Epic’s Tim Sweeney Says He’s Buying Up Exclusives to Help Developers

[Tsing]

Gamers may not like the fact that Tim Sweeney is snatching up exclusives left and right for his store, but the Epic CEO claims it's for a righteous cause. Sweeney explained in a series of recent tweets that his endgame is increasing the standard payout for developers.

While the Epic Games Store already offers a more generous cut, that's not enough to convince Steam and other storefronts from adopting its 88/12 percent revenue split. Sweeney suggests Epic has to become a bigger threat for competitors to revise their policies, and the only way to do that is by getting as many exclusives as possible.

Sweeney went on to add that this tactic, while aggressive, is “proportionate to the problem it addresses” – that being the 70%/30% cut. Epic’s end goal is lowering stores’ cuts across the industry. Failing that, Epic would still end up with a store selling dozens of anticipated games and an avenue for developers to sell their games at higher potential profits.

 

[TechZombie]

The ends justify the means is a really poor argument.

 

[Brian_B]

I don't care that Epic is purchasing exclusives. If it didn't make some form of business sense, the developers wouldn't be doing it. It's up to all the other storefronts to react/adjust and consumers to embrace/reject Epic.

Personally, I don't mind EGS, it's yet-another-storefront to me, and coming from MMOs I'm used to having a ton of various front end file patchers/launchers/etc. Sure, I tend to use Steam over other options when I have the choice, all other things being equal. But that doesn't mean that I feel the need to outright reject EGS just because it isn't Steam, or because they are winning over some developers.

 

[Zarathustra]

There are so many flaws in this argument.

Firstly, for successful titles, the payout is actually LESS with the exclusive model. The likes of Steam may pay out less per unit, but the volume more than makes up for it.

The upfront payment that Epic pays really serves one function. It reduces risk to the developer. Those few millions are theirs, regardless of sales, so if something isn't a hit, the studio still makes at least some money. So essentially Epic is absorbing a chunk of the risk in the game development process, but the studios wind up making less money overall for a successful title than they otherwise would have. And this is not a small thing. Risk is enormous in the game development industry. Developing a modern game is a huge and costly undertaking, and many can and do flop.

Lets be very clear about this. There is one reason and one reason only Epic is doing this. They want to break into the online store marketplace more quickly than they could organically by waiting for their young Fortnite fans to start buying their other titles in their store, and they don't care if they hurt consumers along the way.

This has absolutely nothing to do with helping developers, or any other made up noble cause. Tim Sweeney is a selfish prick who wants his business to do well and doesn't give two ****s who he hurts along the way to accomplish it.

 

[Brian_B]

Lets be very clear about this. There is one reason and one reason only Epic is doing this. They want to break into the online store marketplace more quickly than they could organically by waiting for their young Fortnite fans to start buying their other titles in their store, and they don't care if they hurt consumers along the way.

This is very true.

 

[Amorius]

I wonder what an idea like this might cause....
Steam introduces reduction of storefront cut for day-one release on steam; referring to a game that releases non-exclusively on Steam day-one. However, games released on Steam delayed from a non-Steam storefront (to take a jab at those that took EGS' exclusivity deals) get Steam's cut increased (think of it as a tariff). Do you think Steam has the weight to throw around to make that acceptable?

This might actually be what devs would hope from EGS' shake-up to get Steam to reduce the cut as long as devs would stop taking exclusivity deals.

I think I am improperly using 'devs' when I should be referring to publishers...

 

[Brian_B]

You know, before Epic came around, I didn't exactly hear an outcry of developers screaming "The cut is just too high~!"

In fact, a whole lot of indie and smaller developers were pretty happy with the chance to get some major league exposure.

Except from Epic. When they decided not to release Fortnite on Google Android Store.

 

[Azrak]

Lets be very clear about this. There is one reason and one reason only Epic is doing this. Money.

FTFY

 

[GoldenTiger]

You know, before Epic came around, I didn't exactly hear an outcry of developers screaming "The cut is just too high~!"

In fact, a whole lot of indie and smaller developers were pretty happy with the chance to get some major league exposure.

Except from Epic. When they decided not to release Fortnite on Google Android Store.

A lot did... Why do you think that Origin, UPlay, etc showed up? The cut was too large.