191–200 of 239 posts
One major upside for publishers in steam is DRM which epic won't offer.
Why? Steam DRM gets cracked all the time.
Without DRM your product can just be repackaged and resold, like what happened to the GoG version of Frostpunk being sold on Amazon.
I would have liked some basic version of DRM as well. This will drive a lot of developers to Denuvo, which might be overkill.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Way more people use Steam than Epic Launcher. The oldest Steam accounts are 15 years old now, people have been using it for a long time when it was largely the only game in town. People may use another company's platform because they have to to play a certain game. But a lot of times it's just that other platform trying to be Steam, but not in the same league.
Are we sure that's true? Fortnite is the most popular game in the world right now.
For new users that don't have steam, there might be an inventive to use the Epic games launcher, especially if there's a discount, but having games split across two systems is really annoying (but it's not too bad for one game), so I imagine without an incentive most existing Steam users will opt out, thus preserving Steam's dominance.
1: https://store.steampowered.com/stats/
2: https://thenextweb.com/gaming/2018/11/08/fortnites-concurren...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This does not detract from the fact that it is offering an unreal developer better terms than a unity dev.
No, they are not. The Epic store takes 12% whatever engine you use. They are simply waiving the 5% unreal engine royalty to unreal developers so they don't pay more than 12%.
Unreal Engine:
+$200k
-$24k 12% epic store fee
-0 5% epic fee (would be $10k)
------
$176k income
Unity Engine:
+$200k
-$24k 12% epic store fee
-$3.6k 3 copies of unity pro for $200k budget game
------
$172.4k income (-4.6k vs unreal)
If you publish on Steam then the numbers change
Unreal Engine:
+$200k
-$60k 30% steam fee
-$10 5% epic fee
------
$130k income
Unity Engine:
+$200k
-$60k 30% steam fee
-$3.6k 3 copies of unity pro for $200k budget game
------
$136.4k income (+6.4k vs unreal)Earlier quoted context omitted.
You forgot to mention the Unity cut in your sum. Epic is certainly not making the store engine neutral. It costs less to use unreal than unity.
Unity is royalty-free altogether, you pay a subscription for the development tools (think Adobe CC or MS Office365) and get all upgrades during your subscription. You can alternatively not pay a subscription fee at all, and accept certain restrictions on your engine's capabilities, mostly on the use of enterprise-level features an indie developer wouldn't have the resources to use anyway. So, by eliminating the 5% en…
Just fyi: that is not how the unity license works. Unity's license is if your company makes >= $100k a year you're required to buy the $400 per seat license. If your company makes >= $200k year you're required to by the $1500 per seat license. Period. So for example if you're employee of Google and in your 20% time you download Unity you are not allowed to use it for free. Google makes X billion a year. That's greater than $200k a year. All employees of Google who download Unity for work related purposes are required to have the $1500 per year seat license.
This has nothing to do with whether or not you publish a game. Unity is sold similar to Photoshop. It's a subscription. The only difference is unlike Photoshop, Unity has a free tier for people and companies that make less than $100k a year.
From the unity site
Free version eligibility: I or my company generate annual revenues or raised funds less than $100k
Plus version eligibility: I or my company generate annual revenue or funds raised of $200k or less
Great news, I'm looking forward what Discord is pulling off. As far as I heard, they also want to push into the game distributing market? Epic Games seem to me really as one of the very very few game companies who, beside of marketing, also act very generous.
By all available accounts their launch has been unremarkable, no Indies getting rich.
Their service is now obsolete with this Epic announcement. They are best just offering affiliate banner advertising to the Epic Store and getting the 5% from that.
I mean, nobody stops anyone from setting up a new PC game store, and the Epic PC store is just another entry added to the already long list of stores all competing with Steam. But on Android (outside China), the Google Play Store pretty much has a complete monopoly that they made sure was virtually impossible to break while still being able to be technically called "open." Sure, Amazon Appstore and a few other stores exist, but they haven't really been able to make any real impact due to Google erecting so many hoops for both developers and users to jump through in order to stray from the Google Play path. (eg. Google Play Services, "Unknown Sources" checkbox buried in Settings app, etc.)
But now Epic is forcibly prying it open by using Fortnite as their lure to induce people to actually jump through Google's hoops that were supposed to be insurmountably high user friction. Of all the past alternative Android app stores, this one sounds like it could actually work.
The ensuing Google/Epic all-out war should make last year's Google/Amazon Chromecast/FireTV/YouTube feud look tame. Break out the popcorn.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not a fan of Fortnite but that is extremely disingenuous. In your interpretation, parents are completely absolved from responsibility and apparently children have free access to credit cards that can't legally even be issued to them. Want to know the responsible answer to "mommy can I buy a Fortnite skin"? It's "no". Simple as that. Same as it was when the question was "dad can I buy this Harry Potter poster" or…
I say no, every time. However, I don't want to be the all-controlling parent that dictates what can purchased with gift cards. I try to demonstrate what's being given up, what's gotten in return (nothing but a few bit flips in a database in this case) and break down why he wants whatever thing it is. After a few years of Roblox and now Fortnite, I can see the wheels starting to turn on their own and I think he's forg…