Epic Games is trying to compete with Steam
The creators of Fortnite hit it off big, and now they want to expand their horizons.
Epic Games Store only has a few games on it at the moment, but with over $8.0mil behind them it shouldn't be a problem with them getting more games.
Currently the Epic Games Store houses:
Ashen
Darksiders 3
Hades
Hello Neighbor: Hide and Seek
Genesis Alpha One
Journey
Maneater
Outer Wilds
Pathless
Rebel Galaxy Outlaw
Satisfactory
Subnautica (which you can grab for free until )
Super Meat Boy
World War Z
Some of these games actually aren't available until later, but most of them are available now.
Epic Games VS. Steam
Now Engadget did a really interesting article about this, which you should check out here
"Competition is good, but the PC market has no competition. There is only Steam," Refenes said. "But what happens when the Epic Games store gets its footing and grows into a PC marketplace powerhouse? What would that force Steam to do? It would force them to improve. Then that would, in turn, force Epic to improve, and then you have two large companies fighting to retain customers and developers. That's going to motivate innovation. That is a healthy marketplace, and that is good for everyone."
What they are trying to say is that the Epic Games Store might have been a good thing for Steam, because it would force them to improve.
Right now Steam is practically the best PC Marketplace and has virtually no other competition (GOG, Itch.io, and Humble Bundle really had no threat to steam)
In the article Refenes had said:
"If you were running a store without competition and you were making billions of dollars a year, how much time and energy would you dedicate to making it better?"
The answer was not a lot of effort. Now that Steam might have some competition it will force them to make Steam better, which will overall (most likely) top Epic Games in the future.
The thing is that, contrary to the console war, we don't have to pick one over another. I'm a big user of Steam and I love it, I've been using it for 7 years now and currently have about 1000 games in my Steam library. But I also care a lot about developers, after all they are the ones that make the games we play, we should all care about them. That's why I'm happy to see the Epic Games Store taking only 12% instead of the 30% that Steam takes. That's also why I'll always pick the platform that has the lowest commission on sales when it comes to buying games, which currently is the Epic Games Store. Before that I would mostly buy games on the Humble Store.
I'm sure Steam will try to compete, I've seen predictions of commissions going as low as 5% as a result of this competition, maybe it will go that low but I doubt it. I've seen a video recently which was explaining that Steam taking 30% at the time was a really good deal for developers because once their game was on Steam, it was easily a big success. Every game coming in was carefully curated, now the doors are open to everybody resulting in some legitimately good games selling poorly.
This platform war can only be good for this market for both the developers and the consumers. It already managed to bring Journey to PC even though it was supposed to be exclusive to the PlayStation forever, who knows what will come next.
Yeah I agree with you. Some games will be available only on steam whilst some will be available only on the Epic Games Store, and this means that buyers will invest in both of them. Though as for the 88% revenue for the developers, I think it's great. Steam will try to match with this, so far they have already put something in place: https://www.engadget.com/2018/12/01/steam-gives-successful-developers-a-larger-cut-of-game-revenue/
But Epic Games was the first to make that change and that means a lot. I feel like most developers (who mainly use UE4) will now switch to Epic Games.
The whole thing was a good move on Epic's behalf and Steam now isn't the only PC gaming giant (at least not until Epic Games Store gets it's footing.) I hope it doesn't break out into war, and they can exist in peace like Steam and Humble and GOG.
As for me most of my games are on Steam, though I didn't have Subnautica on Steam so I picked that up and have already started my Epic Games library.
Let's hope they can live in harmony 🤞
I didn't have Subnautica either, a nice game to have as the first game of my Epic Games library (not taking Fortnite into account).
Steam's new revenue share was actually announced a few days prior to Epic Games announcing their store. I doubt it was a coincidence, Valve must have known what was going to happen, they just didn't know how low Epic Games' commission would be. Epic Games still isn't the best one in terms of commission though, itch.io has for a long time allowed developers to set itch.io's commission percentage and Discord just released a statement about lowering their commission to 10%.
I believe too that most developers using Unreal Engine will migrate to the Epic Games Store. They are the ones that get the most advantages from this. I also believe that a big part of AAA games that don't already have their own platform will switch to Epic Games. It's all about money for publishers of those games after all. This proved to work in the past with platforms like Origin, Uplay and Battle.net, I have no doubt it will work again with the Epic Games Store.
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