Humble Bundle Partners With Epic Games

In a way, you have to understand devs as well. They want a bigger cut of the potential profits for their hard work. As a Steam collector, I'm torn over games abandoning the platform, but I know that I won't mind buying and playing games from the Epic Games Store and their proprietary launcher.

It's quite a simple decision for me, if they provide a Linux client I'll support them and be happy to buy from their store. Somehow I doubt that will happen, and I'm quite happy not buying timed exclusives - I've become quite patient as a Linux gamer!

While I'm against exclusives as an incentive, I do hope this increases competition, and gets Valve to lower their cut for the smaller developers also. I feel the 'standard' 30% cut that app stores take is ludicrous.

If these are timed exclusives, then I got no problem with it. Not interested in the Epic Store atm since CAD/USD rate is dog shit right now and Steam offers regional pricing.

I'm really curious to see how games jumping onto Epic's store fare over the next 6-12 months. Would love to see dev analysis and some facts shared as well. Will we see a lot of regret and failed launches/starving devs, or will they do just fine and prosper? Will Epic expand the store with more quality of life improvements for players, new features, etc?

Yeah great for developers, but not really much atm for the consumers

I already have the epic launcher installed because of the unreal engine. So I welcome the free Subnautica game :) (I already have super meat boy)
I also like that they only take 12% of the revenue. Not so much for the big gaming companies, but for indie developers it is a huge deal and even more so if they use the unreal engine. What steam charges is really ridiculous.
Would I buy new games there? No probably not. I never buy the new AAA games because they are simply too expensive. So I don't do it on Steam either. But if there will be a good humble epic bundle or something, sure. I bought one for origin and uplay before too.

Exclusivity has no place on PC, keep that garbage to consoles.

On one hand, that "store war" is getting a bit ridiculous, with people referring to "released on [store name]" instead of "released on PC". On the other hand, Steam's monopoly is unhealthy. Meh, if that's what it takes... ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I'm going to show you how massively HARSH exclusivity is with how little 18% profit means.

Let's look at total income as a time-dependent system and how consumer interest will follow. For simplicity, let's look at this from the publisher's point of view, ignoring any unknown agreement between them and the developer.

The cycle follows hype, release, and post-release interest. The effective hype will set an initial number of purchasers at the release date. Directly after release, an overly-hyped pre-order-based game follows an exponential decay, average games follow a Gaussian, and streamer bait follows a Poisson. Long after release, the exponential decay dominates and purchases have flatlined until a sale occurs to create smaller Gaussians in purchase numbers. In all cases, the majority of purchasers will almost always happen within the first months of release while remainders will be sifted out in following sale(s.)

Initial purchase breakeven is at 80% (74% if using UE) customer transition from Steam to Epic. If higher, that's better for the publisher. If lower, they need to rely on their Epic contract ending and praying that customer interest will still exist a full year later with other distributors. We're going to roughly look at the latter. An "N" percentage of players will transition from Steam to Epic. So, .88N is made initially. A sale occurs to which some arbitrary "S" sale coefficient and further percentage transitioning players of "M" of total remainder untransitioned N-1 should give a scaled income of .88M(1-S)(1-N). If 100% off (S=1), then all remainder should transition (M=1-N). If 0% off (S=0), then no change will happen (M=0). A first-order approximation to this would be that the remainder transitioning would follow M=S(1-N). If you want to skew towards sale-resistant buyers, use M=S^n(1-N) for n>1. Using the first-order, sale income is 0.88S(1-S)(1-N)^2. After the year and the game has released on other platforms, there's only 1-N-M buyers remaining. Interest in the game has been lost to time and only "R" percentage of remaining customers are on Steam, buying it after seeing an announcement. Income from Steam release is .7R(1-N-M) or for the first-order, .7R(1-N)(1-S). Total income is therefore .88N+.88S(1-S)(1-N)^2+.7R*(1-N-M).

From the equation, we can start putting in numbers based on customer transitions, one sale, and the presumed Steam release. After a full year, Steam users will have little to no interest in the game unless if it was consistently good (R=(0..1)) outside of being overly-hyped or streamer bait (R=0). For a variable R, the total income .88N+.88S(1-S)(1-N)^2+.7R*(1-N-M) must reach 0.7 to compete with what would've been a simple Steam release. If we match that, we can solve for R with a 2-dimensional N and S table which comes out to R=(.7-.88N-.88S(1-S)(1-N)^2)/(.7(1-N)(1-S)).

Full N-S table calculating breakeven Steam retention R (N down, S right)
XX .00 .10 .20 .30 .40 .50 .60 .70 .80 .90
.10 .97 .97 .99 1.0 1.2 1.4 1.7 2.4 4.0 8.7
.20 .94 .94 .97 1.0 1.2 1.4 1.7 2.4 3.9 8.5
.30 .89 .90 .94 1.0 1.1 1.3 1.7 2.3 3.7 8.1
.40 .83 .85 .88 .96 1.1 1.3 1.6 2.2 3.5 7.6
.50 .74 .76 .80 .87 .99 1.2 1.5 2.0 3.2 6.9
.60 .61 .63 .67 .73 .82 .98 1.2 1.7 2.7 5.7
.70 .40 .41 .42 .46 .52 .61 .77 1.1 1.7 3.7
.80 -.03 -.06 -.09 -.12 -.15 -.18 -.22 -.27 -.34 -.51

From this, if R>1, it's impossible to sell more copies than there are customers and the publisher has LOST money by placing their product on Epic. How is this possible? It means that too few people bought the initial product on Epic, many people bought the product on Epic when it went on sale, and they can't possibly make up the difference with a Steam release. This happens for the following:

Transition-Sale for a GUARANTEED LOSS
10% 30%+
20% 30%+
30% 30%+
40% 40%+
50% 50%+
60% 60%+
70% 70%+

In translation, one example says 50% of all people who would have purchased the game on Steam went over to Epic to buy it due to exclusivity. Epic then put out a sale for the game at 50% off or higher. It is now impossible to make up the lost money that they would have made if they released it on Steam.

The best case for R is to solve it to be as low as possible to breakeven. At 70% of people buying it on Epic exclusively, and there never being a sale on Epic, R comes out to 40%. This means 40% of people who still don't own the product need to buy the product a full year later after all the hype. If they have a 70% transition and then a 40% sale, there's 52% R needed. Having a sale while exclusive can only hurt the publisher when they plan on releasing it later on Steam.

In all cases of being below 80% buyer transition to Epic due to exclusivity, we cannot expect users to continue to want a product a full year later on the required levels. It is too risky for any publisher to agree to an exclusive contract with Epic until they've shown they have a massive paying userbase on order with Steam and Steam-associated sites. At the moment, it is safest to hedge bets and release non-exclusively on both platforms with the possibility of being slightly (up to but preferably less than 20%) cheaper on Epic.

Edit: Reformatted to work without asterisks for multiplication. Italics were everywhere.

I have Origin for Battlefield, uPlay for Assassins Creed, Battlenet for Destiny 2.
I will add Epic when they get a game I must have. For now, thats not the case and I'm not interested at all in Fortnite or their free games.

Tbh, thats a pretty crappy first list of exclusives they are putting out.

Steam, Origin, Uplay, Blizzard client, Discord store, Bethesda client, Epic Games launcher, Desura (when it was still around), Razer Cortex (Good thing that one is not needed unless free promo's), Twitch store (which gave free games via Twitch Prime as games on their client, so forced to use it), what's next ?

I know i am missing something, but i can't remember.

Cool, now we got even more Store exclusives on PC.

That's so fkn GREAT!

BRILLIANT!

support epic store! it will make valve lose revenue but it's ok because of their unfair prices, fees and policies!

crowd: *YAY! DIE VALVE HOPE! YOU GO BANKRUPT!!!*

epic also affected sales on GOG (the ones also putting 30% fees on their store), and they might have to close down their store! :O

crowd: *DAMN YOU EVIL EPIC! WTH HAVE YOU DONE!! I HATE YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!*

epic store charges developers only 12%, now devs can sell their AAA games under $60!
******tumbleweed rolls******
*$60 on release*

crowd: *OMG STUPID DEVS GREEDY CHEATERS REPORTED TO FBI I WONT PAY $60!*

Well, if that's the best they can do I wonder what sort of poop will be provided for free in three months. 😂

Steam has good games, and thousands crappy ones. Epic Store has one good and bunch of average ones, and in the future thousands crappy ones. Kewl kewl.

Time will tell.

Competition with 5 games... what? I hate multiple clients...

Update:

The Pathless with be on PC and be exclusive to the Epic Games Store.

World War Z by Saber Interactive has removed the Steam logo from their site and now just says PC. That may just mean it could be launching on both the Epic Games Store and Steam. I'll update when something official has been mentioned.

Simple as that.
https://clips.twitch.tv/YawningBadCougarDuDudu

Update:

Maneater by Tripwire Interactive will be a timed exclusive(12 months)

Hello Neighbor Hide & Seek is currently available on the Epic Game Store and will be exclusive to the Epic Games Store for PC.

Update

Darksiders III by Gunfire Games and THQ Nordic is now live on the Epic Games Store.
Subnautica is available right now for free till December 27th.

Update:

The Walking Dead: Final Season will now be exclusive to the Epic Games Store. If you've already purchased it on Steam you will get the rest of the episodes still but it will be no longer available for purchase. Episode 3 will be available with the launch on January 15, 2019.

Genesis Alpha One will be available January 29, 2019.

I totally forgot about Dauntless being announced at The Game Awards. It will be coming in April 2019 as an exclusive to this game store.

I adore indie games. Hate the exclusivity but consoles have been pulling that crap for years and it's just the game at this point. The attractiveness for indie developers coupled with the overall quality of aesthetics from all games I've seen featured on Epic Games has me interested enough to check in at times. And if there's ever a sale on indie games that catch my eye I'd throw my wallet at them so hard something would break. Basically I appreciate games with great aesthetic/cohesiveness with the world/lore over content amount and graphics alone. I love when smaller teams come together and make art because 2-20 people on a project can support and complement each other's talents without losing the vision and charm. A team of 100+ will never be organized enough to keep a consistent tone and quality across 20+ hours of play. That's understandable, obviously, but it has turned me off of the majority of AAA companies since 2011 or so. There are great games in the bunch, but many of those still were titles by smaller teams who will soon be bought out because of the follower count and became the major names we know today. I like fresh eyes and heart in my game. A bug will always be less hated by me when in an indie game as well on the polar opposite of the spectrum. With a smaller team and present talent bugs will frustrate but ultimately be forgiven and overlooked due to my appreciation for the Devs personal time and effort, as well as the much lower standard buying prices, frequent sales so I can wishlist and buy later, and many reasons I'm too lazy to list because I want to troll the winter sale tonight still. It's my bday on the 26th and you can bet that I'll have a cart of smaller games to try out and enjoy for what they are, a passion project by a nobody with a dream. c: I have little expectations for Epic, and I will always have steam installed if only for the good memories I have with games played on their platform. But ANY platform that helps Indie Devs with talent achieve their dreams and reach my eyes I will support as well. People deserve to be happy and art deserves to thrive if not why are we here? (Cash grabs can succ my ducc tho, shove your recycled assets up ur bum mates.)

Jk on the funds, but if it's my type of game I'll always check it out and throw out an honest opinion, and proudly buy it depending on my financial situation. c: Keep creating. Enjoying your work helps me get through life.

View attached image.

They really need to add support forums. And not just Epic, but other game store/clients also.

https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-games-store-users-have-been-turning-to-steam-for-subnautica-support/

Just a reminder for anyone interested. Getting Subnautica for free ends tomorrow.

Super Meat Boy is free on the Epic Games Store for those interested(started yesterday till January 10th)

I have to uninstall epic laucher..... messed up my tv box... the channels on tv freeze every 5 seconds when i have epic laucher running.... the problem disapear when i uninstalled it. LOL