Epic Games General Thread - Its time to talk about what the AAA gaming industry does not understand about the PC console.

[Dick Pooman]

I think the number of people who are willing to either wait 6 months for games to come out on Steam, or just outright pirate these store exclusives are way higher than they thought going into these ventures. This sounds like a gambit just to look "good" under the guise of not losing money/investor confidence and making themselves look even worse.

 

[The tired cat]

A. Won't happen, would be nice if it did but sadly it won't ; B. Enjoy losing more money than you already did as both Ubisoft and Rockstar sell their shit on their stores while getting extra from you suckers.

 

[Red Hood]

I wonder what the woke game journalists would think of Sweeney's Jill of the Jungle. I mean the heroine is an attractive sexualized blonde woman created by a man.

 

[Chichan]

They are both shitty because they are both easily hacked. Fuck em both.

 

[Ghost of Wesley Willis]

Epic's name has been tainted by Fortnite and ownership from tencent, and it will be a cold day in hell before I even touch their shitty spyware masquerading as a game client.

 

[Clop]

If I gotta switch platform at any point in time, it sure as fuck isn't going to be Epic. It's going to be GOG. If GOG ever goes down I'll just download all the installers I ever got from Humble and tell the entire industry to go fuck itself.

The industry's biggest issue isn't a business catering to the customer, it's the industry's obsession with piracy, DRM, copyright strike everything like it's the fucking RIAA, customers are all potential thieves, one-hundred-dollar launch packages, GameStop scamming customers with frivolous sales pitches, cut content, fuck you why aren't you paying more for less what the fuck.

Nope, it's the 'Walmart' of game stores that's the problem. Business doesn't run on morals and sunshine, either provide a better service that can survive on your optimism engine or shut up.

 

[Eryngium]

At first I was a bit rustled by this epic game shit but other people are sperging so badly over it now, it's kinda fun to watch.

 

[MrTroll]

Epic trolling. Literally.

 

[Y2K Baby]

I don't get it.

 

[MuuMuu Bunnylips]

"Buy...ing?" What is this... "buying" you speak of?

 

[UE 558]

If I gotta switch platform at any point in time, it sure as fuck isn't going to be Epic. It's going to be GOG. If GOG ever goes down I'll just download all the installers I ever got from Humble and tell the entire industry to go fuck itself.

The industry's biggest issue isn't a business catering to the customer, it's the industry's obsession with piracy, DRM, copyright strike everything like it's the fucking RIAA, customers are all potential thieves, one-hundred-dollar launch packages, GameStop scamming customers with frivolous sales pitches, cut content, fuck you why aren't you paying more for less what the fuck.

Nope, it's the 'Walmart' of game stores that's the problem. Business doesn't run on morals and sunshine, either provide a better service that can survive on your optimism engine or shut up.

Only issue though is that many pubs AAA like A/B, Bethesda, WB, etc are gonna go to Epic or Steam instead of GOG because they know damn well that CDPR will call them out if they try anything scummy with DRM

 

[The tired cat]

Only issue though is that many pubs AAA like A/B, Bethesda, WB, etc are gonna go to Epic or Steam instead of GOG because they know damn well that CDPR will call them out if they try anything scummy with DRM

You mean how they "called out" Blizzard, when they put Diablo 1, Warcraft 1-2 on GoG and said "Hey, if you wanna play multiplayer you guys will need Battle.net."

 

[KingofNothing]

Did anyone catch this?

https://twitter.com/SatisfactoryAF/status/1121011708292734976

This is what it looks like for indie devs on Epic Store.

https://twitter.com/SatisfactoryAF/status/1121300538673586178

The guy deleted his tweet but he was telling them to put it on steam or he would pirate it. 30 people, 3 years, 9 copies sold. I hope those extra couple of percents were worth it to them.

9 copies? Jesus that really sucks, I saw a video of this game a week ago and it looked pretty nice even if I'm getting a little tied of the exploring/crafting gimmick. I wonder if four of those copies are from the guys I saw playing it. Didn't realize it was on Epic though, that is unfortunate.

 

[Clop]

Only issue though is that many pubs AAA like A/B, Bethesda, WB, etc are gonna go to Epic or Steam instead of GOG because they know damn well that CDPR will call them out if they try anything scummy with DRM

And those companies can fuck right off with Epic and Valve when the system finally falls over. I've never been so motivated to just buy an old Atari or Commodore instead.

 

[Secret Asshole]

He's saying this because exclusives aren't working out for them or the people doing them. Exclusives are hated, not financially viable, not hurting Valve enough, increasing pirating and might actually be hurting the games enough to make securing future exclusives even more expensive. Indie exclusives at this point for Epic basically mean floating an entire studio.

This isn't Tim Sweeny saying to Valve, "Come at me bro."

This is Tim Sweeny being, "Please for the love of God let me fuck you over for this horrible, horrible decision I made."

There is no way this doesn't come off as weakness. Its a plea for help and for him to save face. Fuck off Sweeny, eat the bowl of shit you made.

A. Won't happen, would be nice if it did but sadly it won't ; B. Enjoy losing more money than you already did as both Ubisoft and Rockstar sell their shit on their stores while getting extra from you suckers.

There was a good point on Twitter that Steam lets you make infinite keys and doesn't take any cut. So if you wanted to sell your game on a website instead of Steam, you could do so. Or if you wanted a lower percentage, you could use a key reseller who takes less of a cut. So this is trying to hurt them through lowering their margins by making them stop this policy. Which they'll obviously never do.

Only issue though is that many pubs AAA like A/B, Bethesda, WB, etc are gonna go to Epic or Steam instead of GOG because they know damn well that CDPR will call them out if they try anything scummy with DRM

This is actually a problem as well. You don't need to buy Anno 1800 on Epic. You can just buy it off the Ubi launcher. Or the Bethesda store (Also Bethesda is not leaving Steam. They're bringing more games to it). Or the Rockstore err...store. The problem with exclusivity is that it isn't really exclusive. Most Triple A studios nowadays have their own launchers. Nearly everyone with Steam has Uplay, so they can skip Epic.

That's another problem Epic has with exclusives. People are just going around them.

Epic Exclusives will eventually stop. As usual, Steam doesn't have to do anything about it. Because they're so harmful to Epic its basically worth it for Steam to let them blow millions and millions on securing exclusives for more and more money, while pissing off the audience they need to convert and people go around their launcher to AAA ones. It also forces Epic to buy exclusives rather than work on making their store better.

In a way, Epic store fucked themselves into a corner with the exclusives. Because it resurrected the piracy problem, instantly made them hated, and cost them massive amounts of money. Its been a chain around their neck. You can't get around a major PC release now with people asking, "Will it be an Epic exclusive?" And that's not in a positive way. Its basically asking, "Will I be pirating this or not?"

\EDIT:
Also they'll never get any good Japanese game exclusives because it'll be a cold fucking day in hell before the Japs work with a majorly owned Chinese company.

Another thing I just realized, they'll try to blame Steam for exclusives because they didn't take Sweeny's shitty fucking deal. Hey Sweeny, I guess your consumers actually do decide who wins a war in CONSUMERISM, YOU DUMB GIGANTIC FAGGOT.

 

[Poiseon]

He's saying this because exclusives aren't working out for them or the people doing them. Exclusives are hated, not financially viable, not hurting Valve enough, increasing pirating and might actually be hurting the games enough to make securing future exclusives even more expensive. Indie exclusives at this point for Epic basically mean floating an entire studio.

This isn't Tim Sweeny saying to Valve, "Come at me bro."

This is Tim Sweeny being, "Please for the love of God let me fuck you over for this horrible, horrible decision I made."

There is no way this doesn't come off as weakness. Its a plea for help and for him to save face. Fuck off Sweeny, eat the bowl of shit you made.



There was a good point on Twitter that Steam lets you make infinite keys and doesn't take any cut. So if you wanted to sell your game on a website instead of Steam, you could do so. Or if you wanted a lower percentage, you could use a key reseller who takes less of a cut. So this is trying to hurt them through lowering their margins by making them stop this policy. Which they'll obviously never do.



This is actually a problem as well. You don't need to buy Anno 1800 on Epic. You can just buy it off the Ubi launcher. Or the Bethesda store (Also Bethesda is not leaving Steam. They're bringing more games to it). Or the Rockstore err...store. The problem with exclusivity is that it isn't really exclusive. Most Triple A studios nowadays have their own launchers. Nearly everyone with Steam has Uplay, so they can skip Epic.

That's another problem Epic has with exclusives. People are just going around them.

Epic Exclusives will eventually stop. As usual, Steam doesn't have to do anything about it. Because they're so harmful to Epic its basically worth it for Steam to let them blow millions and millions on securing exclusives for more and more money, while pissing off the audience they need to convert and people go around their launcher to AAA ones. It also forces Epic to buy exclusives rather than work on making their store better.

In a way, Epic store fucked themselves into a corner with the exclusives. Because it resurrected the piracy problem, instantly made them hated, and cost them massive amounts of money. Its been a chain around their neck. You can't get around a major PC release now with people asking, "Will it be an Epic exclusive?" And that's not in a positive way. Its basically asking, "Will I be pirating this or not?"

\EDIT:
Also they'll never get any good Japanese game exclusives because it'll be a cold fucking day in hell before the Japs work with a majorly owned Chinese company.

Another thing I just realized, they'll try to blame Steam for exclusives because they didn't take Sweeny's shitty fucking deal. Hey Sweeny, I guess your consumers actually do decide who wins a war in CONSUMERISM, YOU DUMB GIGANTIC FAGGOT.

Hey now, you should tone it down. You might make poor wittle Sweeny cry uwu

In all seriousness; Sweeny showimg his hand like this is pathetic. It'd be nice if someone at Epic leaked their financials. Must be a hell of a read.

 

[Secret Asshole]

Exactly, its fucking sad. Oh, it is bleeding red in the Epic Store segment. No fucking way they're making money with his comment.

 

[Slamerella]

Valve already takes a 30% cut and gives devs 70. What would an extra 88% do?
Not a whole lot really. At least for sales. What it would do however is affect Valve more. The reason that they have that cut is for server upkeep, for not only their games but the store, the community, the market, and the workshop, all which are on separate servers (and that's JUST for Steam's networking, not even including the actual Valve sites and office work or how downloads work.) Judging by the fact that there's a lot of nothing to do or get on EGS and why Valve has such a "steep cut" for the devs, I can see why they're able to give a bigger cut to devs.

 

[Zeke Von Genbu]

Valve already takes a 30% cut and gives devs 70. What would an extra 88% do?
Not a whole lot really. At least for sales. What it would do however is affect Valve more. The reason that they have that cut is for server upkeep, for not only their games but the store, the community, the market, and the workshop, all which are on separate servers (and that's JUST for Steam's networking, not even including the actual Valve sites and office work or how downloads work.) Judging by the fact that there's a lot of nothing to do or get on EGS and why Valve has such a "steep cut" for the devs, I can see why they're able to give a bigger cut to devs.

A bit of a disclaimer, all I'm about to say is all college student observation and theory based on what I've studied in the almost 4 years I've studied accounting. So keep that in mind.

Depends on how the servers are expensed, larger operations typically can have lower costs overall relative to their size specifically because they're big enough to gain more sales/volume to offset costs. I have absolutely no idea how servers are expensed, so people feel free to explain that I'd love to hear it.. My best guess would be they're mostly fixed but with variable components such as whatever employees are required at all given hours to keep the store operational. How much this variableness changes based on sales or just any activity at all is unknown to the general public, but I'd assume they're mostly fixed as the employee hours I assume are set unless you need to work overtime to fix them or make critical updates. I'd still guess that the servers are mostly fixed costs, or might as well be fixed as you'd likely use the same amount of staff. You likely need the same number of working hours at whatever pay rate/salary Valve pays them. If anyone with actual experience in managing something like this can chime in, that'd be great.

Going with the assumption that the servers are (mostly) fixed costs. Fixed costs by nature don't change based on how much you sell so you just need to generate enough revenue and sales to offset the costs to earn that revenue, the rest is profit. So Steam having the pure sales volume advantage means they can earn more revenue and therefore profit because they can offset, the assumed, fixed cost element of servers. The best thing I can attribute to a direct variable cost is the dev cut which leads to the contribution margin.

Any difference in the dev cut changes the contribution margin (CM for short), if you sold something for $25 and your variable cost is the 30% (edit: this should have been 70%, but I'm exceptional) dev cut ($7.50) of that amount, you'd basically always have a CM of .7 on that product, you can change the $25 to anything and it'd still be the same. For anyone who wants to try this at home CM is: (Sales Revenue - Variable cost) / Sales Revenue. This is ignoring transaction costs as I have no idea if Valve would attribute every cost separately to the products, or just simply just add them all into one expense account to keep things simple. This is also what makes the employee costs difficult, you can't directly apply them easily to a specific sale though you could apply an estimated number to the CM which is what I imagine Valve would do to get a better idea of their CM. Without that private information getting an actual number is basically impossible so we can approximate Steam's CM to .7 or less, though I'd personally guess due to their size and scope it shouldn't go down more than .1 so if you want my asspull guess between .6-.7.

Tl;dr: The servers if my assumption is correct, shouldn't matter as much as you think because they're likely considered fixed costs. The contribution margin (How much profit you make per sale of a product to offset your fixed costs) is what is worth looking at, as it likely involves how the dev cut works in both Steam and EGS' profits and trying to figure out if an approximate .7 (or less depending on how employee costs are applied if they are) contribution margin is high or low for Steam. That I have no idea, as Steam might have some advantages unique to their business that a typical retail store does not have such as no freight and cost to manage the logistics of that, though considering Valve's success I'd assume it is a reasonable enough margin.

Edit for corrections: I'm actually exceptional and at least partially dyslectic. Steam's contribution margin should actually be estimated at .2-.3, not .6-.7. I had the cut numbers completely flipped for some reason, my bad. What this does change to my statements is that steam's profits are more volatile to changes in the CM because it is so small as is, it makes me wonder just how much Steam sells to be able to profit as heavily as I'd imagine Valve is currently. It also makes me wonder how EPS is actually consistently profitable, if it even is, I truly do wonder how any business personnel thought this would work or if the costs to run this operation are actually that low.

 

[Slamerella]

A bit of a disclaimer, all I'm about to say is all college student observation and theory based on what I've studied in the almost 4 years I've studied accounting. So keep that in mind.

Depends on how the servers are expensed, larger operations typically can have lower costs overall relative to their size specifically because they're big enough to gain more sales/volume to offset costs. I have absolutely no idea how servers are expensed, so people feel free to explain that I'd love to hear it.. My best guess would be they're mostly fixed but with variable components such as whatever employees are required at all given hours to keep the store operational. How much this variableness changes based on sales or just any activity at all is unknown to the general public, but I'd assume they're mostly fixed as the employee hours I assume are set unless you need to work overtime to fix them or make critical updates. I'd still guess that the servers are mostly fixed costs, or might as well be fixed as you'd likely use the same amount of staff. You likely need the same number of working hours at whatever pay rate/salary Valve pays them. If anyone with actual experience in managing something like this can chime in, that'd be great.

Going with the assumption that the servers are (mostly) fixed costs. Fixed costs by nature don't change based on how much you sell so you just need to generate enough revenue and sales to offset the costs to earn that revenue, the rest is profit. So Steam having the pure sales volume advantage means they can earn more revenue and therefore profit because they can offset, the assumed, fixed cost element of servers. The best thing I can attribute to a direct variable cost is the dev cut which leads to the contribution margin.

Any difference in the dev cut changes the contribution margin (CM for short), if you sold something for $25 and your variable cost is the 30% dev cut ($7.50) of that amount, you'd basically always have a CM of .7 on that product, you can change the $25 to anything and it'd still be the same. For anyone who wants to try this at home CM is: (Sales Revenue - Variable cost) / Sales Revenue. This is ignoring transaction costs as I have no idea if Valve would attribute every cost separately to the products, or just simply just add them all into one expense account to keep things simple. This is also what makes the employee costs difficult, you can't directly apply them easily to a specific sale though you could apply an estimated number to the CM which is what I imagine Valve would do to get a better idea of their CM. Without that private information getting an actual number is basically impossible so we can approximate Steam's CM to .7 or less, though I'd personally guess due to their size and scope it shouldn't go down more than .1 so if you want my asspull guess between .6-.7.

Tl;dr: The servers if my assumption is correct, shouldn't matter as much as you think because they're likely considered fixed costs. The contribution margin (How much profit you make per sale of a product to offset your fixed costs) is what is worth looking at, as it likely involves how the dev cut works in both Steam and EGS' profits and trying to figure out if an approximate .7 (or less depending on how employee costs are applied if they are) contribution margin is high or low for Steam. That I have no idea, as Steam might have some advantages unique to their business that a typical retail store does not have such as no freight and cost to manage the logistics of that, though considering Valve's success I'd assume it is a reasonable enough margin.

Each server, like I mentioned, is for different things. They even have official servers for their games. Right now, Valve has three games that I know they run official servers on constantly: Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike Global Offensive, and Dota2. For the latter two, that's quite a lot considering how many people are playing those games (upwards in the hundred thousands) but Team Fortress 2, while it does get a hefty 50k, still has an ass load of servers. On top of that, there's also the mass amounts of hardware they develop and manufacture. That 30% is definitely going somewhere, a lot more places than one would think. But even then, this shouldn't even be a big deal nor worth defending because these companies can do whatever they want for a cut.
Just don't be Epic and hold your exclusives hostage while trying to look like the good guy.