I hate Epic Games, they are making PC gaming like console with exclusives, why do good companies do that to their awesome fan base?
This conversation may not be pleasant to have but it is needed. Epic exclusives are a multi facet topic, often emotional, that can certainly use some rational dialogue. The history of how things unfolded in the past is very valuable and does corresponds to what any honest observer present at the time would corroborate. I remember vividly how much better Impulse was to Steam back in the days. To this day I wish you all hadn’t sold it! In a way, we could say that GOG took its place on the market, but I digress. Thank you for engaging your community on this. Who knows, you may change a couple of minds along the way.
That is totally true, I am actually tired of this conversation but I will close with saying, Right now Steam is good, wasn't always like that, Epic isn't good, that can change, and I hope it does, Steam needs to lower there profit share, and Epic need to stop paying developers to leave steam, to join there platform, There is pros and cons to both platforms, I just have an issue with one platform paying the developers to release on their platform, they will get the market share by using those millions of dollars and making a launcher as good, if not better than steam.
Incidentally, one of the reasons I won't use Epic is because I got burned by Impulse dying. I won't make that mistake again. Nothing to do with not caring about the game, I just learn from my mistakes is all.
Any Stardock games on Impulse you would still have.
Lol I though back in 2010 Impulse was your ( Stardock ) Launcher , silly me ..
I am stil no Fan of Tencent ( the Company behind Epic Games ) however I like Galciv to much to NOT support your Work so I jumped over my Shadow and bought it ( IV ) on Epic
Time to rework my Fleet ( again )
It sucks that Steam won, I hated being forced into it in order to play Civ5 and Skyrim.
I hate Epic exclusives too, and can't help but wonder if it is more harmful in the long run for a developer to take the money.
I have one game on Epic, Mechwarrior 5. I pre-ordered, and the game went Epic exclusive after my pre-order. So I played it on Epic, and really didn't like Epic's lack of user comforts found on Steam. After that I found no reason to keep using Epic. (I wont be getting the Mechwarrior 5 expansion)
So now when I see an Epic exclusive, it's just another game that I won't bother with until it's on a Steam sale years later. This makes me wonder how many other people have an "interested later when it's on sale" list for new games. I seriously categorize new games I am interested in into "yep full price" or "50% off in about 1.5 years from now".
Too bad, I would have bought GalCiv 4 at full price now that Totalwar Warhammer 3 is delayed. There's nothing really interesting in the 4x scene right now.
What Steam feature do you think would benefit GalCiv IV? I mean, seriously, what exactly prevents you from buying games on one store versus another? GalCiv IV is going to do its own mod thing so it's not as if it's going to be using Steam workshop or something.
I like Steam a lot. But it does take 30% of our revenue which is an awful lot. It's not as if people are "discovering" our games on there which was the big benefit back in the day. Steam now releases dozens of games per day. New releases get buried.
I could easily make the case that GalCiv IV may never be added to Steam purely for economic reasons. GalCiv fans and people into 4X will know about GalCiv and frankly, anyone who would try to strong arm me to put my game on some platform without a really really good reason is not someone I want playing my games. And "because I want my games in a single launcher" is not persuasive.
Like I said, I like Steam. I prefer it to Epic as a store UX and its general maturity as a gamer. I am also a pretty big Valve fan in general. But the 30% cut thing without the benefit of discovery is a problem (go check out the Endless Space 2 page and look at the "other games like this" -- no Distant Worlds, no GalCiv III, but instead we see Heartless Iron, Troy, Middle Earth: SoW). If you're paying Steam millions of dollars a year in commissions, you'd expect this sort of thing to be nailed by now.
I kind of wish more games implemented Steam's asynchronous turn notification system. Basically making steam a PBEM system but using steam notifications rather than email.
What Steam feature do you think would benefit GalCiv IV? I mean, seriously, what exactly prevents you from buying games on one store versus another? GalCiv IV is going to do its own mod thing so it's not as if it's going to be using Steam workshop or something.I like Steam a lot. But it does take 30% of our revenue which is an awful lot. It's not as if people are "discovering" our games on there which was the big benefit back in the day. Steam now releases dozens of games per day. New releases get buried. I could easily make the case that GalCiv IV may never be added to Steam purely for economic reasons. GalCiv fans and people into 4X will know about GalCiv and frankly, anyone who would try to strong arm me to put my game on some platform without a really really good reason is not someone I want playing my games. And "because I want my games in a single launcher" is not persuasive.Like I said, I like Steam. I prefer it to Epic as a store UX and its general maturity as a gamer. I am also a pretty big Valve fan in general. But the 30% cut thing without the benefit of discovery is a problem (go check out the Endless Space 2 page and look at the "other games like this" -- no Distant Worlds, no GalCiv III, but instead we see Heartless Iron, Troy, Middle Earth: SoW). If you're paying Steam millions of dollars a year in commissions, you'd expect this sort of thing to be nailed by now.
so much dialogue. I said something.
I don't "hate" Epic, but I want to have eventual access to the Steam workshop for mods (I'm not interested in manually managing the mods or using nexus, which I realize is my choice), and I'm not interested in buying this game twice, so while I was about to purchase it for alpha access (and looking forward to participating in Early Access), I guess I will have to sit this EA out and wait for the full release. I'm rather disappointed, but the game looks amazing, and I'm still very much looking forward to playing it once I can purchase it on Steam.I'm all for developers making more money on their excellent products, but not at my expense. If Epic (or any other digital store) offered the same level of service as Steam *and* took a smaller cut from the developers, I would go out of my way to use that digital store. But, as someone who uses and enjoys functions and community interfaces on Steam that are not present anywhere else, I am disappointed and frustrated when developers use alternatives to Steam (such as Epic), which forces me to either sacrifice my experience as a customer, or wait. Given this choice, I will always choose to wait. Case in point, I'm still very much looking forward to purchasing and playing Old World ... if/when it becomes available on Steam.As long as Epic is a demonstrably inferior option for me as a consumer, I will not purchase a single game from it. I will wait for the best option available to me as a consumer, even to the point of simply skipping games I would really enjoy playing (as I do from several developers that have business practices I refuse to support). My purchase (or lack there of) is the only influence I have on the gaming industry, however tiny/insignificant my individual purchase choices may be.EDITI was writing this before Frogboy posted, and I missed his statement about GC4 not using Steam Workshop until after I'd posted and the page updated. I was unaware of that, and will have to consider it. I enjoyed the workshop for GC3, and just assumed it would be implemented for 4 as well. I still don't want to support Epic for spending money on exclusives instead of developing a better storefront.But if Frogboy's earlier statement is confirmation that GC4 will never be using Steam Workshop for mods, then my love of Stardock might overcome my dislike of Epic.
I dont want another Steam on my desktop.I have a GoG account, and I hate GoG Galaxy. I Use GoG for no fuss install executables. It started to not be this thing fornewer games and I stopped buying there. For example: BattleTech RPG only got incremental updates on GoG Galaxy, I gotan untimely convoluted mess of executable downloads by not using GoG Galaxy... goodbye. It's like you're asking an MS-Office user to install WordPerfect or something and use it some of the time instead.Steam adds value to me as a customer sometimes.For example, the newest Master of Orion is pretty trash without even the basic bug fix mod. The user community and mod repository is integrated. No fuss, no hassle, everything at your finger tips. Hypothetically, if I bought that on Epic I would have had a very bad time.
Here's something else to think about.Imagine my pre-order of Mechwarrior 5 wasn't an epic exclusive and it lived on Steam. I'd probably buy the expansion. Does that expansion revenue outweigh the cash that Epic threw at the developer?I know I am not alone in my ways on all of this. Heck, I even tried Epic once which is more than alot of people.
Keep in mind, GalCiv IV will have mods seamlessly integrated into it using our tech. If you want to see our tech in action, check out the beta of DeskScapes 11. It is very seamless.
I'm pretty much a Steam guy, with a bunch of old games on GOG, but I think Brad's note about not using Steamworks for GalCiv IV just convinced me to go ahead and buy the game now from Epic instead of waiting.
The more I think about it, the idea of Epic charging Stardock only 10% vs. 30% on Steam, is really a more compelling reason to buy now. I've been playing Stardock games for over 16 years and am a huge fan. One thing has always seemed to be a constant with the way Brad runs the company, he funds the gaming side of the business way beyond it's contribution. Games are his passion. So if using Epic puts more $ in the kitty, I'm confident that Brad will plow a good peice of that back into the gaming development. That's pretty much a win/win for anyone who likes the games Stardock puts out.
That's awesome! Thank you for putting your trust in us!We know that it can be frustrating to juggle multiple accounts and there is definitely a desire to "stick to what you know". But, really this isn't about what site or client you download your game from but how each publisher/developer handles things. As Brad has said we really do love Steam, but at the same time there is an awareness that we need to make sure that our games are robust and independent enough so that you don't feel like you're getting a stepped down experience.
Going forward we want to ensure that no matter where you own a game that we publish you get the same quality experience. This in addition to the community and technical support we already do on our website, forums, discord and elsewhere. Ultimately it's about providing the support so that you shouldn't even need to think about what website or client you're using to just install/update a game on. This applies to all current and future game stores that might exist.
They are owned by Tencent and they are out to monopolize the PC market in their favor.
They are not Robin Hooding for gamers and making the market fair. Steam's % were the same as Gamestop/EB Games since like forever. They also do sales. Also other vendors sell Steam Keys. They made nothing exclusive. They monopolized ZERO. Allowing places like GoG and GreenManGaming to exist no problem.
Epic is a monopolizing entity. They killed Paragon because it wasn't making the millions Fortnite did, once Fortnite made money. I will not be giving a cent to those bastards.
Stardock just lost a fan.
I really hate the epic launcher but my gosh, passing on Gal Civ because of a crappy UI aggregator? Not this guy. Shut up and take my money.
Quoting for relevance...
Howdy all. I'm sure no one remembers me over an old potato, but I worked on Twilight of the Arnor (I did art, planet textures, etc.). I was just reading through the forums and found this post and thought I'd toss my 2 cents into the ring. I'll admit I was surprised not to see GC4 listed on steam, even in alpha/beta. Personally, I think this all boils down to one thing for me... I'm a stubborn old fart now and I like everything in one place. But you really have to consider all the points here. Brad is right, the cross promotion with similar games sucks, and the 30% is a major PITA, trust me, I know myself as my career advanced.
I think something to keep in mind is that it appears none of this is settled yet anyway, so keep in mind that a lot of things may end up being moot points; I guess I'm saying we shouldn't get all crotchety about things. Also, I think you have to look at things from SD's perspective and realize that, yes, pleasing the customer and making an excellent product is always on top of the list, but you can't do that and continue to grow and make new content if you don't keep the business aspect of your ventures in mind.
SD, and Brad, I'm sure, have weighed their options considerably. It's a balancing act, exposure, advertisement, revenue, quality, etc., you have to come to a decision that best fits the situation, based on sometimes vague ideas of what will occur in regards to your product. Is availability on steam worth the cut in revenue? As Brad said, is there a tangible benefit that outweighs the known disadvantages? I don't know those answers, but if you base a decision on the best information you have at the time and have a logical plan in place then you arrive at your conclusion, inevitably.
If the logic says that you'll reach a dedicated consumer base in enough quantity, without relying on steam, that you will attain your revenue goals (along with a great many other factors), then you have to come to the conclusion that Steam is more of a liability than a benefit. But reverse the logic, and steam may become a benefit. It all depends on the information at hand and what you can predict (with reasonable certainty) for the future. Personally, I'm no fan of Epic, but I'm also aware that things are never that black and white in the real world, and that GC4 should end up where it's going to do the best for players and its creators, and if that's not steam then it's not. The question is, and I've seen it in the thread, weigh your own choices, do you like the GC franchise enough to deal with a minor inconvenience (in your point of view, and in mine)? If you do, and I personally do as well, then I can deal with the inconvenience. If you can't, then you choose the other path. There's no right or wrong, its your choice. But as a fellow dev (who is no longer associated with SD, so I'm speaking on my own here), I can say with some certainty that expressing your opinion calmly and logically is almost always appreciated, but continuing beyond that can be like beating a dead horse, at best it does nothing, at worst it grows resentment within a community, or between a community and developers (again, I speak for myself only here).
Anyway, hi again to everyone, and anyone who has a vague recollection of me.
"What Steam feature do you think would benefit GalCiv IV? I mean, seriously, what exactly prevents you from buying games on one store versus another? GalCiv IV is going to do its own mod thing so it's not as if it's going to be using Steam workshop or something."
Long time fan here ,dont like the Epic store ,not gonna drone on why. I usually dont post in the Epic crap fest posts , but this quote here got me thinking.
So
To answer that question with a question ,what feature does the Epic store offer me as a consumer that would benefit me?
The place selling a good is often just as important as the place that made said good.I wont buy anything from Walmart and I mean anything.Ill buy the exact same thing from the local Hyvee/equiv store at 10%+ more because I dont like Walmart.
Thats not me saying Epic is Walmart and Hyvee is Steam or vice versa,just an example of an everyday thing that I do and Ill also bet alot of people do as well. Yet for some reason no one understands when it comes to these Epic vs Steam posts, thats just how people are,its not right or wrong it just is.
Well if you do decide to put it on Steam great ,Ill buy it ,if you dont thats great too.Good luck with your future endeavors.
Steam didn't pay cash. They gave away SteamWorks for "free" in exchange for the game requiring Steam being installed on the PC. But they effectively paid since at the time, the alternative was to make your own network manager ($$$) or use GameSpy.This meant Civilization V wasn't on Impulse or GOG and whatever since who wants to sell a game that installs a competitor's store and must be run from the competitor's launcher?Moreover, Stardock had Impulse::Reactor which was similar to SteamWorks except it didn't require a store to be installed and running. However, Steam would not allow games that used Impulse::Reactor to be on Steam. Thus, games like Company of Heroes 2, which were going to use Impulse::Reactor had to go with SteamWorks. None of this is intended to cast Steam in a bad light. Steam has been very good for PC gamers. But Steam didn't become dominant based on merit. It became dominant because of exclusive content.
I get your points, however, you keep saying Valve didn't get Steam to be dominant on merit while then going on to list several things that are of merit that Valve did. To say SteamWorks is meritless is your own "creative history", while a the same time giving one of the major examples of its merit. Valve built several backend services including their networking and matchmaking systems which was at the time wildly beneficial for developers compared to any other alternatives. They didn't "buy exclusives" in the vein that Epic does. Valve built a compelling set of services that had enough merit that developers chose to leverage them rather than build their own or pay licensing for GameSpy (or later use Reactor). Valve didn't require games be exclusive on Steam to use SteamWorks, it only required that Steam be installed.
Stardock launching Reactor a year later after developers had already spent time learning and integrating SteamWorks it seem that history would suggest was too little too late. It's not like you weren't trying to do with Reactor the same thing Valve did with SteamWorks. Stardock required games that used Reactor be sold on Impulse and, while I don't have a copy of the terms handy, I'm sure you also had a "most favored nation" clause in your contracts. You tell me why you giving away Impuls::Reactor for free in exchange for a game bing sold on Impulse didn't pan out (granted selling it to GameStop surely didn't help it) since that is what you're attributing to Valve's success with Steam; as being without merit.
Equating building tools and providing them to developers as a loss leader to buying exclusive distribution rights is disingenuous at best. The latter of which is without merit and why people dislike EGS for doing so.
EDIT:
Also regarding your economic points of using Steam for distribution:
You can manage your own store and sell direct and have 100% of the purchase price that I pay
You can choose to exclusively sell on EGS and have 0% of the purchase price that I haven't payed
You can choose to also sell on Steam and have 70% of the purchase price that I pay
Yeah, sorry to hear Brad's thinking on this one. As someone who has bought games from Stardock since the Warp days, I certainly would be interested in IV (even though I just never seemed to get into 3 that well, but I think that's more on me... just want more of an Explorer side to 4X these days). But it isn't another launcher or anything -- it is trust. And I do not trust Epic or Tencent at all. Besides the Chinese connections, their business messaging screams that we (the players) are the product, and I fully expect that they're monetizing us in this era of snoopy software and Big Data.
Do I trust Steam all that much either? No, not really -- but that horse left the barn long ago. I just stick to "Offline mode" as much as I can and hope for the best. My vote would be like the above -- just make the game directly purchasable, take 100% of it and roll up updates to a more infrequent / quarterly if it keeps server costs lower (and so we don't have to ping your servers every time the game starts). But I don't have the figures y'all do, so I'm sure the number of folks like me are outweighed by the cost of rolling your own purchase server, etc. Such is life.
Stardock required games that used Reactor be sold on Impulse and, while I don't have a copy of the terms handy, I'm sure you also had a "most favored nation" clause in your contracts. You tell me why you giving away Impuls::Reactor for free in exchange for a game bing sold on Impulse didn't pan out (granted selling it to GameStop surely didn't help it) since that is what you're attributing to Valve's success with Steam; as being without merit.
This is not true. Impulse::Reactor did NOT have a most favored nation clause. It did not require the Impulse store to be distributed.
Steam succeeded because of merit. But merit is a prerequisite.
It became an effective monopoly because it played hardball with Steamworks back at the time. Developers didn't choose distribute the Steam store because they wanted to. They were forced to because of Steamworks. And Steamworks had no technical reason to require the distribution of the Steam store.
The alternative to Steamworks were expensive third-party libraries. So in effect, Steamworks was payment in kind in exchange for distributing their store. In addition, they blocked Impulse::Reactor games from being on Steam even though it did not require the Impulse store to be distributed.
Two specific examples:
In short: Steamworks wasn't chosen because it was better. It wasn't. It was by any measure, substantially inferior to Impulse::Reactor and developers wanted to use Impulse::Reactor (and is still lacking features that Impulse::Reactor had that devs could make use of) and were until Valve told them that they could not put their game on Steam with it at the time.
BTW, when Civ V did come out exclusively for Steam (and still exclusively requires Steam) it got review bombed on Amazon.com because, back then, people hated Steam.
Now, as for Tencent, they own pieces of lots of companies including Paradox. So I'm not really sure the issue there.
BTW, I *like* Steam. A lot. If I have to choose between Steam and Epic, I choose Steam also for the reasons other described here. I like how benevolent Steam has become culturally. The people we work with at Valve have been universally pretty awesome. Valve has a really really good culture over there.
I am skeptical of Epic's long-term success with their store because it is a competitive landscape and Valve's employee culture is so much more in line for the needed elements to succeed. Look at how long the Epic store took to get a cart. It still doesn't support multiple branches. Steam and Steamworks are objectively superior to Epic's equivalents today.
So for me, as a consumer, it's a lot like Egghead vs. Amazon. If I can choose, I go to Amazon because I like that storefront much better. But on the other hand, if it's only on Egghead, which is sometimes the case, I don't really mind buying it from there (Even with their skeevy RMA stuff that came out recently).
But in 2022, there are a lot of other factors to keep in mind that Steam lags behind on. There is, imo, no excuse for Valve to be taking 30% of our revenue anymore. My game project that took 4 years to make gets crowded out by 10 semi-porn games in a given day. Steam reviews are an abomination of abuse.
And at the end of the day, if someone doesn't want to buy our game on Epic, that's fine. It's a free market. I don't have any issue with someone waiting until it shows up on their favorite store be it Steam or GOG or MS Game Pass or whatever.
That isn't what I said. You did not require games that used Impulse::Reactor to distribute Impulse, but you did require that they be sold on Impulse. Obviously Impulse::Reactor didn't have a most favored nations clause because it wasn't a store. I said that I'd expect Stardock had a most favored nations clause in the Impulse store contracts; meaning a publisher/developer couldn't sell a game somewhere else for less money than they are selling it on Impulse. I'd be very surprised if you didn't have that, but if you say not we'll have to take your word for it.
It's also a bit "revisionist" to suggest that Valve requiring the Steam client be distributed to use SteamWorks being the reason for the growth of the Steam client. By the time SteamWorks launched they already had more than 13 million active accounts, largely driven by the success of Half-Life 2 and expansions. There were also more than one hundred games already being distributed via the Steam store/client prior to Valve launching SteamWorks, and that number was significantly larger by the time Stardock launched Impulse
You're arguing circular logic, on one hand Valve used the success of Steam to shoehorn SteamWorks and on the other hand Valve used SteamWorks to shoehorn Steam client distribution causing the success of Steam.
I actually very rarely use Steam anymore ... I have so many awesome games on Epic that it is my launcher of choice now! And super stoked that Galciv4 is on it!
Those people moaning and groaning about not wanting to use multiple launchers should just use GoG Galaxy ... it combines all of your launchers into 1 place ...
I actually agree with the "grow up" comment earlier ... sick of hearing the whining and moaning ... don't buy the game if you don't think it's worth it. I chose to buy the game because I want to support the developers, and Epic is the platform that will give them more of their dev dollars back!
So your part of the problem, I don't care if there is other launchers out there, but I do care about PC becoming another console were we have this exclusive and that exclusive. Competition is good if they spend the money to make their platform better, buts spending the money to take games away from their competition is no way to be competitive.
I said it before, EXCLUSIVES ARE A CANCER TO ALL GAMERS
So I will have to wait a year to get it on Steam? Fine, I will wait. Most of the bugs will be removed by then and some nice DLC's will be added as well.
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