https://twitter.com/SanatanaMishra/status/1111579316091904001

I thought this was worth posting for those that are interested in knowing how Epics approach to curation is turning out. Turns out they aren't just blocking bad games but well known good ones as well. Assault Android Cactus has a rating of Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam, but apparently that's not good enough for Epic.

EDIT: Tweet has been deleted by the dev as people were apparently being "assholes". Here's a screenshot though for anyone who're interested:

View attached image.
4 years ago*

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Stroe?

4 years ago
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epic don't want niche games, they want blockbusters so they can spy on more computers.

4 years ago
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+1 best answer

4 years ago
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Right, like the new blockbuster they just added called Observation. The devs' last game sold a whopping 100k copies! An absolute megahit!
Quit yer yappin

4 years ago
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that's still a lot of possibly infectable new computer:-D

on other hands a 4 years old game with not many potential new buyers not worth their time I think:-)

Seriously, I can't think any other reason why they don't want a game with such positive reviews from players and press like this one.

4 years ago
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Seriously, I can't think any other reason why they don't want a game with such positive reviews from players and press like this one.

Perhaps they forgot to include potatoes?

4 years ago
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4 years ago
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and this is the exact reason why they using it for giveaway, possible to get it for giveaways for cheap:-)

4 years ago
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AAC is probably the best twin-stick shooter I have ever played.

4 years ago
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I enjoyed it and even gave it a positive review on Steam!

4 years ago
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4 years ago
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4 years ago
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Yep, just posted a screenshot of the tweet above.

4 years ago
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that's why it's called EPIC

UN-EPIC

4 years ago
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4 years ago
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Assault Android Cactus - Score: 84
Metro Exodus - Score: 83

I didn't look at the user score.

4 years ago
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4 years ago
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Fair point. I removed the sentence about metacritic from the top post.

4 years ago
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4 years ago
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What's this Epic store?

4 years ago
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It's China's latest attempt to grab personal information from people.

4 years ago
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More like China's attempt to either put Valve out of business or hurt them enough so a Chinese company can buy them to install spyware world wide.

4 years ago
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not approving the game for distribution on their platform is not the same as "blocking" the game. Your choice of words makes it sound like they banned the game or something. I agree it is a dubious decision though as it is a well-received game.

4 years ago*
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Yea I wasn't completely happy with that choice of words either, but nothing better came to mind when posting.
Just changed it.

4 years ago
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they only care if the game is highly anticipated, they don't actually care about game quality.. only if they can lure steam user to their shitty store because muh cOmPeTItIOn

4 years ago
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that's fine, i wish steam did something like this but with those trash $1 games.

4 years ago
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+1

4 years ago
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Well, Valve did that like 5 years ago. And then devs were "booo, hooo, Valve is not allowing us to sell games, how dare they decide what is good for their store, evil Valve".
So they made Greenlight-then--Direct and devs are "boooo, hoooo, Valve is not blocking my competition and now I have to do a marketing, evil Valve".

4 years ago
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I like $1 trash games so...

4 years ago
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4 years ago
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https://timruswick.itch.io/philophobia

Originally released as Itch exclusive because dev wanted to see if the game would sell outside of steam / wasn't feeling steam at the time due to all the negative vibes he felt from all over the internet. It sold like 300+ copies I think and he earned a decent amount compared to his expectations (at 0% itch fee!). There's a video about it how and why. Anyway, It should be on steam now too.

4 years ago
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Okay, so I'll try and break it down for myself and I'm basically writing it down here in case anyone else is interested.
Before I start writing this, keep in mind that I have a bias against Epic Games Store and might be unduly harsh against them, even though I'll try and keep that bias to a minimum.

Epic promises high quality games and distances itself from the Valve's school of thought of an "Opened floodgates" policy for the games they allow on their store.
Assault Android Cactus (AAC from now on) is a well reviewed game on Steam so far with Overwhelmingly Positive reviews. Looking in-depth into the reviews shows that it's still positive (meaning key owners are also satisfied for the most part).

So what's the game lacking... Well, definitely popularity. They might have Overwhelmingly Positive reviews, but it's also easy to see that the game has less than 1000 reviews with the rest being key reviews. In general, it shows that the customer isn't enticed to the game independently and needs cheap deals to give the game a chance (keys don't mean discount purchases, but the generalization is true and there's no reason to guess it's any different for this game). The game lacks "top notch" graphical quality and the screenshots range from mediocre showcases to downright awful messes of color and flashes. The game's base price is also very low compared to most other games and is lower than most games on the Epic Store. They used to have "transaction fees" on their purchases at Epic, so perhaps this is a negative for them as well.
I doubt that the store's staff plays the games that want to come onto the store. So they're looking at outside aspects. Reviews, prices, screenshots, trailers, developer's Twitter/other social media and so on.

I'm not too surprised that Epic Games Store didn't accept this game. First the fact that they need to reject a couple of games for good PR for their store's exclusivity. The store page isn't great and their reviews aren't as promising as one might think. 30 months and all they really have is around 1000 confirmed purchases. I know this isn't the real amount and in fact it's way higher. But remember that Epic's not us. They're not the consumer and instead they're the businessmen that will willingly only see what's in front of them when it comes to something as minor as a single product in an entire store.

AAC isn't in a place to make demands and it has no right to really bitch and moan. They also flat out obfuscate the truth while also using some pretty shitty metrics to make their case. First they use Metacritic. As a Steam game that's also indie, this is a double-whammy of idiocy to show your mettle in the business. Second, they are basically lying about the number. The PC version's at a 79 with only 15 votes from the critic side and a very weak 6.8 from the user side, but even then it's only 28 ratings. So how did they reach the 87? By citing the Switch reviews. This isn't much better though. Critic and user reviews are 87 and 8.7 respectively. But it's even worse than in the PC version, because there are only 9 critics and 17 user ratings. This only serves to show Epic that their game's so unpopular that they barely got over 10 people to even rate their game. This isn't helping them in any way. Also doesn't help that Switch releases are rated way higher than PC, because their players are more favorable towards all games critically because of the smaller pool of games to even pick from. Also, the Switch, to a certain extent, is taking part in the console wars, which will inflate reviews inherently due to brand loyalty. But to add to this, it's a different version of the game. It's the "+" version of the game, which isn't their PC version, which is just a normal one. Unless they're planning to make an Epic exclusive "+" version's PC port, then they're full of shit.
So the developer essentially just lied. There's no objectivity in what he said and there's no reason to really believe what they say now. At the very least, expect everything he said to need a chunks of salt to morph back into any type of realistic situation.

I'm not surprised Epic finally started rejecting games properly. I'm also inclined to believe that losing out on Assault Android Cactus will not do anything to Epic. The game's not popular and its earning potential's most likely extremely small. It's a mixture of developer's ego clashing with questionable elitist business moves from the side of Epic. The issue here is that the developer's not in the right here. Epic made a dumb decision, but rejecting a game from their own store is something you should respect if you want to be a developer that people want to work with. Epic decided you weren't good enough. Don't prove them right by citing false reviews and badmouthing a store in public for not wanting you.

4 years ago
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4 years ago
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You don't seem to be aware of the context here. Epic's strategy of strong curation is explicitly placed in opposition to Steam's laissez-faire strategy. Valve has received harsh criticism from some commentators who believe that the sheer quantity of releases on Steam is burying high-quality games that don't get enough attention. That's the argument for strong curation: that high-quality games could be made more popular if they're hand-picked by the storefront. And that's how Epic is selling their store. "EGS is for good games, from any size studio. If your game is crappy, sell it on Steam."

Yeah, I'm aware of this. But you're also not thinking of how this practice influences everything else. They want to be the premium store. They want to be the ones that can say "Everything in our store is great" to boost the faith in the customer when they go to their store to buy things. Same goes for profits. Epic Store needs to make money. A small random indie won't make them money, so that'll increase the chances that they're comfortable with saying no to them, which is exactly what happened.

But that's not how Epic is actually selecting games. As you note, their actual selection process appears to be based more on popularity. Assault Android Cactus is an outstanding game in a niche genre, and it hasn't gotten as much attention or sales as it deserves.

Yeah, for one. Are we going to pretend that this massive company that runs a store that's managed to already create developer success stories is so dumb that they ignore every other aspect now? As a meme, you can say that they're dumb for doing some things, but you'd be wrong in pretending that Epic's got no clue how to do basic level business. See, you're talking as a consumer right now. "hasn't gotten what it deserves" and other phrases like that are things that don't mean anything. You think it deserves something, but that means nothing when the market literally shows you that it doesn't deserve jack. In a business sense, AAC wasn't a hit. People didn't want it that much. Depending on the budget, the game might've even been a failure (though odds are it wasn't because it got a remastered Switch edition)
When doing business, emotion will be kept out. You can say that a game "deserves" one and the other, but in business, the things that deserve things are the ones that also got them.

Meanwhile, one of the first games they let in was Hello Neighbor, a glitchy, hollow 38-Metacritic trainwreck that got popular from wacky Twitch-stream antics. This is powerful evidence that Epic's curation isn't based on quality, as they claim it is.

Yeah, Hello Neighbor is a pretty damn weak game. Though, a single game doesn't really prove anything. I'm proving all of my guesses off of actual things that have been said from the company's leadership. Even worse, as you said, it was brought to the store when it started, not after they had clearly stated their intent on what they're planning to do.
The fact here also is that you need to hit a balance here. The store can't get flooded and it can't have crap. AAC won't get sales and its quality is dubious when looking at the game on surface level (store page, screenshots, description, reviews and so on).

All in all, I was unpacking this stuff here and we can't give definitive statements. A single game won't show much, statements can be changed and all we can do it speculate. The developer's still being an asshole and it doesn't help that he purposefully misled everyone.

4 years ago
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4 years ago
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The linked site don't exist, so my informations are now very few.

They are a company and none of us know why they don't want this game at there store.
And to be honest it don't interest me too.
Did you try to say your supermarket what food (labels) must lay in there storages ?
They should handle THERE business how THEY want and if i am not pleased as customer i let them feel it with my money pocket.

4 years ago
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Seems like the final nail in their store's coffin. They'll never get anywhere if they only sell popular games. They'll run out of bribe money eventually, meaning no more 1-year exclusives. If they haven't become a serious competitor to Steam by that point, they're done. Just another lame publisher store like Origin and Uplay, but with fewer in-house exclusives. If they want to compete with Steam as a generic store, they need to have a large enough library of games that people who are just now starting to build up their collections might consider them the best place to buy from. Excluding trashware is all well and good, but excluding obscure niche games is suicide. Aside from the casuals who only play whatever is popular right now (and who are mostly on consoles anyway), pretty much every gamer has at least 1 preferred genre and is interested in finding obscure niche games from that genre. If Steam caters to that and Epic doesn't, Steam wins.

Of course, a large library is not enough. Epic also needs to match or outdo Steam's regional pricing and the 3rd party key sellers, especially bundles. Also the game community pages, the groups, the workshop. And even after all that, they'll still only be the best choice for people who don't already have a huge library on Steam, so they'd need all that money they're throwing at exclusives to keep going at a loss until their userbase grows. Unless they manage some kind of spectacular GOG Connect -like deal.

In fact, you know what, they should have just duplicated people's Steam libraries. Then use their Fortnite money to pay for the bandwidth for people downloading games they didn't buy there for the next few years. And also offer some money to every dev of every non-trash game on Steam to get them to agree to put their game on the Epic store and to rush sending the files over so it doesn't take forever to build up the catalog. Also offer some money to the bundle sites to get them to push devs to offer Epic keys in addition to Steam keys. And in the meantime, rush to implement regional pricing and community features. And just like that, in a few months they'd have had a serious competitor to Steam, with the advantages of no trashware and a lower cut taken from every sale. And they absolutely should have split that lower cut between the devs and the customers, effectively having every game be 9% cheaper on their store.

4 years ago
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"they should have just duplicated people's Steam libraries"

Yea if I was in their shoes I'd probably try and get Steam games with an Overwhelmingly Positive rating to fill out the Epic store. Even if the games are old they could still attract customers (its not rare for people to double-dip on games they like across platforms).

4 years ago
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They'll never get anywhere if they only sell popular games.

Gave me a good laugh.

4 years ago
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It's ok for me if they just want to sell AAA games. I don't care. Origin, Battle.net, Bethesda... all ok also. I'm sure some people just have an acoount on each one. I don't. I'm a Linux player ant I just use GOG and Steam (Proton is so awsome!).

4 years ago
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A few years ago the dev said that GOG didn't even respond to his request for inclusion there. So this is an improvement. Considering that GOG has thousands of games, and epic only dozens, GOG's rejection is also a lot more of an insult.

At this point Epic is limiting releases quite severely due to the state of the store, so I'd expect very few games to get in. Epic said that it's going to open the store more later this year. I suppose that's the response of 'get back to them in a year' meant.

4 years ago
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I think they want to minimize the amount of games they have because their client's UI/UX seems like it would do horribly with a large amount of games. I'm already lost in the few games I have there... they need to work on this, seriously :x

4 years ago
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Work on improving the actual platform? Stop this crazy talk! Let them just bribe more publishers/devs instead! That's the real value and C O M P E T I T I O N we all need in PC market right now.

4 years ago
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Can't say I'm surprised Epic rejected AAC. Barely anyone's heard of the game, outside of bundle buyers. Not profitable at all for them at this point. Even as a freebie I don't think it'd get people to install the client.

4 years ago
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Good. Epic should stay premium.

4 years ago
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Like hello neighbor, 38 in metacritic, only popular because twitch ? Or Roller Coaster Tycoon Adventure, also below 50?

4 years ago
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Please don't be logical. Logic has no place here.

4 years ago
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do you see over a 1000 games that wouldnt grace a toilet bowl ?

4 years ago
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I'm not the one claiming Epic should stay premium. Can't "stay" premium when it started with those two games.

4 years ago*
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4 years ago
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