Timmy is lying as always. Everyone older than 13 in Russia has a completely free debit card courtesy of Sberbank, because the government hates paper money and wants a e-trail for every kopeika, and every retailer larger than a lemonade stand is legally required to accept these cards. The fees are normal (3% or so, otherwise people would stealth revolt at a surprise 15% tax), they provide an online interface for sellers, and as a buyer you can also plug it into Yandex payments or Vory prison credit and the seller can then implement those (GOG does). I love bashing Sberbank and its discount techbro CEO, but they've been really good with cards for 5 years now.
Tim knows jack shit about business. Since he's the majority shareholder they can't do much about him, but the way he's been running Epic has been beyond incompetent. I think the theory that Tencent is letting him do this to get their hands on the Unreal engine is plausible. Because the shareholders would have stepped in a long time ago, because this fucktard is just bleeding them money. That might be what Tencent wants to do. Lose money on Epic, buy it up for cheap, control one of the most powerful gaming engines.
he does, he willfully ignores to be able to shit on steam. same way his shills ignore that timmy himself said 12% is not sustainable.
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Market forces have basically dictated 12% is not a sustainable model to keep with consumers if you're a third party store. 30% is the standard because its what is required to: Make a profit on your company, keep adding features to lure users and have capital to seduce games over to your platform without exclusivity.
This autistic faggot doesn't realize his 12% only works because he is sitting on Fortnite money. If he tried to do this without Fortnite money, it'd be dead in six months.
Hahaha, Christ Almighty, the nerve of Tim.
-Car dealerships are their own enormous bag of worms. Ever wonder why you can't just go to Target and buy a brand new car? That's a whole rabbit hole full of bullshit you can go down someday,
-Yeah, that's Burger King's signature burger. Nobody's getting pissed that you can't buy Mario Odyssey on PS4. If Fortnite were an Epic exclusive from the start, I don't think anyone would be surprised, and I'm sure its playerbase is grateful that it's cross-platform. Speaking of which, isn't that interesting? Epic's giant bread-and-butter game is on every platform of your choice, except other PC launchers. They know it's not worth it to completely ignore the console and mobile markets.
Another funny thing: Fortnite on Android isn't on Google Play, ostensibly so they don't have to pay Google anything for microtransactions. Searching for it gets you a message that it's just flat out not on Google Play, but you get a paid ad for PUBG Mobile. Guess who publishes PUBG Mobile? Tencent, of course.
Tim really loves to hide behind his excuses about developer cuts. Tim, you're just training a whole generation of zoomers how to pirate their games. That's a thing I've wanted to write a long post about, how shitty digital distribution practices get people into the flow of piracy instead of paying for stuff, to the point where they're much more comfortable with running a torrent client instead of running their card, and how so many games out there are just a flat-out better experience when pirated than legit.
Well, I've gone over that history in this thread, but I can re-hash it and say why 30% is the standard.
Back in ye old days, contrary to popular belief, Steam was not the first digital distributor. There were a metric fuckton of them. Most of them, like Epic, operated on a website. Epic isn't a launcher, its a glorified web browser. I know, because I've seen the launcher and been on old school digital distro sites. Same deal. But even those sites had more features.
Anyway, all these sites were broken up. The problem with these sites was the market was completely fractured. Sales were pretty much non-existent and you still needed CD-Keys to operate the game. The prices were pretty fucking high and they'd gouge the fuck out of you. The problem was also you had multiple distro sites with multiple games. You needed to keep track of all of this as well, including CD Keys. And some of these early distro sites sucked ass, were slow bandwidth, or actually limited your downloads. Others were also fly by nights who got bought up constantly, so all the time your games were changing places like a student loan distributor desperately trying to sell off a gender studies degree loan to some sap enough to take on the debt. This is if they transferred licenses over properly. God forbid they lost the license.
Worse still, these games had no regional pricing. So in poorer slavic countries, a game was still $60 US. Same with China and South America. So piracy was rampant. Extremely terrible DRM which could brick your computer and make your game unplayable were the order the day. As was copying down dozens of CD-Keys and if you lost the manual, you were shit out of luck.
What Steam originally was, was basically just an Origin. A way for Valve to launch their own products outside of digital distribution. Somewhere along the line Gaben had an epiphany. Piracy wasn't a price problem. Console games sold just fine as compared to PC games. While console games were harder to pirate, if price were an issue, people just wouldn't buy them because you know, they couldn't afford it. But they could. What Gaben realized and for some reason, nearly no one else in the entertainment industry, piracy is a
service problem.
The consumer wants an easy route to a product. They don't want 50 digital distribution sites that fractures them all over the internet, with different features and different rules. They don't want to pay for a product that is massively expensive as compared to everything else in their country. They don't want horrid DRM that makes running a pain. So what Gaben did was this: Centralize, Simplify, Expedite and Regional. Buying shit on Steam was simple. Much more simple than hunting down a crack or a good torrent. It had basically invisible DRM (except for cunt publishers). It had fair pricing. Not many realize this, but Gaben nearly eliminated PC piracy in Eastern Europe because of this. China is an exception, because it is INCREDIBLY hard for a non Chinese company to break in. But in Eastern Europe? He did the impossible.
The main thing is, doing this sort of thing requires a lot of features, back-end and well, making the fucking thing work well. We all know how long it took for Steam to work. This turns out to be not cheap. So to balance everything out and still make a profit, you've got your 30%. Steam could not do what it does and be what it is with a simple 12% cut. Epic boasts that, but it is economically not viable. Market forces have basically dictated this cut unless you run your own launcher. The only reason Epic can afford this absurdly low cut is because they are financed by the sales of their engine and Fortnite. If they did not have those two things, Epic would have been out of business a long time ago.
The main problem is that Epic is going
backwards. Its moving towards the old days of a fractured digital distribution market, with exclusivity, poor regional pricing, bad service and support. In a market that is continually evolving, Epic is trying to force a genie back into the bottle. You just can't do it. Steam has had over a decade of experience and even other publishers followed its example, except for Epic, which invested all its money in exclusives. This is what early digital distribution sites did; they overpaid for exclusives and charged a lot of money for them. And they just went under.
Epic simply cannot exist without billions of dollars backing it. Its just that. Epic cannot compete with any digital distribution launcher on the market without its Fortnite money. The problem is that its only a one trick pony: Exclusives. And companies are demanding more and more money for that. It only works with indies and even then, you're paying millions. AA games you're looking at 10 million, which you're not seeing. AAA games, you better pray that people are impatient enough or you're never seeing it. The Take2 RDR deal is one of the worst I've ever seen. It is simply burning money. They are just that desperate. These are supposed to be getting better, not worse.
So what does Epic have outside of exclusives? Nothing. The 12% isn't attractive enough to devs to remain exclusive without monetary incentive. Epic is extremely guarded about what games it picks anyway. Yeah, you'll be on the front page for a long time. Of an incredibly unpopular store with a small userbase. Great for you I guess. Epic is offering nothing for devs except a check and that's what devs and publishers are looking at Epic now: Gaming Welfare. Epic has no leverage. They know Steam will always be there for them. Take 2's RDR2 move was fucking genius. Its going to eat up all of the sales for RDR2 with its new launcher simply because of the press. Its only a month exclusivity, so people are just going to wait. And they get a fat check from Epic. When you look at that, companies are going to start wanting something similar. And at this point, Epic is just paying its competitors.
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