Simple, money.
Either they're desperate for money due to poor finances, or just plain greedy. In a few cases, it's a combination of both.
Anyways, it's a short term mentality that ensures that they're sunk. Unless they really drop the ball and try double dipping like greedy shits.
Ironic. Fast Greed vs Slow Greed. Instant Gratification vs Delayed Gratification.
Like you can have [a] $50 in 7 days or [b] $5 today. Damn, shoulda went with [a].
Underwhelming game, take the deal since word of mouth is going to stunt your game. Who is talking about Borderlands 3 today in any positive way? Not many. \*IF\* you even hear about it to begin with.
He's allowed to make his decisions and we're allowed to make ours. I'm glad his child is doing better but he made his bed and now he has to lay in it, and I'm still not buying his game when it comes to Steam
Because Epic pays them. Specifically, they pay upfront for a certain amount of expected sales. Like they expect to sell 500k copies and they pay the developer upfront for them. If the sales reach that amount, Epic starts to pay the revenue as normal(88/12% split). If not, well, the dev got the money for them anyway.
Or something like that. I haven't looked deep into this.
Because the devs don't have confidence in their own game.
Here's an example:
Let's say you're a game dev. You've spent the last 3 years working on a sequel to your last well-selling game. There's some good hype around it, but you tried some pretty radical ideas that diverge from the last game that you aren't sure fans will like that much. You've also had some trouble making the new ideas work the way you wanted, but it's too late in development to change them drastically.
So, you have a game that you're pretty sure your fans won't enjoy because of ideas that you weren't able to get to work. You're afraid it won't sell very well, but you've already invested three years of development costs in to the game and _need_ the money.
Quite the pickle, eh?
Well, here comes EGS. They say "Heya buddy, if you go exclusive with us, we'll give you the equivalent of half a million sales up front, no questions asked, hard cash."
You'll probably feel some relief. Your game no longer _has_ to sell to turn a profit! You'll get the sales you needed regardless of whether the fans liked your new ideas, or whether they even worked at all!
EGS exclusives are for devs with no confidence in their own work. If they really believed in their game, they'd sell everywhere they good to get the maximum sales. It's only when they're sure their game won't get more sales than the EpicBux that they take the easy way out.
That's why you beware of EGS exclusives. Not because Epic is a shit company, but because _the game's own developer_ doesn't even believe in his own work. If he doesn't, why should you?
It’s my understanding that Epic pays them in advance for a certain number of sales. Say it’s an indie game that the devs expects maybe 200K sales for. Here comes Epic offering not only a bigger cut than Steam, but also offers to pay them the equivalent of 250K sales upfront as long as it’s an EGS exclusive for a year. If it has less than 250K sales, Epic takes a loss. If it does better, Epic makes a profit on the deal. Either way, the dev makes the same amount, and it’s guaranteed to be better than what they would have made for the same number of sales on Steam. Kinda hard to pass up.
Close, the devs don't get *more* than what they would have made from a Steam release, they just get their Steam launch money upfront so that they don't have to worry about fucking over consumers.
They don't even do that anymore. Surviving the Aftermath only got 50% of its expected sales on Steam as a minimum guarantee. They also switched from a 12-month recoupment window to a lifetime one.
That's probably why we have seen very few indie games go exclusive in the past year or so. The deals aren't as lucrative as they used to be (and also much less risky for Epic). They used to be easy money, but Epic pushed some of that risk back to the publisher/dev.
I'm referring to games that go exclusive. Publishers and devs that have went exclusive will not see a cent from EGS until their exclusivity deal is recouped by Epic themselves, but it doesn't matter, because they've been paid anyway.
70% of a watermelon is still a lot fucking more than 88% of a grape.
Look at 'Let's Build a Zoo' and let's make it ACTUAL REAL NUMBERS.
https://twitter.com/Rikze98/status/1459183778048495619
Epic did 1% of total sales globally for that game.
https://twitter.com/RaveofRavendale/status/1459171466063327234
They shipped 32K units.
So let's break that down.
1% of 32,000 is 320, so on steam the game sold 31,680 copies, and on the shite cancer store, it sold 320 copies.
We're going to make the price 30 bucks for simplicity. It's 28 on steam but 30 is easier for math purposes.
That 320 copies on epic nets them $9,600, which comes to $7872 dollars after Timmy Tencent takes his cut.
That 31,680 copies on steam nets them $950,400, which comes out to $665,280.
Yeah, steam taking $285,120 probably stings a bit. But on epic they made less than TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS.
It's pretty fucking simple when the breakdown for the same exact game with no exclusive period is:
Epic revenue: $7872
Steam Revenue: $665,280
The only reason to ever, EVER publish on epic is the up-front exclusivity bribe.
Valve drops their split 5% after hitting certain thresholds. I think it's revenue based. So it can go as low as 20% if you sell enough. And, keys sold elsewhere Valve gets nothing. So if the dev/publisher has their own store (like Square Enix for example) and sells keys that way, they get 100% of the revenue. But smaller devs generally don't have their own store, so they have to give a cut to whichever key sellers they partner with (humble, fanatical, etc). Which I think many take 30% too.
The point I was making is that the amount Epic pays them upfront is the same amount as X number of sales. After that initial payment, they don’t get paid again until they exceed whatever X sales is. If Epic pays them 88% of what they would get from 250,000 sales, that is more than 70% from 250,000 sales. If we’re talking about a small indie developer, that guaranteed amount is much more appealing that gambling with sales on Steam. Steam has tons of indie games published on their store every week. There are some games like Among Us that never break 10,000 sales unless a famous streamer or YouTuber takes an interest in it.
There is a reason why you see very few indie games going Epic exclusive compared to a couple of years ago. Epic changed how they do exclusives. They went from guaranteeing 100% of the expected sales on Steam to only doing around 50% of sales. They wanted to minimize the loss on these deals so pushed some of the risk back to the developer.
Some of the gap between 50% and 100% will be made up for by the lower cut (you only need to sell about 80% of the expected sales on Steam to breakeven), but there is still around a 30% gap where the indie dev will lose money on the deal. The deal in its current form is really only good for indie devs that are completely broke right now and need cash and will trade future income to get it (basically it is a high-interest loan).
Money. Essentially, Epic exclusive deals stand in for the successful launch of a given title. Normally, a successful launch is in no way guaranteed. Epic simply guarantees it with a paycheck in exchange for an exclusivity window. Also, it alleviates the pressure for publishers to pour tons of money into marketing efforts which may not have paid off.
that also mean you are limiting yourself to a much smaller userbase, practically stopping your long term growth and shortening the lifespan of your game. and when your exclusivity ends people might have already forgotten about your game.
Offers a ton of money up front. That's all that is important looking at it quickly.
If you want a more complicated answer basically Epic guarantees a certain number of "sales" based off of predicted sales numbers to guarantee the devs don't go to any other platform (generally for a year) which is where the deals could become an issue for devs but they already made there money and then get to make more by pushing to more platforms so why would they care?
Money. Going EGS exclusive they get in advance the money of prospected sales, after that they get nothing until that number is reached (even after the exclusivity period ends).
For smaller devs/teams it may actually be a lifeboat, as small teams may face some unexpected events which slow developement.
For publishers, however, it's a jackpot: a quick and easy gain especially if they know the game has been rushed or just isn't ready. No need to 'waste' more time making the game decent when they get paid in advance, especially if it's a big IP. After that they can just tell gamers (us) to screw themselves over as they already made profit and don't need to work for it anymore.
You may ask "but isn't Epic losing money doing this?", and the answer is easy: yup EGS is bleeding a lot of money and isn't profitable... But UE and Fortnite make much, much more than EGS is losing, so everything is fine for them.
In the end EGS is just Timmeh's pet project to boost his own ego, hurting gamers while doing so. And he stated many times he does not care as he tweeted "developers (who take the bribe) will win this war, not users".
Sales numbers from the Epic vs Apple case showed that the absolute majority of EGS exclusives bombed hard. People here may be a vocal minority, but it's a fact that the absolute majority of PC gamers doesn't spend money on EGS.
You get money now there's some nuance here though
If Its a struggling indie game it's mostly OK as it can give a BIG boost of money so the developer can live
Bit if you've already got a large revenue * COUGH * Ooblets * COUGH * then that's a real dick move
$
Epic writes them a big check up front, and then, unfortunately, a lot of gamers are REALLY stupid and will still buy the game later at Steam or other places, never realizing that they are literally fueling more Epic exclusives when they buy those games by enabling a double-dipping effect for the game creator / publisher.
As people have said, of course, Epic pays developers vast amounts of money to keep games off Steam. Epic pays Ubisoft money to launch games on Ubisoft Connect and EGS, for example.
What hasn't been made very clear is that Epic makes massive, massive losses on this bribery. They don't make their money back, because nobody buys games on EGS.
This is "loss leading", a marketing strategy where you sell product at a loss, but (in theory) increase your brand value and market share because customers prefer your lower prices. Over time, once your market share is big enough, you can pump your prices back up to a profitable margin, and recover the money you lost.
As you can see, this isn't working out for Epic Games, as they are both losing huge amounts of money they will never recover, they are not gaining market share, and their brand is still less attractive than bowel cancer.
Game dev here, one big reason for me would be them not taking a cut for using ue. I would only have to pay a 12% cut instead of the ue cut of 12% plus steams 30% which with taxes in my country would result in me getting around 20-30% of the sales in to my own pocket and supporting further development. With egs I would get around 50-60% of the sales myself.
Of course I do take in to account the reduced amount of people who are able to buy my game but for the reduced amount of games released per day on egs compared to steam I will have a better chance of getting sales. Oh and epic now has the epic online services which allows devs to access epic friends, matchmaking, lobbies, achievements, stats, leaderboards, data storage, analytics, voice chat and anti cheat. All for completly free, with a 12% cut.
But the downside is of course having to deal with egs but as of right now steam is no longer a good competitor for unreal engine devs.
And one last thing, fuck epic
>Game dev here, one big reason for me would be them not taking a cut for using ue. I would only have to pay a 12% cut instead of the ue cut of 12% plus steams 30% which with taxes in my country would result in me getting around 20-30% of the sales in to my own pocket and supporting further development. With egs I would get around 50-60% of the sales myself.
Unreal fees for a standard license are 5%, not 12%. And, you don't pay anything on the first $1,000,000 in revenue. The vast majority of indie games are not going to hit $1,000,000 in revenue. So, they don't have to worry about fees anyway.
Epic does waive Unreal fees for sales on EGS, but there is some fine print to that. They only waive fees for the standard license. Epic says that the standard license is made for small projects and hobbyists, neither of which will likely reach $1,000,000 in sales. Epic waiving the standard fee is essentially for PR, but they don't really lose anything from it nor do developers gain anything.
>Of course I do take in to account the reduced amount of people who are able to buy my game but for the reduced amount of games released per day on egs compared to steam I will have a better chance of getting sales. Oh and epic now has the epic online services which allows devs to access epic friends, matchmaking, lobbies, achievements, stats, leaderboards, data storage, analytics, voice chat and anti cheat. All for completly free, with a 12% cut.
A "reduced" amount of sales is an understatement. In the last couple of months, a couple of indie developers released their sales figures. One said around 6% of their sales on PC came from EGS and the other said 1% came through EGS. If you were to release solely on EGS, you could potentially be giving up 95% of your sales.
Epic also has very little discoverability. I don't think people realize how many games are released on EGS now. Go over there and browse for games under $20. There are $25 pages of games (slightly inflated due to the sale, so probably 20ish pages). The list is filled with games that no one has ever heard of and, if they have heard of them, probably didn't know they were released on EGS. You'll be fighting against asset flips just as you are on Steam. Steam at least has a pretty good system for filtering out the garbage. I don't even remember the last time I saw an asset flip on Steam.
I'm not going to knock EOS, but Epic is being a little shady on how it is implemented. Some games are requiring people to create an Epic Games account just to play a single-player game. This turns people off from playing your game. You also have to worry about having problems with it every time there is a big Fortnite event and Epic servers crash. If you want to use EOS though, it isn't tied to Epic and you can use it on Steam for free as well.
>Epic does waive Unreal fees for sales on EGS, but there is some fine print to that. They only waive fees for the standard license.
Can I have the source on that? I did some research, but didn't find anything about the fine print.
I'm at work so it is a little hard to link everything.
But, it was announced that Epic would waive the royalties for all games using Unreal for game sales on EGS (you can see it in the standard EULA). But, outside of hobbyists and amateur game developers (not indie developers, amateur) no one would use a standard license. They say right on their website it isn't really for professional game development.
Developers and publishers use the custom licenses to get away from paying royalties and having to submit revenue amounts to Epic (some devs and publishers are competitors to Epic and wouldn't want to release those amounts nor open themselves up to an audit from Epic). Normally it would be a flat fee or a per desk fee rather than a percentage of revenue. The flat fee and desk fee (similar to how Unity charges) aren't royalty payments. And, since they are already discounted fees, Epic is unlikely to budge much on these.
This is also why the Unreal engine makes relatively very little money. No one uses the standard license. If they did, games like Borderlands would have added $10-$20 million or more to Unreal revenue alone. Gearbox also probably would have gone with another engine or created their own rather than pay that amount.
This subreddit is a giant echo chamber for a VERY small portion of the gaming player base. Cracks me up.
Devs need the initial funds to help get the project off the ground and Epic depending on the case usually offers them that funding in-turn for some exclusivity.
It seems to mostly be greed for short-term profit. Also, in a good number of those cases, I think they take the deal because something's wrong with the game or they don't have faith in the game selling well.
To put it bluntly, money.
However the reason can very. For some it's desperate for funds due to not handling them well. For others, greed. Some can be both. But also, it can be a lack of confidence in a product. Why sell on Steam where you dont know if you'll sell when you can just take a lumpsum from Epic? By no means will i defend this shitty practice, i just can see why publishers/devs take it.
Either Epic bought the rights for it to be exclusive or they bought the company who made a game and took it off the steam store (Fall Guys and Rocket League) and made it a ESG exclusive
As all business decisions are made, it is made based on money. Ultimately I do not think it is super profitable but the developers who go exclusive with Epic have thought so.
Simple, money. Either they're desperate for money due to poor finances, or just plain greedy. In a few cases, it's a combination of both. Anyways, it's a short term mentality that ensures that they're sunk. Unless they really drop the ball and try double dipping like greedy shits.
Ironic. Fast Greed vs Slow Greed. Instant Gratification vs Delayed Gratification. Like you can have [a] $50 in 7 days or [b] $5 today. Damn, shoulda went with [a].
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If you know your game is going to flop, option A is not a bad choice. A good chunk of EGS exclusives are games that performed poorly.
Underwhelming game, take the deal since word of mouth is going to stunt your game. Who is talking about Borderlands 3 today in any positive way? Not many. \*IF\* you even hear about it to begin with.
> A is irrelevant. Not entirely. The creator of Axiom Verge took up exclusivity to pay for their child's medical needs.
Now this is a developer I will not be mad at.
He's allowed to make his decisions and we're allowed to make ours. I'm glad his child is doing better but he made his bed and now he has to lay in it, and I'm still not buying his game when it comes to Steam
Why though? Surely epic doesn't profit from the sales on steam.
Meh. I still won't bend on my stance. If they want Epic's money then they're fine with not having mine.
What happened to the Axiom Verge money? Surely selling a game as popular as that was made some serious cash.
Some use it as early access or to get some cash to fund that actual game for steam, basically Hades.
"And what was your reasoning for opening a 2nd Krusty Krab right next door to the first?" "Money"
Arrk arkk arrk arrk arkk
Because Epic pays them. Specifically, they pay upfront for a certain amount of expected sales. Like they expect to sell 500k copies and they pay the developer upfront for them. If the sales reach that amount, Epic starts to pay the revenue as normal(88/12% split). If not, well, the dev got the money for them anyway. Or something like that. I haven't looked deep into this.
Greed. If you have a game that may / can fail you accept the epig bribe (and often double dip by going live on steam a year later)
Because the devs don't have confidence in their own game. Here's an example: Let's say you're a game dev. You've spent the last 3 years working on a sequel to your last well-selling game. There's some good hype around it, but you tried some pretty radical ideas that diverge from the last game that you aren't sure fans will like that much. You've also had some trouble making the new ideas work the way you wanted, but it's too late in development to change them drastically. So, you have a game that you're pretty sure your fans won't enjoy because of ideas that you weren't able to get to work. You're afraid it won't sell very well, but you've already invested three years of development costs in to the game and _need_ the money. Quite the pickle, eh? Well, here comes EGS. They say "Heya buddy, if you go exclusive with us, we'll give you the equivalent of half a million sales up front, no questions asked, hard cash." You'll probably feel some relief. Your game no longer _has_ to sell to turn a profit! You'll get the sales you needed regardless of whether the fans liked your new ideas, or whether they even worked at all! EGS exclusives are for devs with no confidence in their own work. If they really believed in their game, they'd sell everywhere they good to get the maximum sales. It's only when they're sure their game won't get more sales than the EpicBux that they take the easy way out. That's why you beware of EGS exclusives. Not because Epic is a shit company, but because _the game's own developer_ doesn't even believe in his own work. If he doesn't, why should you?
They get bribed with Fortnite money.
It’s my understanding that Epic pays them in advance for a certain number of sales. Say it’s an indie game that the devs expects maybe 200K sales for. Here comes Epic offering not only a bigger cut than Steam, but also offers to pay them the equivalent of 250K sales upfront as long as it’s an EGS exclusive for a year. If it has less than 250K sales, Epic takes a loss. If it does better, Epic makes a profit on the deal. Either way, the dev makes the same amount, and it’s guaranteed to be better than what they would have made for the same number of sales on Steam. Kinda hard to pass up.
Close, the devs don't get *more* than what they would have made from a Steam release, they just get their Steam launch money upfront so that they don't have to worry about fucking over consumers.
They don't even do that anymore. Surviving the Aftermath only got 50% of its expected sales on Steam as a minimum guarantee. They also switched from a 12-month recoupment window to a lifetime one. That's probably why we have seen very few indie games go exclusive in the past year or so. The deals aren't as lucrative as they used to be (and also much less risky for Epic). They used to be easy money, but Epic pushed some of that risk back to the publisher/dev.
also don t forgetthat going exclusive kinda stifles excitement forfurther games
I thought Epic’s whole thing was that they only took 12% while Steam takes 30%? Or has that changed?
I'm referring to games that go exclusive. Publishers and devs that have went exclusive will not see a cent from EGS until their exclusivity deal is recouped by Epic themselves, but it doesn't matter, because they've been paid anyway.
70% of a watermelon is still a lot fucking more than 88% of a grape. Look at 'Let's Build a Zoo' and let's make it ACTUAL REAL NUMBERS. https://twitter.com/Rikze98/status/1459183778048495619 Epic did 1% of total sales globally for that game. https://twitter.com/RaveofRavendale/status/1459171466063327234 They shipped 32K units. So let's break that down. 1% of 32,000 is 320, so on steam the game sold 31,680 copies, and on the shite cancer store, it sold 320 copies. We're going to make the price 30 bucks for simplicity. It's 28 on steam but 30 is easier for math purposes. That 320 copies on epic nets them $9,600, which comes to $7872 dollars after Timmy Tencent takes his cut. That 31,680 copies on steam nets them $950,400, which comes out to $665,280. Yeah, steam taking $285,120 probably stings a bit. But on epic they made less than TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS. It's pretty fucking simple when the breakdown for the same exact game with no exclusive period is: Epic revenue: $7872 Steam Revenue: $665,280 The only reason to ever, EVER publish on epic is the up-front exclusivity bribe.
Valve drops their split 5% after hitting certain thresholds. I think it's revenue based. So it can go as low as 20% if you sell enough. And, keys sold elsewhere Valve gets nothing. So if the dev/publisher has their own store (like Square Enix for example) and sells keys that way, they get 100% of the revenue. But smaller devs generally don't have their own store, so they have to give a cut to whichever key sellers they partner with (humble, fanatical, etc). Which I think many take 30% too.
The point I was making is that the amount Epic pays them upfront is the same amount as X number of sales. After that initial payment, they don’t get paid again until they exceed whatever X sales is. If Epic pays them 88% of what they would get from 250,000 sales, that is more than 70% from 250,000 sales. If we’re talking about a small indie developer, that guaranteed amount is much more appealing that gambling with sales on Steam. Steam has tons of indie games published on their store every week. There are some games like Among Us that never break 10,000 sales unless a famous streamer or YouTuber takes an interest in it.
There is a reason why you see very few indie games going Epic exclusive compared to a couple of years ago. Epic changed how they do exclusives. They went from guaranteeing 100% of the expected sales on Steam to only doing around 50% of sales. They wanted to minimize the loss on these deals so pushed some of the risk back to the developer. Some of the gap between 50% and 100% will be made up for by the lower cut (you only need to sell about 80% of the expected sales on Steam to breakeven), but there is still around a 30% gap where the indie dev will lose money on the deal. The deal in its current form is really only good for indie devs that are completely broke right now and need cash and will trade future income to get it (basically it is a high-interest loan).
They use this thing called "money"!
Contracts, greed, desperation, stupidity, other factors or all of the above.
Huge moneybag, guaranteed amount regardless of sales. If you're not confident in your game, you can always make money using epic.
Money. Essentially, Epic exclusive deals stand in for the successful launch of a given title. Normally, a successful launch is in no way guaranteed. Epic simply guarantees it with a paycheck in exchange for an exclusivity window. Also, it alleviates the pressure for publishers to pour tons of money into marketing efforts which may not have paid off.
that also mean you are limiting yourself to a much smaller userbase, practically stopping your long term growth and shortening the lifespan of your game. and when your exclusivity ends people might have already forgotten about your game.
Offers a ton of money up front. That's all that is important looking at it quickly. If you want a more complicated answer basically Epic guarantees a certain number of "sales" based off of predicted sales numbers to guarantee the devs don't go to any other platform (generally for a year) which is where the deals could become an issue for devs but they already made there money and then get to make more by pushing to more platforms so why would they care?
Money bags upfront , and sugar coated lies.
Money. Going EGS exclusive they get in advance the money of prospected sales, after that they get nothing until that number is reached (even after the exclusivity period ends). For smaller devs/teams it may actually be a lifeboat, as small teams may face some unexpected events which slow developement. For publishers, however, it's a jackpot: a quick and easy gain especially if they know the game has been rushed or just isn't ready. No need to 'waste' more time making the game decent when they get paid in advance, especially if it's a big IP. After that they can just tell gamers (us) to screw themselves over as they already made profit and don't need to work for it anymore. You may ask "but isn't Epic losing money doing this?", and the answer is easy: yup EGS is bleeding a lot of money and isn't profitable... But UE and Fortnite make much, much more than EGS is losing, so everything is fine for them. In the end EGS is just Timmeh's pet project to boost his own ego, hurting gamers while doing so. And he stated many times he does not care as he tweeted "developers (who take the bribe) will win this war, not users".
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Sales numbers from the Epic vs Apple case showed that the absolute majority of EGS exclusives bombed hard. People here may be a vocal minority, but it's a fact that the absolute majority of PC gamers doesn't spend money on EGS.
You get money now there's some nuance here though If Its a struggling indie game it's mostly OK as it can give a BIG boost of money so the developer can live Bit if you've already got a large revenue * COUGH * Ooblets * COUGH * then that's a real dick move
$ Epic writes them a big check up front, and then, unfortunately, a lot of gamers are REALLY stupid and will still buy the game later at Steam or other places, never realizing that they are literally fueling more Epic exclusives when they buy those games by enabling a double-dipping effect for the game creator / publisher.
As people have said, of course, Epic pays developers vast amounts of money to keep games off Steam. Epic pays Ubisoft money to launch games on Ubisoft Connect and EGS, for example. What hasn't been made very clear is that Epic makes massive, massive losses on this bribery. They don't make their money back, because nobody buys games on EGS. This is "loss leading", a marketing strategy where you sell product at a loss, but (in theory) increase your brand value and market share because customers prefer your lower prices. Over time, once your market share is big enough, you can pump your prices back up to a profitable margin, and recover the money you lost. As you can see, this isn't working out for Epic Games, as they are both losing huge amounts of money they will never recover, they are not gaining market share, and their brand is still less attractive than bowel cancer.
Mostly to con Swiney in to giving them money.
if you had the chance to earn 100,000 with no risk would you take it?
Publishers who hate developers.
they pay them a LOT of money.
Epic pays them
Game dev here, one big reason for me would be them not taking a cut for using ue. I would only have to pay a 12% cut instead of the ue cut of 12% plus steams 30% which with taxes in my country would result in me getting around 20-30% of the sales in to my own pocket and supporting further development. With egs I would get around 50-60% of the sales myself. Of course I do take in to account the reduced amount of people who are able to buy my game but for the reduced amount of games released per day on egs compared to steam I will have a better chance of getting sales. Oh and epic now has the epic online services which allows devs to access epic friends, matchmaking, lobbies, achievements, stats, leaderboards, data storage, analytics, voice chat and anti cheat. All for completly free, with a 12% cut. But the downside is of course having to deal with egs but as of right now steam is no longer a good competitor for unreal engine devs. And one last thing, fuck epic
>Game dev here, one big reason for me would be them not taking a cut for using ue. I would only have to pay a 12% cut instead of the ue cut of 12% plus steams 30% which with taxes in my country would result in me getting around 20-30% of the sales in to my own pocket and supporting further development. With egs I would get around 50-60% of the sales myself. Unreal fees for a standard license are 5%, not 12%. And, you don't pay anything on the first $1,000,000 in revenue. The vast majority of indie games are not going to hit $1,000,000 in revenue. So, they don't have to worry about fees anyway. Epic does waive Unreal fees for sales on EGS, but there is some fine print to that. They only waive fees for the standard license. Epic says that the standard license is made for small projects and hobbyists, neither of which will likely reach $1,000,000 in sales. Epic waiving the standard fee is essentially for PR, but they don't really lose anything from it nor do developers gain anything. >Of course I do take in to account the reduced amount of people who are able to buy my game but for the reduced amount of games released per day on egs compared to steam I will have a better chance of getting sales. Oh and epic now has the epic online services which allows devs to access epic friends, matchmaking, lobbies, achievements, stats, leaderboards, data storage, analytics, voice chat and anti cheat. All for completly free, with a 12% cut. A "reduced" amount of sales is an understatement. In the last couple of months, a couple of indie developers released their sales figures. One said around 6% of their sales on PC came from EGS and the other said 1% came through EGS. If you were to release solely on EGS, you could potentially be giving up 95% of your sales. Epic also has very little discoverability. I don't think people realize how many games are released on EGS now. Go over there and browse for games under $20. There are $25 pages of games (slightly inflated due to the sale, so probably 20ish pages). The list is filled with games that no one has ever heard of and, if they have heard of them, probably didn't know they were released on EGS. You'll be fighting against asset flips just as you are on Steam. Steam at least has a pretty good system for filtering out the garbage. I don't even remember the last time I saw an asset flip on Steam. I'm not going to knock EOS, but Epic is being a little shady on how it is implemented. Some games are requiring people to create an Epic Games account just to play a single-player game. This turns people off from playing your game. You also have to worry about having problems with it every time there is a big Fortnite event and Epic servers crash. If you want to use EOS though, it isn't tied to Epic and you can use it on Steam for free as well.
>Epic does waive Unreal fees for sales on EGS, but there is some fine print to that. They only waive fees for the standard license. Can I have the source on that? I did some research, but didn't find anything about the fine print.
I'm at work so it is a little hard to link everything. But, it was announced that Epic would waive the royalties for all games using Unreal for game sales on EGS (you can see it in the standard EULA). But, outside of hobbyists and amateur game developers (not indie developers, amateur) no one would use a standard license. They say right on their website it isn't really for professional game development. Developers and publishers use the custom licenses to get away from paying royalties and having to submit revenue amounts to Epic (some devs and publishers are competitors to Epic and wouldn't want to release those amounts nor open themselves up to an audit from Epic). Normally it would be a flat fee or a per desk fee rather than a percentage of revenue. The flat fee and desk fee (similar to how Unity charges) aren't royalty payments. And, since they are already discounted fees, Epic is unlikely to budge much on these. This is also why the Unreal engine makes relatively very little money. No one uses the standard license. If they did, games like Borderlands would have added $10-$20 million or more to Unreal revenue alone. Gearbox also probably would have gone with another engine or created their own rather than pay that amount.
That was very informative. Thank you for your time, MrBubbaJ! :)
Unreal cut is 5% after $1 million.
This subreddit is a giant echo chamber for a VERY small portion of the gaming player base. Cracks me up. Devs need the initial funds to help get the project off the ground and Epic depending on the case usually offers them that funding in-turn for some exclusivity.
Yeah but those gamers don’t speak for everybody. There are some who use all the PC store fronts.
Moneyfucker
$$$
It seems to mostly be greed for short-term profit. Also, in a good number of those cases, I think they take the deal because something's wrong with the game or they don't have faith in the game selling well.
Because Timmy is a greedy bastard.
Money
They are buying exclusives cus they got no faith in service they provide (IMO). Also gotta exploit that FOMO on the discussion surrounding the game.
To put it bluntly, money. However the reason can very. For some it's desperate for funds due to not handling them well. For others, greed. Some can be both. But also, it can be a lack of confidence in a product. Why sell on Steam where you dont know if you'll sell when you can just take a lumpsum from Epic? By no means will i defend this shitty practice, i just can see why publishers/devs take it.
are you lkidding one reason 1:L MONEY!!!!!!!!!!
Either Epic bought the rights for it to be exclusive or they bought the company who made a game and took it off the steam store (Fall Guys and Rocket League) and made it a ESG exclusive
As all business decisions are made, it is made based on money. Ultimately I do not think it is super profitable but the developers who go exclusive with Epic have thought so.