It wasn’t really even exclusives technically. It was explicitly Excluding-Steam exclusives. It released everywhere else but not on Steam. And it was further aggravated by games that were already on Steam being taken off in favor of launching elsewhere.
This reads like someone trying to justify the position of Epic Games.
While I can understand the difficulty of trying to come up with competition to a pre-existing and dominant storefront, they went about it almost entirely the wrong way. They underestimated consumers’ aversion to change and overestimated the value their own launcher provided.
Everybody and their mother used Steam at the time, and it provided a whole lot more than just a storefront and icons to click. When Epic launched EGS, it provided absolutely none of that. Without any social aspects or consumer buy-in to their ecosystem, it has no staying power. People—myself included—would go to it to play a shiny new free game until it stopped being fun, then fuck right off back to Steam to play our other games with friends. If they had spent more time cooking up the EGS ecosystem into something more similar to XBL or PSN before trying to attract consumers en masse, they likely would’ve been pretty successful.
Instead of doing something to make their ecosystem more appealing, though, they used paid-for exclusives to make other ecosystems less appealing. It was an obvious attempt to herd consumers into their ecosystem, and it backfired spectacularly. Before that, most people were either indifferent or liked them as a company due to their legacy and/or Unreal Engine. These days, it’s a lot of bitching about “timed exclusives”.
Chailles@lemmy.world 11 months ago
brawleryukon@lemmy.world 11 months ago
That’s not remotely how it would have happened.
Have a read over this article that was posted by Lars Doucet (well-respected indie developer of Defender’s Quest roughly a year before EGS even launched. It lays out exactly what a Steam competitor is going to run into trying to break into that market and provides a blueprint to not fail that is almost exactly what Epic did. And yet, the discussion to this day is still filled with nothing but “REEEEE, EXCLUSIVES!!!1”, nevermind the fact that those games all still run perfectly fine on the exact same machine you launch your Steam games from (excepting, now - multiple years on from the whole kerfuffle having begun - the Deck… buying straight from Steam does make that a much nicer/smoother experience). You can even add them to Steam to get the extra features like the controller customization and such.
Basically, even if they built a launcher that was better in every conceivable way than Steam, nobody was going to switch. They had to do something else to bring both devs and players on board. As the article states:
pivot_root@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Thanks for the read. A couple points:
I summarily addressed the inertia issue already, when I mentioned that they underestimated consumer’s unwillingness to change.
The article is primarily aimed at startups, who don’t have the same amount of money to pour into software development, testing, and infrastructure.
Epic almost did exactly what the article suggested, but it notably did not improve anything over Steam. It didn’t even try for parity with Steam. In my opinion, as someone who plays PC games, that removed any chance of me even considering using it in any serious capacity.
I genuinely think they would’ve had a shot at being successful if they had tried to improve the state of PC gaming. Steam is massive, but it’s not without its pain points. The core of the client is ancient, and the fact that it heavily utilizes CEF makes it a bit of a resource hog. There’s a lot of bugs hidden in the nooks and crannies, and legacy cruft makes fixing some of these issues take a very long time.
Epic had the right approach to getting their foot in the door by giving away games for free and paying/bribing developers to release non-exclusive games on their platform. They just fucked up everything else.
Some things they could have done to help themselves:
Built-in Nvidia GameStream protocol support.
GameStream has lower latency than Steam Link.
Integrated mods.
They wouldn’t get developer buy-in for a new ecosystem, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t just buy out an existing mod platform and integrate it.
Forums, chat, and social features.
Lacking these, they’re basically asking players to go to Steam whenever they need to find comminuty guides or discussions.
Achievements and matchmaking as a drop-in Steam API replacement.
A CEO that knows when to stop talking.
The impression I get from him talking is that he thinks he’s the messiah of PC gaming. The impression I get from his actions is that he’s just like the rest of the publishers trying to grope our wallets at every opportunity.
mammut@lemmy.world 11 months ago
all-knight-party@kbin.run 11 months ago
I also think the problem is how they executed some of their exclusives. There have been multiple games, mostly in the past now, that announced launching on certain platforms, including Steam, then had to backtrack and reveal that Epic bought their exclusivity and that gamers that were already expecting to get the game from one platform, now wouldn't be able to.
Even though that doesn't change the end result of what you're getting, the feeling that the timing and method of the exclusivity deal left you with was... a surprise that forced the buyer to reevaluate their expectations and have to consider the purchase all over again on a different storefront, because of that storefront's direct monetary intervention.
It came off as a corporate bribe that lessened the consumer's options, for no benefit to the consumer. The pure taste that actions like that left in my mouth got me to never even claim any free Epic games and to wait an entire year for Hitman 3 to drop on Steam even though the reboot trilogy are some of my favorite games of all time, and I won't even get into the snafu that game particularly had with transferring trilogy content paid for on Steam to Epic.
If they hadn't gone about purchasing exclusivity deals in that fashion, I may have bought some things on sale from them, or at the least claimed some games allowing their launcher to live on my machine, but instead it drove me away.