Epic reduce their cut to 0% for the first $1 million in revenue for devs on the Epic Games Store
Epic reduce their cut to 0% for the first $1 million in revenue for devs on the Epic Games Store
Do they officially support Linux yet? No heroic doesn't count.
They do not, and never will.
"Bite my shiny metal ass, penguins!"
~ Epic CEO (paraphrased)
Here's a different take, as a game dev:
Epic actual employs quite a few people who work with Linux. The Unreal engine (and even, to a certain degree, editor) has native support for Linux.
The reasons they're not including Linux support in their store front are two fold:
While Valve's move to push Linux gaming is brilliant for us gamers, it also kind of cements us in their camp.
There is absolutely no reason for Epic to support Linux in anyway, and it absolutely supports their bottom line to attack it.
And, no, it isn't because of any David v. Goliath tale of a little guy standing up to a brute: it's because a fellow giant has decided to ally itself with Linux, and all of us have - invariably - been shuffled into their camp.
I think the Epic Games Store has a place in this world as a niche storefront with limited visibility but higher access to sales profits as a result of that.
They'll never grow to the size of Steam, and that's okay. The largest storefront in the world supports Linux not just on its platform, but by developing tools for everyone that makes Linux gaming viable. That is enough, IMO.
[1] Edit: I was throwing around a made up 0.1% number earlier to indicate what I thought the number'd be - wasn't meant to be factual, and was poorly worded, so I removed that.
Where are you getting 0.1%? According to Steam Hardware Survey Linux is over 2% of Steam Users. This puts Linux way ahead of Mac which supported by Epic
2 is only true because they refuse to support it, and it's going to be great to see them walk back everything they said once it's too late. More handhelds are going to launch with official steamOS support, and a new batch of steam machines will come eventually, with a much better support.
In the same way they tell how to side load an apk in android, they can could tell you how to install heroic on the deck.
Hell, through 10-20 K to heroic and they will make it for you simple.
And it was just a big coincidence that Epic removed Linux support exactly when the Steam Deck got announced...
There is absolutely no reason for Epic to support Linux in anyway
Except for the fact that their entire technology stack already supports it and making Linux versions of their games is a compilation step away. Their Tencent buddies at One-Notebook would surely make a OneXPlayer with EpicOS. "Comes with Fortnite and get free games each week".
They’ll never grow to the size of Steam, and that’s okay.
EGS has a massive installed base because of Fortnite.
But it's the year of... Oh no. Rly? :(
Do they officially support Linux yet?
Unreal Engine has official Linux support since ages. Unreal Engine running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux is what movie CGI creators often use these days. It's a highly lucrative market they're not going to give up.
Epic Online Services supports Linux as well: https://dev.epicgames.com/docs/epic-online-services/eos-get-started/platform-support (which includes Easy Anti Cheat)
So when Fortnite and Rocket League have no Linux versions, it's just because of lack of will, not anything technological.
And yet, still, they can go fuck themselves.
I have to give it to Valve, their marketing team is really good.
Do they even have one? I thought it's rare situation when the product speaks for itself.
I assume they mostly just do Steam sale and store organization stuff these days. Maybe they were involved with the SteamDeck but I mostly saw word of mouth for that.
Right?! Nobody ever talks about all the kids they got addicted to gambling. Bang up job, there.
Yeah, lmfao, one of my friends literally only wants to play cs2 because of the free weekly items... It seems that games with elements of gambling always do better than those without it
Cool, still fuck em though
The desperation looks good on you Epic
They’re so desperate to make their store front a thing 😂
It is hilarious.
Epic tried getting users by giving them free games. But that didn't translate to increased sales. And now they are trying to woo developers to abandon Steam, hoping that way customers will be forced to buy from Epic.
They don't understand that developers are on Steam because customers are there. And what does a customer get when they use Epic over Steam?
I just deny the existence of any game that is an Epic Games exclusive title.
Games that need a third party app to run on Linux
They understand that devs are in steam because it's where users are. Do you think they are stupid? There is no much they can do to bring users if there are no games, they are 15-20 years behind Steam in years of existence.
Because they have to, because their store is based in bribing developers for artificial exclusivity in an attempt to hurt Valve for proving that Pig Swiney was a moron a decade ago when he said PC gaming was dead.
This is all a vain attempt by a man child to get back at Gabe, and it’s abso fucking lutely a hilarious delight what an abject failure it all is.
Garbage store with no customer services struggles and burns money, because that’s what’s lazy customer fucking cash grabs should do - burn. Fuck epic, fuck Swiney, and fuck you if you defend them.
Yeah yeah, what about making the EGS program not suck for customers? An overglorified browser running on top of unreal engine, no user reviews for games...
The no user reviews is a terrible choice. I don't understand why they wouldn't have them. Maybe they're afraid of spam on Fortnite. But I can't imagine reviews on Fortnite would matter all that much.
Unreal Engine could've got us, like, Unreal Tournament. It almost did, in fact, it a little.
Die in eternal fire Epic
That's pretty cool, actually. Sorely needed in the current economic climate. Good for them.
I wish their software and platform were a lot better to go along with this, but in isolation this is great.
Steam is a monopoly because it is the only one of these platforms to actually be good.
Epic can even beat them if they just improved their store, but they would rather fight other stores so that it would be worse for everyone.
no, it's because they had about a 15 year head start. you think steam started the way it is now? it started as a launcher for steam games and it was worse than ubisoft's launcher.
I am against monopolistic competition practices and that includes exclusivity deals and predatory pricing.
And as far as I know, Epic does this more than Valve or GOG. Granted, Valve doesn't need to, because they are already the main player, but they also mostly avoided enshittyfication for now.
Granted it is hard to enter a market that is already dominated by another company, but instead of doing those business practices they could offer a better service.
Steam fans are a cult lol. Invested too much money they hate to admit so now they sing it's praises till they die.
epic can have a seat at the table when they actually start competing with valve in terms of features and customer service.
so they can keep feeding a monopoly that licenses drm keys to them.
I guess I don't understand Epic's model. How is Epic different from Steam in this regard?
How many layoffs does that take? /s
100% of $0 is still $0.
I'll spend my money on platforms that have proven to respect their customers.
What's epics problem? I only log in to get free games but I think competition should work out better for the consumer
They could literally just copy steam, add their "we take less of a cut" thing, and be in a good place.
Instead, using their storefront sucks, their customer service sucks, they lack features you'd expect of a major platform, and they're pretentious dicks about it. Instead of fixing these obvious problems, they're bribing devs for exclusivity, pumping their marketing with bullshit, and litigating apple over their app store (actually that last one is kinda great). The epic store today would be competition to steam if steam was still as it was 20 years ago when everyone hated steam.
Competition is usually always a good thing, but sadly no launcher has ever brought anything new to the table that Steam hasn't already been doing (they usually just bring headaches).
Epic doesn't want to compete fairly (by providing a great user experience, etc). They want to compete by paying for exclusives & bribing users with free games. Obviously this hasn't worked because they are loweri g fees, likely to try to get the growth they just aren't seeing.
For the consumer multiple platforms sucks. There's already competition for selling steam keys as well. Epic doesn't want to pay other platforms for anything fortnite, anything else they do is to justify why they shouldn't have to pay like every one else.
Fortnite kids will sustain them. Gotta darken those patterns just a little...
Cool
Epic Games store and Tim Sweeney are both still peices of shit.
Good for them, but until EGS starts being more pro- consumer, I'm not spending a cent there
even if they do become pro-consumer you shouldn't spend there. because it'd be a temporary affair and soon as they win market share from steam it'll disappear.
I can't wait to get more games on my Epic deck, oh wait it was Valve who pioneered an incredible platform that can play AAA games on a handheld running Linux and made compatibility a reality for thousands of games.
They didn't pioneer it, companies like GPD did. Not shitting in the Steam Deck, love that thing. Just wanting to get the facts straight.
I think it still counts, due to all the work they did on the software side.
This is great and it's not like they have shit revenue splits anyway as last I checked it was 88/12 which is by far the best around.
At least Valve takes some of the money that they make from Steam and use it for Steam. You cant run an entire gaming platform based on developers alone, you also need to make it at least somewhat bearable for consumers.
I've not used Epic games store much at all but I could see this leading to a proliferation of garbage on their service if they take the Steam approach of just letting anyone publish on there. This would essentially be an incentive to publish asset flip shovelware on Epic instead of Steam because "devs" get a bigger cut.
Is this an apology for the bad performance issues of UE5?
So what does Steam's revenue share look like in comparison?
Steam takes 30% at first, and there is a discount after tens of millions of dollars in sales.
Steam offers a ton of benefits for game companies through steam, such as the Friends list, reviews, having a way to show live play from the store page, and a bunch of other things. There is a reason that everyone is flocking to steam, and that 30% cut isn't keeping anyone away.
Plus steam input, remote play, play together, trophies, hell there's a whole API for you to use to make your game multiplayer and have it integrate with steam friends easily. So much built in for devs lives to be easier.
Just check out steam works. There's so much for developers
User base and brand loyalty
Nothing about what Valve does but you can’t afford to not be on Steam even though it’s the inferior product
That’s why EOS works with any platform
How are they affording this? It can't be a sustainable model, right?
Fortnite, and it's not. The store loses them hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
That's the kind of competition I want. Not a plucky newcomer with fresh ideas, but an industry titan able to burn more money than some companies ever see in an attempt to undercut the competition. They surely aren't factoring this as a deficit to recoup when they pull a massive reversal after securing market dominance. That's never happened in the history of capitalism.
Epic can huff my huffables.
Dont they also get royalties from Unreal Engine?
Here's the details on the financials
https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/exclusive-the-numbers-behind-epics
They'd been paying a fortune for other ways to get more titles which never panned out. Steam said fuck the little guys so they're trying to capitalize on that right now.
Easy. On EGS most games don't sell at all, so 0% of $0 is still $0. They get most of their money from Fortnite.
It s a good start ngl.
What about taking a different route altogether and not be greedy? what about charging a flat fee (your costs plus some profits to run the infrastructure like yearly or monthly). What about not being evil?
There is a huge business opportunity IMO to do just that. Have a store, charge a flat fee, add whatever percentage wire transfers take (1-3%). You make money, you out-compete everyone and you are the good guy.
That would require having a platform worth something. Currently, they sank millions into the community - but in the wrong way. The client still lacks basic features and yet they spend money to buy exclusivity.
Fuck them, they don't deserve shit - praise or money.
I agree with this. What would make people jump from an evil corporation abusing its users and creators to another evil corporation abusing its users and creators.
Like Steam is doing?
I don't think their cut is them being greedy.
Your plan might not be economically feasibile, because companies need money for growth (new products, R&D, etc), so only charging enough to run is not possible.
Steam is probably doing a kindness by not charging an infrastructure fee every year to developers, that shiz would probably really expensive.
The cost of the cloud features they provide is likely, usually, understated. Just the bandwidth costs alone of allowing your game to be downloaded whenever the user wants and however many times they want is expensive enough. Add on cloud saves and all the other niceties..
All that is just to say that Epic is likely losing a lot of money here just to try enticing more developers to move over, and maybe bring some customers too, but it's not gonna work. They are lucky the fortnite piggybank lets them do this, but it's not smart by any means.
This goes along with their 0% engine fees, only surprising thing is that this wasn’t always in place
Sounds like it's time to play through the free games I got before epic folds like a card table and revokes my access to them.
In a sane world, the library could host the people's digital store front with no cuts taken from the sales. Gaming is our culture, we should preserve it. We should collectively own it. We should be free to sell the games without a middleman taking a cut.
I don't have an issue with a platform taking a small cut, but the 30% steam takes is ridiculous.
A lot of Steam Stans here.
Here's some neat facts:
It sucks that EGS is looking to suck up games, customers, data, etc. Their App / Interface also kinda sucks. UE5 on the other hand kinda rules, and Steam has been quietly collecting cheques while their Source Engine has collected dust. Almost all my games are on Steam but the ones I want to keep I've been getting through GoG.
GoG I think has a solid business model of DRM free games and game preservation. EGS is leading in one of the industry's most innovative and developer-accessible game engines for the foreseeable future. Steam is going to have to make some tough decisions I think to compete as time goes on.
Yet Steam has a history that proves they will not fuck customers over, and if they try new features people hate they'll not pushing it through no matter what for the purpose of maximizing profits (also not through dark patterns). This is something phenomenally rare and which you can't buy with any amount of money.
So yeah, not sure what will happen in the future. But competing with Steam always will be just painful unless you got your own niche (like GOG) by the mere fact that Valve isn't "just another company that will screw you over" <-- the default expectation these days.
You do realize the market share of GOG is about 0.5%, right? That's despite Projekt Red being a beloved developer, the great launcher features, the fairest DRM practices, many years in the business, and so on. It only proves the point that Steam is a monopoly that cannot be disrupted whether you do it nicely like GOG or aggressively like Epic.
I would argue UE5 enables and encourages bad development practices that lead to the unoptimized mess that "modern graphics" games are right now. Their work is cool, but so many games rely on temporal aliasing for in-game effects now, and UE5 is the common denominator.
Steam and GOG have a strong history and userbase. 0% commission is nice, but Steam in particular offers a world of more value than Epic Games Store, including but not limited to a usable fucking user interface (I use Rare to play my EGS library because it's so bad).
Steam games are DRM free unless you consider Steam itself a form of DRM. DRM is implemented by the developers of the game, not by the marketplace it's sold on.
And I find it strange that you think GOG has a better business model than Steam and will be more competitive long-term. Why do you think so?
I find it strange that you think GOG has a better business model than Steam and will be more competitive long-term. Why do you think so?
Steam is it's own DRM system. Control (2020) is a perfect example. You can't run that from your steamapps folder due to Steams DRM to verify a purchase license. GoG on the other hand has the same game, usually cheaper, an runs entirely independent of any platform. Not every Steam game is like this, but most major releases are.
The nice thing about a "Free" Engine is that anyone can pick it up. This means the more people pick it up, the more tutorials, the more docs, the most common issues are found, the more common solutions, etc. So while you believe that performance is an issue, it really is one of the better available engines out there and it can only get better. Again, Steam does not let other people use their Engine - what's the next best free thing - Unity?
Neat facts, but they don't justify the awful game store they have created. They can't even handle a downloads queue that you can change around, which is embarrassing. They have 1% of the features that Steam provides, so rightly they can't charge the same.
Would be nice if Source 2 was available to anyone, but it isn't a product they want to sell/support. It's mostly meant to power their own games (like most game studios, they can have their own inhouse engines). Maybe as it gets more mature they could explore this possibility idk.
Steam has been quietly collecting cheques while their Source Engine has collected dust.
Very innacurate.
Valve create so much great software around gaming. Steam gets updated very frequently with bug fixes and new features (just recently we got game recording).
Source 2 is likely constantly being worked on (featured in 2 of the most popular pc games: CS2 and Dota2). Maybe randoms like us could never use it, but they still work on it unlike your statement would suggest.
Not to mention Proton, which helps every linux gamer run Windows games.
30% may sound steep, but it's not really when you consider what Steam provides: Game distribution (downloads, forever), community features, steam workshop/marketplace (if implemented), inventory system, game networking, in-game purchasing, achievements, etc, etc. I'm not a game developer, but theres probably a million more things they do. I'm not even mentioning the features they provide just for us, the gamers (mainly family share, thats simply amazing).
I've been getting through GoG.
Very awesome, GOG and their goal of preserving video games is great.
My p.s. wrapup is that Epic is barely a launcher when compared with Steam. Yes Epic can launch a game, but it does nothing else (well) at all.
Even with all the years they have had for development, they'd rather try to shove money into game devs faces (or customers with free games) than fix their app. I hope they realise this is a mistake, because you can get game devs to move over with lots of money, but customers who are spending money won't if they arent treated well. This isn't a long term strategy they have been using and this 0% fee seems like desparation to me (not to say they are poor, cuz fortnite pays the bills, but they likely aren't seeing much growth).
I hate defending corporations, but Valve is the one that I hope every other company looks at and tries to mimic because they have only done good for their customers.
None of these are why people hate epic games or like gog/steam.
EG is toxicily anticonsumer. Their platform is assbackwards with no good functional community features. They bombard users with ads for games they already own. They spyware they call a store front has repeatedly been caught snooping through user files without consent and sending unknown amounts of data back to their server without permission to gather that data in the first place.
And the cherry on top is their close relationship with tencent, aka one facet of the propaganda arm of the CCP.
And the cherry on top is their close relationship with tencent, aka one facet of the propaganda arm of the CCP.
I see this a lot and... do they though? From what I can tell, Steam also operates in China. Sure, Tencent invested in EGS, but not in any kind of controlling stake. Tencent does invest in tech and EGS is probably a solid investment.
Source 2 is closed source, however it's absolutely available to third parties. There are a couple non-Valve Source 2 games in development right now.
Could you point to these games or any documentation on how a developer may reach out to Valve regarding developing in the Source 2 Engine?
I was able to find sources for the Source engine, but not Source 2 which Valve has been primarily making games on in the last 10 years. In any case, neither are as widely supported or available as UE5.
Not one of those data points justifies their shitty client, which, as a consumer, is all I really care about.
Tim, what are you doing here?
Steam is good, but competitors can only make it even better. Worst case it doesn't change.
fuck apple and their customers btw
Honestly, I completely forgot I had Epic installed on my PC
Eh, I've mostly moved over to Godot for actual game making
This is for the store, not the engine.
Oh yeah. I forgot I have an Epic account.
Steam really needs something like this. Even the first 100k would be a great start for boosting indie devs.
Instead they do the opposite and reward the big players.
I think ideally the first xk should have somethong like 10% since there's still payment processing fees and such. After that have 30% then go down on huge amount of sales (to keep the big boys happy and on steam)
Why do you want to keep "the big boys" happy?
I mean, if you're Gabe then I get it. If you have a spare yacht call me, let's talk.
But if you're not, then... what's the reasoning there?
Epic only does it because they know they're the underdog. If that were to one day become untrue they would never do anything like this again.
I mean, yeah.
You sorta figured out competition in marketplaces.
Hey, I'm a social democrat. I'm all for intervening in markets, but for commodity entertainment products competition works pretty well, as you just explained.
And steam doesn't do it at all.
One approach is objectively better for the little guys than the other.
They will continue doing it if they need to compete. Capitalism working as intended. Who would've thought
20% is still way too fucking high for little more than just hosting the games.
I dont think the curve would look like this without valves efforts to push linux, so i am a bit forgiving when it comes to them wanting money to do random research and development. So far they have always been making cool stuff with that money.
You are joking, right? The customer support alone (at the level at which it stands, which is very high for Steam) is well worth the price, especially for big players.