Video Game Tuesday: Thoughts on the Epic Games Store

Michael Blaker
Game Industry News is running the best blog posts from people writing about the game industry. Articles here may originally appear on Michael's blog, Windborne's Story Eatery.

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Hey all I’m back with a topic that you’ll either not give a crap about, or hate me for talking about it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday. It’s my Thoughts on the Epic Games Store!

Epic Games Store?: So for those unaware Epic Games, the publisher behind games such as Unreal and Fortnite, launched a Digital store to compete with Steam this past Decemeber. It was to drastically cut down on the profit gained from Epic Games for games they did not publish sold on the store compared to Steam. Steam has a 30% cut of the profits earned from each game sale, where as the Epic Games Store would only take 12% of that, and it would forgo the 5% profit if it was made using the Unreal Engine which is one of the most popular game engines available today.

So what’s the problem?: Well there were a few games that were announced incredibly late, just weeks before release, that would become Epic Games Store exclusives, games that had already had Pre-Orders on Steam for months at that point. So the Internet went up in arms and people started Review Bombing games on Steam. Frankly for those cases I can understand the upset about it. The fact that they’d either be forced to download a seperate program to play the game, or risk losing out on the game they spent money on already. However later whenever a game was announced to be an Epic Games Store exclusive, or even just a Timed-Exclusive, there would be significant backlash against it. Frankly I don’t sympathize with those upset at Developers and Publishers wanting to make more money by using the Epic Games Store. Even a single percent, let alone up to 18%, in profits could mean potentially millions of dollars in revenue that could be used by the makers of games to make more games, or make them better. So I get why I they would do that. More money is always appreciated and frankly I get that desire. Maybe Steam needs to change their policies if they wish to be competitive, but either way this isn’t a situation that is going to go away so long as that profit margin is different.

That’s it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday.

 

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