It looks like all the rumors were true. Epic Games is launching their own store with a 88/12 revenue split. It’s open to all engines from the looks of it.
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/announcing-the-epic-games-store
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Nice,
These days we are hearing more about new game stores !
https://www.kartridge.com/ also lunched on beta last month. Based on their blog post, 100% of revenue earned on first $10,000 in sales.
Do they offer anything other than a flashy website? Seems a little bit steep to be honest. I’ve never been a fan of these stores. They basically earn off your back and all they offer is potential. There are xxx people that visit our site and they might look at your page. I have to do all the work, all the art, trailer, and all that goes with it, as well as actually write the game and wiki and you basically want a cut of all profits for a database entry. Lovely.
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Too bad it doesn’t support linux though. New game stores are popping up quite a lot lately (discord comes to mind), but steam is still the only one supporting linux. even if I don’t start about SteamPlay and Proton.
So for me personally, I’m staying with steam.
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Awesome. Used to hate the idea of having to have multiple launchers but been bitten by Steam a few times and I have paid more purely to avoid Steam recently. Good to see more competition.
Could you please elaborate?
However, as a player I’ll just stick with Steam until they have a killer application that convince me to install another 3rd party launcher
As a game developer, I see these “alternative” stores as a way to early access the game (read: betatesting) without getting the PR hit on steam review of a unpolished release.
I understand the Epic store doesn’t have Linux support which makes it a non-starter in some cases.
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Soon we’ll launch the Epic Games store, and begin a long journey to advance the cause of all developers. The store will launch with a hand-curated set of games on PC and Mac, then it will open up more broadly to other games and to Android and other open platforms throughout 2019.
I guess they mean Linux.
I guess we’ll see… seems strange not to mention it and get some easy buzz… but I also can’t think of other “open platforms” that they might mean.
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I have a bunch of minor complaints, but my biggest problem was that after closing ‘For Honor’ Steam told me it was still running. I didn’t notice this the first time - I ended up racking up more time than is within the refund window so they refused me. (After a lot of automated replies and a final ‘No’ followed by them closing my ticket, as advised by UK Trading Standards I asked to speak to whom is in charge is “dispute resolution” and did get a refund but it took about 8 weeks if I remember correctly).
When PUBG exited early access and became a “full release” I complained that despite exceeding minimum requirements the game was still unplayable and wanted a refund. Few days later the minimum requirements got changed. They are well within their rights to do change that, kinda annoyed me though. The game was still completely broken and the developer themselves told me they knew and said “it all fix in patch 1.0” (the release). Nothing was fixed. There were some new laws in 2015 here in the UK about digital goods and giving reasonable time to fix them, but it’s just not worth the time and effort to fight Valve over it (plus I really don’t know the legal details). They’ve shown time and time again they couldn’t care less about individual countries government laws.
Not shop related but support related - one time they updated CSGO and I could no longer play it, got some VAC error. I created a support ticket and after 19 days of silence I got an automated reply saying “sorry for the delay, your support ticket would be deleted unless you reply to confirm you still require support”. Just don’t have any faith in them tbh.
EDIT: for the record I don’t expect anything better from Epic, I’m just bitter
Symbian, probably
This however is because Ubisoft Games on Steam just launch the Ubisoft Launcher which then launches the game, so both sides are to blame. I mean honestly Ubisoft. Either you want people to use your launcher or you want to sell games on Steam.
The other issues, that’s probably how every big company treats it’s customers sadly.
Well… what do you expect from a store that sell games for less than 1$, and even give them away for free every now and then?
The fact that you bought it full price is meaningless; it’s the game indurstry that’s just broken in several ways. Or would you prefer a physical store?
It feel to me like the game industry is partly broken because of steam. I can’t help to think that if the platform was more consumer friendly some of this shit would simply not happen.
I can’t wait for the epic game store, and that plus the current state of EA/ Activision makes me believe in a better tomorrow for gamer and game dev x)
It is true that without platforms like Steam that we wouldn’t have a lot of these problems… because a) we’d only know about maybe 1/20th of these games and b) we’d be buying them directly from the publishers. (A lot of the same stuff already happened with brick-and-mortar retailers, I guess.)
Some of the problems are sort of natural from having a big popular online store of everything.
I’m not sure what price has to do with what I said tbh. I don’t expect anything less - they are a business and these kind of things happen all the time. It’s just nice to have alternatives.
Yes I do prefer phyiscal stores. Far harder to just fob someone off when they are right there in your face.
Except they just keep pointing to the sign “No returns if package is opened” until the manager calls security.
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Apples and oranges to me. You just bought your game on a physical store, but it has online features and the dev patch out the soundtrack because right expiration. Is a physical store going to give you a refund? I doubt it.
Besides, my memories of physical stores was of people that had no clue of the stuff they were selling. I’d rather pick what I want myself rather than deal with the incompetency of the middleman.
Like this? xD
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It’s Live
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