I think this whole Epic store stuff developers are trying to do is going to end up back firing on a lot of these games and a lot,due to epic store, will under sell on PC and hurt a games potential in the long run

I was crunching numbers on this myself yesterday but without knowing what kind of $$ Epic are paying for something like Metro it's hard to know for sure but I can't really see how they will make more money by dropping Steam for a years Epic exclusivity. I mean unless Epic are paying $50m+ for a years storefront exclusivity and even that amount may not even cover the sales they will likely loose by the move.

It's also worth noting the recent change Steam brought it that works good for AAA games (sucks balls for Indie devs though) the drop to 25% share after the first 170k copies are sold followed by a drop to 20% share when the game as sold roughly 835k copies based on a $60 price tag so with GOLD Editions it would take less copies due to high revenue to hit the lower Steam Cut.

Yeah. Going to pass over this title now.

Valve could also make Steam more palatable to developers as well... But, exclusivity to certain stores on PC doesn't do anyone any favors.
Although, breaking up Valves monopoly long-term would be good to see from a competitive perspective I guess.

Good to see Epic attempting to break up Valve's monopoly.

Hopefully Steam lowers their cut, which is too high.

And Steam already has adjusted their cuts, especially in favor of AAA games. It needs more adjustment, but they are already being pro-active. 

Honestly, the Tweets from the parent company THQ Nordic makes me believe this is nothing more than a deal, not a righteous endeavor for fairer cuts (though that needs to be addressed too).

The thing is Steam had no real template when it started, Epic did and a lot of those features should have been implemented.  If a car company  built a car with drum brakes and  no seat belts then later on added disc brakes and seat belts, then years later another car company comes along you would expect their car to come with those features.

I agree competition is good,  more money for the developer hopefully means more certainty, but if it comes with putting up walls and epic looking after one part of their customer base at the expense of others then not so good.

That's pretty bad but understandable. It'll also be understandable if the game's sales suffer because of this, potentially even a lot. My guess is that the game's going to bring in less revenue than it would have, had it been on Steam from the start.

This timing is absolutely horrendous though.

No way we will ever know but I'd wager they sell way less than half the number of copies on Epic's Game store than they would have on Steam. But let's be generous and say they sell 50% of what they would have on Steam. So they are opting for 88% of 50% (Epic)= 44% vs. Steam at 70% of 100%= 70%.

Best of luck with that strategy.

Well yeah, I do admit that doing it merely 3 weeks prior, when many people have already pre-ordered is not the right way to go about this.

The reason I think these deals are being signed by Ubisoft/Deep Silver, is that it might be a huge loss for the short term (much less sales of course), but in the long term they could normalize the platform cut to 12% if Steam gives in. Which is a huge gambit of course, but the payoff would be big for PC developers across the board if it all works out. That 18% difference is quite a bit (which jumps to 23% if Unreal Engine is used).

Yeah, Epic store is lacking in a lot of features Steam has accumulated over time. I heard they did add a couple of the feature just some time ago (like regional pricing), but they are still way behind on that front (though hopefully they add stuff not too far into the future).

I guess in the end Epic is a developer oriented store while Steam is consumer oriented.

I've already talked to one of Rebel Galaxy Outlaw's devs and they confirmed that their game will launch at exactly the same price on Steam a whole year later, so I imagine the same thing happening with all devs going to Epic exclusively for a year. Thing is, this isn't pro consumer at all, it's devs demanding full price for a product that is a year old, and has thus degraded in value over time. We see this across all other industries, where prices for certain products end up going down due to the passage of time, it is what happens to everything after all, so why should digital code not lose value when we know things like software rot exist?. 

As for the 2$ difference, nah it's not worth it, not by a long shot, and it shows how desperate they are, if they're willing to toss away 100+ million users for a 2$ difference, and it also means I can write those devs off my support list. 

These devs exist because we buy from them, they exist because we exist, and not the other way around. 

Except they aren't. All they've been doing is using FN money to buy up games for temp exclusivity, which doesn't benefit the consumer, it actually gives us less options. Their client has had 10 years to use Steam's R&D to catch up to them. The refund policy only changed recently because we the people screamed about it to them. That's not good, that's absolutely awful. 

You also didn't address the fact that other storefronts and consoles take the same cut as Valve either.