I mean it’s a play as old as time; “we give great deals to the sellers and the buyers, until we own the market”
Does Epic have any market share past free games and fortnight?
Developers. UE5 is chalking up to be the defacto standard for modern titles that don’t have budgets large enough to make their own engine.
EGS, on the other hand, is still an abysmal failure beyond the lure of free (and increasingly shittier) games and a yearly 25% off discount coupon that people fall for.
I really wish they’d start by not making the EGS program a fucking UE5 app. Seriously, using the whole ass engine to render html is stupid beyond belief
Wait, is it seriously a full-blown UE5 application?
I was going to call shenanigans, but then I looked at the details of the application:
https://i.imgur.com/J30SGAr.png
So it seems there is something to it.
If you peruse the folder where it’s installed and compared to any UE4 or UE5 game, you’ll notice all the other similarities in .dll files, folders and whatnot. Even the CrashReporter.exe is the same you see in unreal games. Or you can check the config files at
Epic Games\Launcher\Engine\Configwhich has stuff like BaseEngine.ini which, among other networking configurations, also has this:[/Script/Engine.Engine] ConsoleClassName=/Script/Engine.Console GameViewportClientClassName=/Script/Engine.GameViewportClient LocalPlayerClassName=/Script/Engine.LocalPlayer WorldSettingsClassName=/Script/Engine.WorldSettings NavigationSystemClassName=/Script/NavigationSystem.NavigationSystemV1 NavigationSystemConfigClassName=/Script/NavigationSystem.NavigationSystemModuleConfig AvoidanceManagerClassName=/Script/Engine.AvoidanceManager PhysicsCollisionHandlerClassName=/Script/Engine.PhysicsCollisionHandlerMeanwhile, in
Epic Games\Launcher\Portal\Config, the “game” part of the launcher, you have DefaultGame.ini and DefaultEngine.ini, the latter’s first 2 lines pointing back to the Engine folder:[Configuration] BasedOn=..\Engine\Config\BaseEngine.iniSo, yeah, it’s the actual engine. I was going to complain about disk bloat, but my Steam install is currently sitting at 1.3GB and I’m not entirely sure how much of that is from cached stuff. GOG Galaxy is taking ~980MB, but roughly 650MB are from redist installers (MSVC2005, 2007, dotnet, etc), so a “clean” install would be way lighter than Steam or EGS, the latter at 1.1GB on a clean install.
That is ridiculous. Even Electron would have been better…
Why is it stupid exactly? UE5 scales very well and places very little demand on hardware for simple tasks.
Ever heard the saying “Everything looks like a nail when you have a hammer”? Basically, just because you have a tool, it doesn’t mean it’s the best tool for every job. UE5 is great for making games, cinematics and loads of other stuff. But why use it to effectively behave as a browser like Chrome or Firefox, but worse, when there are alternatives made specifically for that?
That’s not really a valid response. Please accurately clarify why UE5 is inefficient at running a store. Benchmarks and other evidence is required.
I don’t think benchmarks are really needed to explain this. The whole game engine part is an unnecessary step.
To initialize a web browser component within UE5, you first need to initialize UE5 and then the web browser within it. Or, you could initialize a web browser directly, saving the memory and time needed to start up UE5.
They clearly have developers who know how to use CEF or whatever web view framework since they added it to Unreal Engine, so it’s not like they don’t know how to add it to a standalone application.
Steam is largely driven by Valve’s own games and freebies as well. 1.5M currently playing Dota 2 and CS 2, with the next best being F2P games: PUBG with 370K online, Apex Legends, and Naraka.
Rocket League and Fall Guys are also on there. Not sure how much paid games sell there though.
Exclusive deals suck ass. So good.
They are anti-consumer, but for smaller devs in particular, they can mean the difference between between canceling and releasing a game, between bankruptcy and the studio’s continued existence.
If your success depends on a storefront paying you to sell your game to less people, maybe it is for the best that it doesn’t succeed.
Do you see developers making games exclusively for one console manufacturer the same way? Are you willing to deprive the gaming community as a whole from these titles? Games like Shadow of the Colossus or Alan Wake 2 would not have happened without exclusivity.
Games like Shadow of the Colossus or Alan Wake 2 would not have happened without exclusivity.
Bullshit. If the publishers for those games had made them for more platforms, they would have sold more copies. Exclusivity deals are made between console makers and publishers in order to sell more consoles and are an anticompetitive practice that should be illegal.
No, both of these titles are “halo games” (not in the Bungie series, but in the way that they are showcase titles) that sold poorly compared to their development costs - and their publishers likely knew that these would sell very poorly, but chose to publish them regardless, because they bring prestige to their platforms. They sold poorly, because they are niche games, not due to their platform exclusivity.
It’s kind of like a car manufacturer making an exclusive sports car that only a few hundred people will buy, but that is meant to elevate the entire brand, bring in customers for other products and wow journalists so that they think of the brand more highly. Most of Sony’s publishing strategy hinges on strong exclusive titles - since their hardware is virtually identical to Microsoft’s - and they started this by going down the “high art” game route all the way back with the PS1 (with extremely niche games like “The Book of Watermarks”) before creating more mainstream blockbuster exclusives like the Uncharted series.
I get your frustration with this, I have felt it myself with exclusives that I wanted to play, but couldn’t justify the expense of buying a console for, but there are solid reasons from the perspective of developers and publishers for doing it and outlawing this practice would result in a far less vibrant and interesting gaming landscape. Another comparison is how rich aristocrats used to pay artists like Leonardo DaVinci to create art for them. This was also an exclusivity deal of sorts, since most of the public didn’t see these artworks until centuries later (the platform exclusivity was being born to the right kind of family), but without these wealthy, selfish patrons of the arts, mankind would have been deprived of amazing creations.
Lol comparing console makers to renaissance art patrons is rich. They are hardware makers and that’s all. They don’t give a shit about great art. They are just trying to have some unique selling points for their locked down platforms so that gaming PCs don’t completely dominate the market. Fuck Sony. Fuck Microsoft. And fuck publishers who sign exclusivity deals. Monopolistic and anticompetitive behaviour doesn’t deserve praise or encouragement.
Pick a different hill to die on.
Not a very nice response to an honest discussion. Try again.
Which still may not have recouped development costs. Shadow was on PS2, no other console got close to their sales. Costs to convert it to other platforms may have been more than profit from sales on Xbox and GameCube.
confused pikachu noises
Yeah, game publishers are in their “cash out” phase after realizing there’s no competing against steam.
There is if they’re interested in competing with Steam. Epic made some very competitive offerings for the supply side of things and then provided very little reason for customers to ever shop there, which it turns out is just as, if not more important.
Let me gift games, let me wishlist games to receive gifts. There’s lots of other features I would also like but if other stores had that I’d be much more inclined to use the other stores.
GOG does those things, for what that’s worth.
GOG is great. I do wish Epic would improve their platform, though. It’s like they’re not even trying.
I really wonder how the palworld devs feel about being gamepass day 1. I have no idea what the payouts look like for them. It probably got a lot more people to try their game, but would they have done better selling it only on steam? They probably weren’t in a position to negotiate a very favorable contract with Microsoft.
I think that’s looking at the deal in hindsight. Palworld had just as good a chance at flopping completely as hitting #1 worldwide, I imagine they were grateful for the opportunity to have some guaranteed income at the time.
Some? Didn’t they make over 400m?
I think they meant guaranteed income prior to selling the game, since they had no way of knowing how successful (if at all) the game was going to be once released.
Ah, makes sense
Because craftopia and palworld have a social aspect getting a big seed of players who only played it because it was free (for them) was I think a catalyst in making palworld blow up like it did. There are too many games out there for people to look through so it probably helps get word out effectively to sell out cheap for a big initial audience like gamepass when you’re a small dev. I only knew of craftopia or palworld because of gamepass at least
The flip side is Microsoft is 100% giving the above as a sales pitch to devs why they should put their game on gamepass for peanuts (paid in exposure!). That’s probably some of what drives the shittier deal devs get now
Their previous game Craftopia was also on GamePass and somewhat successful. They probably had some leverage for negotiations.
Maybe… just not make exclusive deals? Especially not on mediocre game distribution platforms.
“I talked to at least five small teams, like 35 [members] and under, during GDC, and they’re like: Cuts, cuts, cuts, funding canceled, talks that were going on for a year, canceled,” said Casey Yano, the co-founder of Slay the Spire studio Mega Crit. “It sounds like it’s shit. We’re definitely very privileged to be able to self-fund. [Otherwise] I’d be very, very, very scared right now.”
If these deals didn’t exist, lots of games simply wouldn’t get made. You can hate on the platforms all you like but the deals are one of the only sources of funding for small & solo developers.
Oh no! Not the games I will never play because they’re exclusive to EGS!
You do realize those are usually exclusive for only a year, right? So EGS pays them out for a year of exclusivity and then the devs are free to launch on steam and others.
The thing is, often if they don’t get that first infusion of cash from a deal with EGS (or another investor) they don’t get to complete or even launch the game at all. So it never would make it to the other markets.
Usually by the time they’ve made it off EGS, I’ve forgotten they exist. There’s been many sequels to games I loved that I forgot existed because of this.
Same, after a few years you see them show up on steam and all the reviews are
- “All my lobbies are empty”
- “It takes 30+ mins to get into a game with 2 other players”
- “I’m only getting matched against bots”
Or the EGS phase was just glorified beta access like Hades.
Remember DARQ? Taking a stance against third-party exclusivity pays off.
Hawkish monetary policy has a way of making it hard to turn a profit on long horizon projects.
