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Great to see that Epic didn't snatch that one up.
I love Remedy and their games but their publisher choice is always atrocious.
We would never had an Alan Wake Remaster without Epic paying for it.
Dear PC gamers, please stop bitching about installing a second games launcher. If you wanted all games to only come out on a single launcher then you should have bought a console. Us console players are getting real sick of the endless bitching about Epic just because they tried to break Steam's monopoly.
Noone is a fan of exclusives but Epic's behaviour was explicitly to try and break Steam's entrenched monopoly and they legitimately offer far more favourable terms for developers. They've also spent hundreds of millions of dollars to break other monopolies like Apple and Google's. They are by no means the evil villains that PC Gamers make them out to be. The tactics they took with EGS were misguided but they've genuinely fought to level the playing field at the legislative level, they're a full tier better than an EA or Ubisoft who only ever try and squeeze as much profit as possible at every turn.
They should have spent those millions to fund development of a store that can actually compete with the competition and studios that produce games, which they then can sell on their own platform.
Instead they snatched up every new release on the way to Steam while still not being able to provide the basic necessities of a modern PC store front.
So why should I bother purchasing something from them? They have nothing to offer and actively make it harder for me to play games through their store with their anti-Steam Deck stance.
I'm not saying you should, I'm saying it doesn't make them villains or a bad company.
They made a mistake in their approach to the EGS, which they've pretty candidly talked about and admitted. But the end goal of EGS wasn't just to make them more money, they offer every developer more money when they publish there. The underlying motivation for creating EGS in the first place was the recognition that Valve does not need to be taking a 30% cut of every game sale to provide the services they provide.
I'm happy that Remedy can afford to self publish and that Anna Purna is willing to finance the project without publishing it, but I don't think Epic is a particularly bad publishing partner.
I'm not saying you should, I'm saying it doesn't make them villains or a bad company.
But it does, paying third parties to not publish on your competitors platform is the oldest anti-competitive behaviour in the book.
It would have been completely fine if they started out with actually funding development of new games and only releasing them on their store.
I would have even given them some slack for their bad launcher since they were new to this.
Instead we are here, almost 6 years later. Their launcher is still trash, their exclusive deals were a complete money sink, EGS is still not profitable, they burned all bridges to Valve and are not one step closer to their claim that 30% is too much and they can do it with ~~8%~~ 12%.
Yet consumers get more value from Steam as a platform where that 30% cut has helped fund a powerful gaming platform, remote game streaming, driven developers to release builds for macOS and Linux and license users for all platforms with a single purchase, an open source handheld gaming device, an input library that enables practically any input device to be used and for controls to be remapped even if the game doesn’t support it, the best VR headsets and room-scale VR, popularising VR and making it mainstream, contributing to upstream to further gaming on Linux, enabling DirectX games to execute natively on Linux, several of the most popular multiplayer games on the internet, enticed PlayStation to release games on PC, putting indie developers on a level playing field with the biggest studios, enabling developers to release games mid development to help them self fund the game’s development, support the modding scene, and so much more.
Epic may charge developers less but that doesn’t offer me, a consumer, any extra value.
Instead their platform and its lack of investment and innovation make the purchases I have made in their store feel less valuable and cumbersome as their competition increase the value of their offerings.
I’m not saying they’re the bad guys but the argument that developers get more money doesn’t really matter if that 30% cut is felt justified to consumers.
And with the upcoming untethered VR offering from Valve on the horizon, which will no doubt be powered by open source with their improvements upstreamed, that 30% cut feels even more justified when Linux becomes fully capable of VR thanks to my purchases.
I’m not saying you should, I’m saying it doesn’t make them villains or a bad company.
I think it does. Instead of competing they chose to try and force customers to use their platform by buying exclusivity that specifically targets Steam. From the perspective of the customer they took the worst possible approach and, along with how Sweeney has talked about people like us, treated customers like a cattle to be herded, as if we couldn't think for ourselves and would throw ourselves into EGS if our games went there.
But the end goal of EGS wasn’t just to make them more money, they offer every developer more money when they publish there.
That is the PR they sold that the money goes into the hands of the developer. That is true only if the developer is also self publishing. Actually that extra money goes into the hands of the publisher and then it's up to the publisher to decide if the developers get any more money. And once again, from the customers perspective, we barely get anything out of that goal. Games don't get cheaper for us, we don't really get more games because of it. The publishers simply get more money per sale. They don't even get more money (except for the exclusivity money that Epic threw their way) because you sell significantly more copies on Steam because unlike Epic Steam doesn't treat its customers like cattle.
The underlying motivation for creating EGS in the first place was the recognition that Valve does not need to be taking a 30% cut of every game sale to provide the services they provide.
So to prove that Valve doesn't need to take a higher cut they make a store where they take fraction of the cut Steam would take but also offer a fraction of the services Steam offers? I think that would be an argument if they offered at least half of what Steam offers but they don't even do that. They made a barebones store for a barebones cut, that doesn't show anything.
Dear PC gamers, please stop bitching about installing a second games launcher
No.
Don't force me to install a garbage dump that runs like shit and isn't even close to feature complete to play a game.
Or do and I won't pay, either way works lol.
Edit:
Noone is a fan of exclusives but Epic's behaviour was explicitly to try and break Steam's entrenched monopoly and they legitimately offer far more favourable terms for developers.
What a surprise, an epic defender that thinks that monopoly means store do good. There are plenty of competition against steams store, they just don't get market share because they're not feature complete or they just suck.
Or both in epic's case.
because they're not feature complete or they just suck.
Or serve a different kind of user base.
E.g. GOG, itch, publisher specific
Or just... Don't make a launcher?
Yeah lol, people forget that GoG exists god dammit.
We don't need a launcher to install games on PC, every launcher purpose is to collect data.
Dear PC gamers, please stop bitching about installing a second games launcher.
I'm neither bitching nor installing that shit. I take every freebie, but never install anything other than through Steam, just let 'em pile up. I'm actually not bothered by exclusivity at all, I only exceedingly rarely pay for games before they're 75% off a few years down the line. Stuff like Synthetik 2 or Shapez 2, where I know what I'm getting and it's a small team with an uncompromising vision.
Epic’s behaviour was explicitly to try and break Steam’s entrenched monopoly
Steam doesn't have monopoly on anything, they just have superior service that people prefer, but there's quite a few stores / launchers. I like Epic's engine, but their launcher is still crap five years down the line.
Dear PC gamers, please stop bitching about installing a second game launcher.
No, and fuck you.
There is no purpose in a second game launcher and it only causes things to be cumbersome. Hell, games don't technically need any launcher.
I can agree that challenging Steam is probably a good thing, but right now Steam just gives so much more value to Devs and publishers. Steam provides:
and that's just what I can think of, not including the player specific stuff like library sharing.
Devs and publishers pay more, but get a community and ecosystem in return instead of just a platform.
Yeah, but think about how much money Valve has taken, 30% of virtually every single PC game sale over the past 21 years.
I do understand that there's more value provided, but that's the thing with monopolies, they can still provide more value than upstarts because an upstart has to build everything they did, while having none of the market share that they had to do it with.
Remedy and Epic agreement was for 2 releases, so I guess Alan Wake Remastered and 2 fit the quota and now they're free.
Agreed with their bad publisher choices though
While I dislike Epic as much as the next guy, lets put taste and emotion aside: they went with Epic because Epic offered them a truckload of money. Presumably, enough money to offset any sales lost due to being limited to EGL temporarily, as well as gamers who boycotted the game for the time it was an exclusive, and presumably, no other publisher was offering them as much, or if they were, there were probably even more downsides.
If there was a more financially sensible choice for Remedy, I guarantee you, they would have made it. People have to remember that video games aren't just passion projects meant exlcusively to please fans, they're gigantic, expensive undertakings, surrounded by a massive industry that functions with as much bureaucracy and red tape as any other indistry.
It makes me wonder how it would feel as a game dev getting this deal taken to the extreme.
“Hello, human. I’ve come from the pits of Tartarus to offer a deal. You’ve just finished making a video game. My request is: Do not release it anywhere for 2 years. In exchange, I will give you 5 million dollars.”
Exciting announcement. Two of the best creative and narrative focused companies in gaming.
That seems like a huge step for Anapurna too, doesn't it?
Not really I don't think ... Anna Purna already publishes a lot of games and has published a lot of notable films in the past few years.
I feel like if anything it's most notable because Anna Purna has deeper pockets than Remedy, more experience in film and television, and produce notably high quality creative and narrative work, meaning that they're unlikely to screw up Remedy's writing chops and can legitimately help them expand their mixed media ambitions.
I am just now learning from your comment that Annapurna does film! I just know them from Kentucky Route Zero and Outer Wilds. Crazy, I thought they were just a gaming company.
It's Outer Wilds, no "The".
Sorry for being pedantic :p
God damn how I wish James McCaffrey was still with us.
Annapurna is Annapurna and is already "weird". But noticing a lot more push for video games as film. And not just the nonsense of shit like Rampage and Borderlands but stuff like Remedy-verse and El Paso Elsewhere as well as Blumhouse getting involved as more of a publisher (?).
We are probably in for a bad time because... yeah. But I am optimistic. Because Remedy (heavily involved rather than just licensed) and Xalavier Nelson Jr and the like are REALLY good at taking advantage of the medium to tell their stories and... their stories are actually pretty okay as stories with a LOT of character work.
Can't say I love Annapurna, but at least control 2 will be on steam. Hopefully from day 1.
As I understand it, Control 2 will be self-published by Remedy and is just being co-financed by Annapurna in exchange for film and tv rights
Oooh, now it's getting interesting
Annapurna somehow just stuffed up the PS5 copies of Outer Wilds.
The discs have been printed with just the base game without patches or the dlc.
They really stuffed that up.
Really liked Control, although the Alan Wake DLC was disappointing. Hoping the second on has more Threshold kids!