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?
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.
Nope. Godot, a fully free Unity-like Engine is shaping up to be the defacto standard for good games (AAA garbage is being ignored purposefully)
I know Godot exists, and it’s preferable to supporting Epic, but it isn’t up to feature parity with UE5. Particularly, when it comes to asset streaming and open world games, Unreal has better support out of the box.
I would love for Godot to be the standard and first choice for every developer (including AAA), though.
“ignoring the major players in the industry”
UE5 had turned into the standard whether you like it or not. I personally don’t like the engine, but that doesn’t mean I’ll lie about its position in the market, and neither should you. You aren’t doing Godot any favours with it
When said “major players” only pump out trash that’s not fun to play, yes, I will ignore them gladly. The last AAA game I bought was Fallen Order, which I promply refunded after finishing, since it was more of a walking and climbing simulator than anything else – and that was one of the better AAA games to come out in the past decade.
Indie devs and studios are the ones actually carrying the industry forwards.
Your preference doesn’t dictate what’s industry standard is my point. It would be like someone only playing exclusively Total War games claiming the Warscape Engine is industry standard, sounds pretty stupid doesn’t it.
The last AAA game I bought was Fallen Order,
A shame you missed out on Baldurs Gate 3 then. Alan Wake also got great criticism.
Fallacious reasoning. “Indie” isn’t a genre of games. I don’t claim AAA games are garbage because of a preference – they’re objectively slop made without passion as a cashgrab.
Rocket League and Fall Guys are also on there. Not sure how much paid games sell there though.
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.
Exclusive deals suck ass. So good.
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.
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What is the gender crowd and how do I get their free cash you speak of?
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What’s the most prominent instance of a studio being forced to use Sweet Baby Inc.?
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Can you link the solicitation or grant where people can apply for this?
What a fascinating conspiracy theory. Interesting that you specify ngo, government agency, and government projects. Also interesting that you call it “woke/gender/diversity”. If you don’t mind me asking, where did you hear of this concept originally?
unknown indie games aren’t selling shitty platforms? you don’t say.
Just because you only know three games, it doesn’t mean the rest of us do too. Slay The Spire, and Darkest Dungeon, are a couple of really well known and community loved indie games. Both excellent examples of what can be done with limited resources
Slay the spire is one of my absolute favorites
How does this contradict what they said though? Just because some niche community knows these games, it doesn’t make them platform-selling games. Valve had HL2 with episodes, Portal, TF2, CS, and Dota 2.
Some “niche community” with a game that’s in the top100 most active games on Steam alone, 5 years after release
Correct.
These are enormous classics, made by small studio is not the same as unknown game. Sold much more than many triple a games, this is a very dry weak take
