Monday, November 29th 2021
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney Calls For Unified Digital Games Store
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney recently spoke at the Coalition for App Fairness conference in Seoul where he called for a unified digital store for game platforms. Sweeney stated that Epic Games had already begun working with publishers and service providers to create this vision of a unified store where customers could be confident that their purchases would work across all platforms. The system described by Sweeney would be a radical departure from existing ecosystems such as Xbox, PlayStation, Steam, Nintendo, and Epic where digital purchases are often limited to an individual companies platform.
This new system would allow games purchased from any ecosystem to be fully playable on all supported platforms without requiring multiple purchases. The success of this vision is entirely dependent on game studios signing up to the program which will likely be a hard sell given the expected fall in sales. While there are limited options currently exist for cross-buy games the movie industry has implemented a similar program with Movies Anywhere which boasts large studios such as Disney, Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros.
Source:
Bloomberg
This new system would allow games purchased from any ecosystem to be fully playable on all supported platforms without requiring multiple purchases. The success of this vision is entirely dependent on game studios signing up to the program which will likely be a hard sell given the expected fall in sales. While there are limited options currently exist for cross-buy games the movie industry has implemented a similar program with Movies Anywhere which boasts large studios such as Disney, Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros.
Tim SweeneyWhat the world really needs now is a single store that works with all platforms
119 Comments on Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney Calls For Unified Digital Games Store
pays 150 million dollars to make games at least time exclusive on epic to take away the freedom of choice.
now he wants to fight against the evil monopoly from apple, google and steam.
starts to work on a single platform for every platform on the world.
tim sweeney is a complete joke.
And yet everybody built their store into a walled garden. They thought it was smart to corral in players. And now they face extinction since publishers built their own stores, denying others their 30% cut (at least upon launch date, which is what counts). Store operators might pull a miracle and somehow unite, but they'll never get big publishers back.
If I had to guess, I'd say Tim is playing the hero/good samaritan card to draw some sympathy.
The closest thing i've seen to a solution is GoG galaxy and even then it's far from perfect and only works on pc (for obvious reasons, consoles are closed and their economics are just different).
Nope
That will only change when they'll steer gaming towards mobile gaming and their p2w model.
However, even in the absence of DRM, cross platform is hard to achieve because games implement Steamworks and the like.
steam_latest.deb
steam.DMG
SteamSetup.exe
Personally, I find the Steam platform far and away the best for updates and overall functionality, so I wouldn't want to be forced onto some inferior one just because it was "industry standard". Never mind, never gonna happen. ;)