Friday, December 7th 2018
Epic Games Begins Moving its Games Off Steam and on to its Own Store Platform
Epic Games is moving its entire collection of digitally-sold games away from Steam, and on to its own new store+DRM platform rivaling Steam, Origin, and UPlay. The new Epic Games Store plans not only to sell games published by Epic, but also other third-party publishers, to whom Epic is promising an 88% revenue share (keeping a 12% thin margin for handing DRM, unlimited downloads, and update patch distribution). For comparison, Steam rakes in a 30% margin. Epic is offering additional incentives to third-party game studios who use Unreal Engine. Epic Games titles are being pulled out from Steam store. The move does not affect people who already own Epic titles on Steam, as future re-installs and patch updates will continue.
58 Comments on Epic Games Begins Moving its Games Off Steam and on to its Own Store Platform
EDIT: Subnautica from 14th to 27th Dec, and Super Meat Boy from 28th to 10th Jan. I guess I'll signup just for these. :D
If a company can keep prices high and people will still buy it, they'll do it.
Ah the good ole days when game devs shifted to digital and said they'd pass the savings from retail onto the customer...
Lasted about as long as the first publisher which practically said, "screw that, we can charge full price and people will still buy it!"
They are in business to make money, not pass along savings.
That said, they are too late to really offer a big impact. The market is on Steam. EA strong arming Steam did squat. It took EA years before Origin started to pick up any traction. Heck I still barely ever load it up. Same with Uplay and GOG. All the communities are established on Steam. Steam is more than a storefront because of that. As long as Valve wins in the community features, no one can really topple them with sheer sales incentives. If anything Epic's main competitor is now Origin. Which frankly isn't too hard to beat. EA has been eternally slow with updating the service and giving it any value beyond games.
It's got no price, so guess it's also on the move...
I have to use 8 freaking launchers to play games instead of a unique platform..
For an example, I own more games on GOG than Steam. I buy and play the big Ubisoft titles on Iplay, and EA games on Origin that are only.
- I don't care for Origin - I honestly only used it to get free games. Granted, a couple of them I already had and others I still have yet to play, but they're there for me should I ever feel the need.
- GoG - I actually like how unobtrusive GoG Galaxy is. I can run the program and launch games from there or I can simply just launch the game from a shortcut like the good old days after installing a game from a DVD/CD.
- I don't really like Uplay. It feels clunky and slow when compared to Steam. Every now and then Uplay fails to actually launch a game when I start it. Also there seems to be constant server disconnects means some games won't save progress because the server communication is down - Assassin's Creed 3 got me here. Played for a few hours and quit the game, the game couldn't sync because the server connection was down (my internet was up and working). I had to replay a large chunk of the game because of this.
Steam, it works and I have lots of games on it. I haven't purchased any game on Steam for a good year or more, but any game I'm gifted is on Steam or tied to Steam from other places (Humblebundle.com or Fanatical.com where I pick up the odd game from time to time). Generally, these days, I stick to GoG when buying single player games and Steam for Co-Op games.It's always good to have healthy competition, but I'm content with what I currently use. Epic doesn't have any games that I'm interested in so if they take their games from Steam, I wouldn't notice. Much like when EA started pulling games or not listing new games when Origin was being pushed hard.....never bothered me because last EA game I picked up with ME3 and I purchased an actual physical copy (which it wish was still a thing) of it a good year or more after it released.
When used by itself, my experience is that Uplay is the better platform. It’s quick, downloads come quicker, and more stable. It also stays connected more than Steam. I can’t tell you how many times Steam has offered to sign in offline for me.
Steam and Uplay download games the same for me - usually around 9MB/s. Steam never signs me off.
Clearly it all comes down to personal experiences, such as:
My younger brother loves the Splinter Cell games. He was ecstatic when they were released on Uplay some years back so we could play them co-op. They weren't my favorite games, but he liked them. So he picked up a couple of copies of Double Agent & Conviction for us to play through on co-op. We struggled and struggled to get the co-op to link up through Uplay, it was a constant struggle for nearly 6 months until we just basically gave up. We'd try almost every weekend and if we got lucky, we'd be able to connect and play co-op for a short while before the servers would disconnect.
I know things work better now, played some of the Wildlands as co-op with friends, but Uplay still leaves a sour taste in my mouth after all the years of issues.
Just pointing this out, as a case where the publisher did something better in their own version.
This kind of reminds me of Origin, though EA only removed DAII and Crysis 2.