The Epic First Run programme allows developers of any size to claim 100% of revenue if they agree to make their game exclusive on the Epic Games Store for six months.
After the six months are up, the game will revert to the standard Epic Games Store revenue split of 88% for the developer and 12% for Epic Games.
I’m not fully sure the steam comparison works only because that was a different time.
With that said I still think epic has staying power if for no other reason than anyone mildly interested has a massive epic library sitting there. I don’t spend a ton of time thinking about epic, but I do want to keep my account because of all those games.
Steam literally forced me to install it when I bought Portal on CD back in the day.
The only thing that was on that CD was a Steam installer and a code.
This is kind of like complaining that you have to own a Switch to play Nintendo 1st party games.
Portal is a Valve game. Steam is the PC launcher for Valve games.
FWIW, Portal was available on other platforms without Steam. I had my copy of the Orange Box for the Xbox 360 and that didn’t require Steam or a Steam account to play.
Civ 5 for me. I stuck with physical because “all my games in one place” was my CD binder.
Steam suuuuuuuuucked back then I avoided it just as much as the “Fuck Epic” people do to that. Hated everything it stood for. The idea of a launcher for a game was madness.
I got over it.
Making it seem like Steam’s problems for the first ten years were some software bugs inherent to all software.
It required you login every 48 hrs to two weeks to play most games for DRM purposes, they had no return policy, app’s buttons barely worked, overlay made games run considerably worse, it frequently took up a shitton of resources. The 48 hr thing meant that if you were offline for a bit and Steam was down or slowed (any time a bit sale happened or a big game was launched) most games were unplayable.
Steam came out in 2003 and tons of people complained about Steam DRM hearkening the end of actually owning videogames until at least 2012. GoG came out in 2008, didn’t require a launcher at all, sidestepped everything wrong with Steam.
There’s been non-buggy, not anti-consumer software as long as there’s been computers, Steam prior to like 2016 was not that. There’s been an alternative, buying physical games (until they all started using Steam DRM or worse) and GoG.
Yeah Epic Launcher is barebones. Both Steam and Epic are anti-consumer because of DRM, and making users beholden to any buggy software update to play software they purchase. At least Epic pays devs.
Yeah I mean I hope my comment doesn’t seem like it’s blindly defending Steam or anything. I think steam today is a good platform. Not talking about their 30% cut, I just mean from the perspective of gamers.
But its launch was anything but smooth. I HATED steam when it launched as a requirement for HL2. I had dialup and the experience was utter shit. I recall being so upset at what a pain it was.
Nothing about epic has ever been as frustrating as the early life of steam.
This is exactly what I think of when people argue that EGS shouldn’t be supported or will definitely fail. These days, most gamers agree that Steam is good. They like Steam. Early on, though, Steam was really bad, and gamers really hated it.
Should gamers have avoided Steam early on, when it sucked and they hated it, so that it would have failed? Or was it better to support it early on so that we ultimately got the Steam that we have now? I dislike both EGS and Steam, but the reality is that the marketplace will probably be better for everyone if EGS survives and actually has a substantial market share to compete with Valve’s market share.
I know everybody hates the exclusives thing, but it’s actually probably necessary and is based on market studies of the games market. There was an economics journal paper years ago that basically argued that exclusives are an equalizer of sorts. That is, if you’re the dominant player in the market, you don’t need to buy exclusives. You’re, as the dominant player, going to get the big games anyway. As a smaller player, though, nothing is guaranteed, and, in general, nobody is ever going to switch platforms just to play the same games on the newer, smaller platform that they were already playing on the older, bigger platform. You’ll need exclusives to get people to switch, even if your platform is as good or better than the dominant one. (I’m not saying EGS is as good – but I’m saying people wouldn’t switch anyway.)