Personally, as a customer, not a developer, this is disappointing to me, as there's still no reason for me to shop on Epic when they don't support my operating system, so this is likely just going to entice more developers to make me wait 6 months to play their games. Nonetheless, it's gaming news.
All signs point to that program being a failure for them, which is why the exclusivity offers and announcements started drying up, but I guess this is them trying a revised strategy.
Not a failure at all. Operating at a loss for years to start up is not uncommon, and this was the case for Amazon, Netflix, Uber, Spotify and many others. Eventually they have to wind down their investments as they move towards breaking even and becoming profitable. In 2019, Epic had a specific roadmap on dropping the aggressive pursuit of exclusives and estimated that it would take them 5 years to reach profitability.
Exclusives are a cancer. At least if you made them, i could somewhat understand. But paying third party developers to not sell their game on certain platforms is stupid.
Good for the devs who need the money but as a customer Steam just provides more, and if not Steam, GOG is DRM-free and ItchIO enables smallers indies to get their games out there. Epic isn't even on my list of places to buy. The only thing I bought in Epic, funny enough, was Fortnite Save the World, and I didn't get much out of that.
I know Epic isn't going anywhere anytime soon because they have loads of money, but I will never buy a game or even take a free game from them. Fuck them and their exclusivity bullshit. Any publisher that decides to cash in on that crap is simply delaying the release of their game by another year, as far as I'm concerned.
Steam exclusives aren't because Valve forces or even pressures developers into avoiding other platforms. They're because there are no storefronts that aren't a huge fucking downgrade not worth supporting.
I will never understand the animosity for the epic game store. A "launcher exclusive " means nothing, it's not like back when you'd have to choose between Mario or Sonic.
Epic has failed so greatly with their launcher that this just seems desperate now. It’s no wonder they attempted their nonsense with Apple. They must need these exclusives and the lock-in pretty badly.
Even then, as long as sales on Epic keep sucking, no revenue split will make the devs more money than just releasing on multiple platforms. Certainly 70% times $60 times however many steam copies sell is a higher number than 100% times $60 times their epic exclusive sales.
The old Epic system would subsidize the "fewer people buy your game at all if it's on Epic" factor by just paying the devs up front with a big chunk of cash. Basically ensuring a "successful launch" even if nobody buys the game. This new system is probably less enticing for developers who know how many more people are willing to buy on Steam than Epic (and also if they want to release on non-Steam platforms there are always the indie friendly Itch and the DRM-free GOG)
Yeah, not a developer or otherwise someone who works in the gaming industry at all, but a deal like that would definitely remind me about what mom always said about deals that sound too good to be true.
@ampersandrew Just use Heroic Launcher, you get to enjoy whatever Epic games you have, without having to use their launcher. Plus it works with GOG games as well.
I'll use that for things I already have in my library, either from my Windows days or from giveaways, but I'm not going to spend money in their stores when they don't officially support me as a customer. Unofficial launchers like this could be broken by those storefronts at any time, and they were never guaranteed to work for me. GOG fares better than Epic in this regard, since they do sell Linux games, but I want official cloud saves and automatic updates as well.