Surely developers don't have to release games as epic exclusives if they don't want to. Also, epic's cut is much lower that valve's (12% vs 30%). I'd rather buy games on epic so that more money goes to creators.

The never ending cycle of monopoly vs convenience. Let us forget the fact that exclusives make the game devs more money than they would've got otherwise and the games are eventually released on steam anyway.

Exclusives do nothing for convenience, and if the game gets released a year or two later, it's no longer "next-gen" or whatever.

> and they cost game devs money in lost sales from me.

I don't think the exclusives are good for users, but from a developer perspective this is an oversimplification. Epic is essentially pre-funding games.

If you're an indie dev who's been working on a game for 3-5 years, literally everything you have is riding on that release going well. It's incredibly stressful.

So suddenly this billionaire shows up and says, "no content changes, no interference, we'll just guarantee up front that your game is profitable. We'll just give you the money to justify the last 5 years of your life, and after 6-12 months you can sell wherever." Of course developers take that. Suddenly you have the freedom to be experimental, to make games that are personal and niche without worrying about going broke.

There's a real sense in which PC exclusives are bad for the industry overall, I don't like the direction the market is headed. But from a developer perspective Epic has been pretty objectively good for indie games. The lost revenue from not being on Steam means nothing if Epic is willing to fund your game upfront. Think about how much peace of mind that means as a developer, to not have everything riding on a single launch, to not have to spend months leading up to launch getting sick worrying about what's going to happen.

And also let's be real, from a user perspective we had Steam exclusives, even if Valve didn't directly require them. I buy my games exclusively DRM free, I won't use Steam or Epic. The number of games that refuse to release outside of Steam, or who tie their multiplayer and modding communities to Steam's servers have been a pain in my side for over a decade. There are games on GoG that are missing patches and that will never get multiplayer, because Steam just happened to release frameworks encouraging devs to make themselves utterly dependent on Valve's infrastructure.

I won't install the Epic game store on my computer. But at least a game that's exclusive to Epic games store eventually becomes non-exclusive -- on average, I'll end up getting access to it later. Most of the games that get released exclusively on Steam never get ported off and I never get access to them. It's a little bit irritating to hear people pine for the day when most devs were still effectively releasing store exclusives, just without any extra compensation and to a storefront that more people happened to use.

I know the dev gets a good deal out of it (probably more money than all the lost sales). It's still bad for the consumer (except if the title would never get released otherwise).

If a developer chooses to only publish on steam, that's not really the platforms fault, is it? I dislike that some games use steam login/servers as well, but there is a trade-off: those steam servers will probably exist 10 years from now, where a lot of multiplayer games simply shut down their servers and you're out of luck. If Valve open sourced their steam infra, that would alleviate problems with self-hosting those games while allowing the devs ease of use and guaranteed infra.

>I won't install the Epic game store on my computer.

I won't either, and neither would I install steam, except for inertia (250 games bought).

As far as my consuming goes, I've gotten a dozen or more quality free games off the epic store and in some cases steeper discounts on games than steam offers. It's only really a "consumers lose" thing if you're boycotting and "unable" to play those exclusives.

As far as devs go, EGS gives a better cut, offers stability with timed exclusivity deals, and arguably are the ones who forced steam to lower their cut to 30/25/20 on high sales figures.

> If a developer chooses to only publish on steam, that's not really the platforms fault, is it?

It's complicated. Using Steam's infrastructure for multiplayer and mod support means that the game will only work with Steam. Valve isn't stupid, the reason they offer those services is to encourage games to be Steam exclusives. It's not an accident that Valve has no terms or options for developers releasing on other platforms to tie into those same servers.

Now, is it nice for developers that they don't have to pay for servers and that they get an easy API to integrate with them? Sure. Is it good for the consumer? No, not in any long-term way that wouldn't also apply to Epic funding games.

I will make the argument that what Epic is doing is better for the consumer than what Valve is doing. Epic exclusives are timed, eventually games leave the platform. Valve's infrastructure changes the way a game is built, it has to be re-engineered to work anywhere else. If a game is tied into those frameworks, it's very unlikely that it will ever leave Steam.

For the most part, developers that use Steam's features end up releasing gimped versions of their game elsewhere -- you buy a game on GoG and it's literally just missing features. This is especially frustrating for mods, you get cut off from the entire community. I think fragmenting the PC market so that different versions of the same game exist on different storefronts with no indication of the "proper" place to buy a game is way more toxic and harmful to the end consumer than forcing them to wait 6-12 months to play a new release.

I agree open sourcing that infrastructure would go a huge way towards alleviating the problem. If GoG could offer their own multiplayer servers that were compatible with Steam games, that would be huge. Even better if players could set up their own compatible servers for GoG games, that would be amazing. But there's very little incentive for Valve to do that. They benefit tremendously from games hard-coding those servers and making them impossible to change.

And that's not to say that what Epic is doing is good. I generally think that we should be discouraging exclusives, or at least making it easier for users to move their games between storefronts without installing new clients. Buying games from the Epic store wouldn't really be a problem if they were DRM free and you could download them from a web client, at that point I wouldn't care about exclusives at all.

My point is more that I don't think that what Epic is doing is bad in a way that makes them unsuited to bring this case, or that the way they're disrupting the status quo on PC is uniquely evil or something. Pretty much any dev you talk to will be happy to see Valve getting more competition. We don't want Valve to be taking 30% of our game revenue.

> but their exclusives are a cancer and they cost game devs money in lost sales from me.

Developers are making an educated choice to take their games exclusive, in exchange for guaranteed revenue. Sometimes that can be make-or-break for a game.

You’re acting as if steam doesn’t have exclusive games either - I play Destiny 2 which is only available on Steam (on PC). I would not be surprised that larger games/publishers get negotiated terms on the store which comes with contractual exclusivity clauses.

> they cost game devs money in lost sales from me.

I still don't get how the exclusives are a good deal for the creators. They get more publicity and probably some extra money for the contract. But does it really offset the lost sales? There was a large number of times when I went though: this game looks awesome, I'll buy it, oh it's exclusive for whatever-platform-i-don't-have, ... and likely not remember about it ever again. I even bought similar games which are available on platforms I already have instead.

Epic pays the developer for X units sold before selling anything. Basically guarantee the developer to make at least that much sold. The developer still stands to make extra buck if the game sells really well (when selling more then those X units Epic paid them beforehand)

This is great for smaller devs as you basically have 0 advertising budget and rely on worth of mouth for your game to be a success or not. So you can take guaranteed money and pay yourself (and your employees) or take the gamble and hope your game sells well.

Also Epic takes smaller cut then Valve does on Steam. (12% vs 30%)

Also these exclusives to Epic are timed. So after a couple months the developer is free to publish their game on Steam/GOG/Windows Store/whatever PC platform (Epic store exclusivity does not apply for consoles)

Is installing another store really so burdensome? It costs nothing but a few minutes of time. GOG Galaxy can even help consolidate them.

Until epic supports proton, yes. It requires a whole new OS.

But I was also thinking in terms of actual platforms like "Xbox only for N months"

Yet another US service to slurp my data and give it to the NSA.

Sadly the only alternative is to buy used, disc copies.

Digital collections certainly have privacy tradeoffs. Though I'm quite happy with many of the upsides: cross-play, automatic cloud save, (sometimes) cross-save, no disc swapping, fewer things to clutter my living space.

In the case of Epic games, they shovel money their way with a _biiig_ shovel, even for free games.

I don't know about PS/Xbox, but the situation is probably similar.

If the alternative is not publishing the game at all, or never on PC then it's still a benefit. Are any of their thirty party, exclusivity deals permanent?

If you want to play any Valve games without Steam then you're out of luck.

Having another store is a low barrier to entry.

Imagine there was only one store for groceries in your whole state. And when you go to court a chorus rebukes you for not selling your produce there instead of opening another nearby.

>If the alternative is not publishing the game at all, or never on PC then it's still a benefit.

Yes, there is nuance that I left out of my post. I agree with you here.

>If you want to play any Valve games without Steam then you're out of luck.

If you want to play any Epic games without Epic game store, you're out of luck as well.

I have no problem with another store, I have problems with another store having exclusives which do not benefit the consumer in any way (directly).