised they wouldn't do. To be fair  I can see why Ubi is doing it, they have their own mini game but that just shows how full of shit Epic is. Again, both are to blame. 

Devs can be their own publishers just so you know and in the end, they agreed to shift to another platform for a timed exclusively, not gonna blame Epic for doing what business do and offer incentives, practices like that would stop if devs and publishers alike stopped accepting the deals but as long as they continue with it I'll blame the publisher and devs and not the one who offered them a voluntary incentive.