Remedy and Annapurna announce a strategic cooperation agreement on Control 2 and bringing Control and Alan Wake to film and television
Great to see that Epic didn’t snatch that one up.
I love Remedy and their games but their publisher choice is always atrocious.
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.”
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.
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.
That’s like saying that Walmart doesn’t have a monopoly in your little town because there’s this one other store that stays open even though most clients don’t go anymore.
Hell, the first sign that a monopoly exist is that independents that said they wouldn’t deal with the company with the monopoly start to do it because they realise that their sales aren’t up to par because customers won’t buy from them unless their product is available in the bigger store.
https://www.polygon.com/23799285/blizzard-pc-games-steam-overwatch-2-release-date
https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/21/23471589/ubisoft-return-steam-2022-assassins-creed-valhalla
It’s not that people didn’t want to play their games (otherwise they wouldn’t sell on Steam either), it’s that people didn’t want to play them unless they were available on a specific launcher and that means Steam is in a monopolistic position.
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.
You can have a monopoly without abusing it, you’re still in a monopolistic position and in a position where you can start abusing it and people are left without an alternative.
All your games are on Steam and stuck there, tomorrow they decide to start charging users a monthly fee for online services, what then? You purchased multiplayer games telling yourself the purchase price was all you would need to pay but now you need to pay every month to play those games all because Valve can do whatever they want since they don’t have any real competition.
So yes, monopolies are a problem because they open the door to abuse even if it doesn’t happen at the moment.
yawn
If it’s not on Steam or GoG I pirate. Console children should go touch grass or go to school so they understand something other than defending multi-billion dollar megacorps.
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:
- a review system
- remote play
- the workshop
- discussion threads
- cards and the points store
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.
Reviews > Also available from websites that don’t have a financial incentive to show good reviews
Remote play > Good example
Workshop > Also available elsewhere
Forums > Also available elsewhere on platforms that don’t have a financial incentive to censor criticism
Cards and points stores > Bloat
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.
