Slashdot Mirror
Fortnite Dev Launches Epic Games Store That Takes Just 12% of Revenue (venturebeat.com)
The 30/70 revenue-sharing split that turned into something of an industry standard is on the ropes. From a report: Epic Games, the developer responsible for the Fortnite phenomenon, is launching its own game store. And like with its asset store for developers, Epic is planning to take a 12-percent cut of revenues. This will leave 88 percent for the people who actually make the games. "As a developer ourselves, we have always wanted a platform with great economics that connects us directly with our players," Sweeney explained in a statement. "Thanks to the success of Fortnite, we now have this and are ready to share it with other developers."
I would never pay a fee to a platform that rides on a whole other platform without testing it out first. Certaibly would never sign a contract without excellent advice beforehand. Stupid and asking for serious problems
More walled-off silos of content!?! Yay...?
This better not become a thing.
The gaming industry is getting a bad as the movie industry. Each own company want to launch their own client. With shitty interfaces.
Steam is tolerable because of the details view.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
Is a an app store.
That I'll put in the Epic app store.
That I'll put in the Google app store.
Valve. They are screwed. Finally.
12% is 12% too much!
It's almost like software developers have to pay a protection fee to pirates if they want to travel along the internet's trade routes.
They should be willing to take a 1% (or less) cut of the profit to show that they genuinely care about software developers, instead of trying to rob them like petty thieves. Instead, they are showing us their true, heartless capitalist greed, and they are going to destroy software development.
This is what Karl Marx wrote about in 'Das Kapital.' He warned us about exactly this sort of thing happening. Software should be free, just like labor! People should not be paid to work, or be paid to produce. People should be happy to work and do things without an expectation of receiving goods or money. That is how things SHOULD be.
Capitalism is just pure evil.
The strategy is always the same. Invest heavily in new platform using venture capital. Draw users by very attractive offer. Once users migrated to the new platform and are locked-in (they purchased many games on the platform), raise the percentage slowly up, until devs no longer offer their games on the platform and/or games become so expensive that users buy elsewhere (aka another store that repeats this exact strategy).
It's a good thing humans have evolved hands with fingers that can remove garbage from their mouths. Funnily enough, I thought trolls had those too. I guess this proves me wrong.
While people may have sought out Fortnite outside of the Play store, I can't imagine enough people willing to do that for other games that it it would be worth abandoning the default store already resent on users devices. Any game big enough to a large audience outside of Google Play would be better off creating their own launcher instead of sharing revenue with Epic.
Hopefully I beat the racebaiters to "they used 88 that's a racist dog whistle!!!"
For the lulz
Take that!
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sea-turtle-plastic-bag-throat-video_us_5c04ec58e4b04fb211698b69
https://itch.io/updates/introducing-open-revenue-sharing
"Highdude" needs to be raped in Federal prison like his nazi forebearer Don Jr. will be in a few months.
That is all.
I know this is a wild and crazy concept, but how about building a federated system where people are free to buy their games from multiple sources without being trapped in a vertical slice? Games for Windows was more or less that concept, but it seems to have been forgotten about and really it needs to be revisited.
When in the world do businesses lower their prices. Almost never, they just make even more money if it gets cheaper for them.
Disneyflix can be tied to espn / bully ISP to force into the all internet planes just like they do on the cable tv side.
I prefer GOG. Once I buy a game there and download it, the store I bought it from no longer matters. I can reinstall the game whenever I want, and play it whenever I want. I also buy DRM free from other sources. I don't want to have to install a dozen clients to be able to play the games I want. Steam was enough. I got stuck with Origin for some RPGs. I do have Uplay for some of the free games they offered. Battle.net for Diablo 3 and recently Overwatch. Epic for Fortnite, which I only got into to play with my kid. I don't use GOG Galaxy because I don't care about achievements. Now I hear Bethesda has their own client for Fallout 76. Luckily it seems Fallout 76 is garbage, so that is one less client to worry about.
GOG Galaxy is entirely optional. Their core business model has always been games that are DRM free. You can download the games directly from the website and install them on as many devices as you want. The Galaxy "app" is just a convenience for most people.
Long live the Speaker Bracelet
Rolo D. Monkey
Only because the others don't want it that way. And there in lies the problem.
No, GOG doesn't want it that way either. They run attack campaigns on other companies all the time. I still remember the "that's not real money" campaign they ran against GamersGate and other similar retailers who offered store credit to offset regional pricing - a practice GOG now exercises itself because it broke its commitment for single pricing.
"Thats not real money, GOG!"
...where he created a rigged contest to get free content for his games, promising to pay the winners, and then never paid anyone a damn thing. I'm sure this will be just as transparent, of course.
Why 12%? Why not even less? Still seems like an arbitrary and painful tax between the buyer and the seller.
These guys were *THE* shareware publishers back in the 1990s. If it hadn't been for some of the missteps that both lost Apogee mindshare, and caused shareware products to dwindle (a combination of the decline of bbses, success of big box publishers, increase of idiot gamers, and proliferation of shovelware on the internet.) things might have turned out different.
As it is, we are left with the current walled garden models, instead of something cool, like the shareware era of yore, where if you bought a copy nobody was spying on you when you played it, and short of them suing you individually for violating the license they could never take your copy of the software away.
Epic got published by them in the past, up until... Unreal?
ZZT for instance.
Does it run on Linux?
Steam does.
And I run nothing but Linux on every machine I own.
Epic has done well in my book by porting UE4 to Linux.
But until and unless this new digital store of theirs runs natively on Linux and has games for Linux (*cough* fortnight *cough*) then I care about it as much as I care about the W10 fiascoes: not at all.
Cliffy B's greatest achievement was when he was one of Stile's cam people.
Now it's shit game after shit game.
SO the chart specifically mentioned UE4 and Unity engine games, so will they only allow games made in those two engines? If so, then while this is great, it's also not really going to compete with Steam.
The USSR was destroyed by WWII. The US of A got away largely unmolested. We lost some soldiers, but they were really just surplus population (yes, that's a horrifying thing to say from a moral standpoint, but capitalism doesn't care about your morality and supply and demand means that if there's an oversupply of labor wages plummet).
Still, video games are definitely something that can and should be left in the hands of the free market. They're relatively harmless and not at all essential.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Why should the app store need to take a percentage? The only pricing model I would be happy with is a flat fee model, where you pay a fixed amount to be listed. Whether it's 30% or 12%, they are still gouging you.