The Epic First Run programme allows developers of any size to claim 100% of revenue if they agree to make their game exclusive on the Epic Games Store for six months.
After the six months are up, the game will revert to the standard Epic Games Store revenue split of 88% for the developer and 12% for Epic Games.
I don’t think I’ve spent any money on the Epic Launcher yet but I’m happy to see them try their best. Competition is good and needed.
The problem with Epics approach is theyre doing competition for devs, not compition for consumers.
Compition for content usually comes at the cost of consumer convenience or benefit (e.g the multitude of streaming platforms for movies and videos)
Exactly. This isn’t encouraging competition; It’s encouraging exclusivity. The two are diametrically opposed. If you’re competing over exclusives, you’re not really competing to make the best platform possible. It’s a race to the bottom, because Epic has consistently proven that they don’t care about the consumer experience. Their launcher is hot garbage, and they seemingly have no plans on improving it. Meanwhile, Steam has a best-in-class launcher and has been making improvements every single week.
If Epic focused on improving the usability and the feature set, I think they’d find gamers much more willing to give it a try. But when every single experience with a platform is bad, gamers are going to dig their heels in and refuse to use it out of spite.
Competition for dev’s is fine, its the exclusivity deals that show them to be evil.
Offer devs a better cut of the profits, devs can sell the game for less on Epic and make the same money as steam… a real price war to reduce fees. The devs and customers would naturally follow.
But Epic has demonstrated they want to take advantage of their “customers”… so many reasonable people are like… Steam is the devil we know, a chill devil we can get a beer with, and eat some hot dogs on the weeknds with, The Lowbowski of devils… were good.
Not inplying compition between devs is bad, its just if you go for devs and little for the consumer, it would make sense at a consumer standpoint, that’s not competition.
The mistake a lot of Pro Epic defenders make is equivalating that all forms of competition is equally great for everyone, when it isn’t.
They’ve mostly tried their best to make as much money as possible, not actually compete as a service, though, unfortunately.