Gwen Frey, creator of upcoming puzzle game Kine, explains how she was 'saved by an Epic exclusivity deal'

Gwen Frey responded this tweet (claiming that no struggling indie developers have taken an Epic exclusivity deal).

Also, Epic has given away millions of dollars in grants to smaller/experimental devs over the years, and continues to do so! They sponsor all sorts of industry events, conferences, and meetups! I find them to be one of the most philanthropic companies in this industry!

For reference, here is what Kine looked like when I was a solo dev. I made this game and cut together this trailer myself. I'm proud of it, but it was a massive amount of work for one person, and I didn't have funds to work too much longer on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-h4XRRwgDM

I kept working for months after that, and pitched to Epic! I got the exclusivity deal, had time/space to work on my game longer & hired a few contract artists. Now Kine looks like this: -- https://twitter.com/direGoldfish/status/1128989211581931520

Continues explaining how Epic helped her -- Here:

Kine is a niche game that is hard to market - Kotaku was never going to cover Kine. IGN was never going to cover Kine. That's just reality! I was a solo dev making a narrative puzzle game. In spite of this Epic has done an excellent job promoting my work.

If Epic wanted they could have announced Kine back when I signed with them (Jan). They could have said "Hey, look at this female solo indie dev we're supporting! Aren't we great!" It would have been excellent pr for them in a difficult time. But that would be bad for the game.

Instead they asked what I wanted to do. Then agreed to wait until I had a demo and was ready to show it. They let me showcase my game in their booth at GDC. They printed out hundreds of T-shirts with the Kine logo on them and gave them away for free. Check it out: https://twitter.com/direGoldfish/status/1129038628770992129

Other developers who have partnered with Epic have chimed in, like Spellbreak's Seth Sivak explaining why they left Steam:

They (Steam) control all keys and approve each batch. If you want to sell your game, even founder packs, it must be done in public early access. You lose control of the number of players coming in and you set the expectation that the game is ready for early access

In running the pre-alpha of Spellbreak you cannot get all the keys you want. We were denied consistently and sometimes waited more than a week. If you want to sell you still must have an early access page that anyone can view. They can unlist it from search but it is public.

We left Steam in October and went to our own launcher because of these issues. That was 5 months before we moved to the Epic Games store

Karken_SF, UX Director at Phoenix Labs, the company behind Dauntless, also remarked something minor here.

It should be noted that the founder of the company, Jesse Houston, previously explained why they chose to go with the Epic Games Store, in this article:

There is too much to unpack in that article, but basically, they needed Epic to be able to make Dauntless cross-play with consoles, and that's why they decided to partner with them.

​What do you guys think?

That's how it started...

That whole “sell your soul” narrative is extremely ignorant and childish. Without these deals there are many great games we would have never seen. The vocal minority in the gaming community does more damage than good. It’s just a shame that so many people eat up this rhetoric

Epic is very developer friendly. We're going to be seeing a lot of games that never would have been possible without Epic in the near future. Unreal engine in general has been great for devs.

That's great and all, but that does nothing to take away my concerns about their storefront.

Same here. We know Epic are good with devs, but there are many more issues at play.

We all gotta start somewhere right? Epic's only bad rep is buying timely exclusives rather then just developing them from the ground up is what's the problem. Gwen Frey being save by Epic is great they are treating with good faith, indie developers don't have nowhere to go when it involves little to big projects getting off the ground. I have no issue buying anything from Epic unless it's a game I cannot play anywhere but on Epic.

I remember early days of MS Xbox One, they treated indie developers like crap, it's stuff like this we'll never see good games releasing but it's also nice MS has a change of heart with indie developers over the years.

Then why are the games still launching on consoles?

@davillain-: The problem is that the store itself is in early access with no clear final release date.

And stop treating Epic like they're some small start-up. They're a multi-billion dollar company owned by an even bigger company ffs. There's no excuse for how barebones the store is.

As long as Epic invests money into games that would otherwise not be made or that would stay exclusive to consoles (heavy rain?) I'm fine with that.

If it's throwing money to keep a game away from the competition i.e. Steam than I still think that's a really lame move and screwing over customers.

Maybe Epic wants to be the bad guy and the good guy at the same time? Screwing over everybody whilst being everyone's favourite friend constantly?

If so that could be a really smart business strategy.

I'm treating Epic like they are the good guys? I'm neutral to Epic and I'm keeping it like it is.

Steam has literally hundreds (thousands?) of success stories of independent studios, small and large, releasing their games. They have countless niche games you and I have never heard of. Games that have never been featured on Kotaku, and so forth. The same can be said for GoG and even Origin, to an extent.

Furthermore, games don't need a storefront like Epic or Steam; I first bought Minecraft from a website and downloaded an executable. A lot of the indie games I play are less than 2 GB in size, that's smaller than a movie.

Believing that Epic is somehow saving games is as stupid as believing Steam has a monopoly.

It's just another store, with the added "feature" of using exclusives to lure people in.

Pretty much how I feel.

Exactly. I don't hate Epic. I might favor them if they offered a good service or had ethical business practices, but as it stands I don't really have any use for them.

The second Epic makes another good game (tbh I don't know when this will happen, their last good game was UT 3), I will use the store to buy an Epic game. The second they have a non-exclusive that's on sale I will use it. The second they start having decent customer service, community tools, mod support, and all that jazz, I will use it.

But I will never use it to buy an exclusive they paid to keep away from other storefronts.

That doesn't make Epic Store a less crappy store or Epic Games a less shitty company.

Get me some good deals and stop with the exclusivity bullshit and they have themselves another customer.

If the Epic Store wasn't so crappy people likely wouldn't have as much of a problem with games being exclusive to it. Being new is not an excuse either considering Origin launched in a much better state than it. There is no excuse for lacking things such as a shopping cart and email verification system which is basic stuff anyone trying to make a successful online store would have more than the common sense to implement before launch.

Well, gaming is filled with children and grown men who think and act like children.

You people are relentlessly unforgiving.

@mrbojangles25 Do you have any idea how difficult it is to publish a game? Even a basic 2D platformer is an enormous undertaking for an indie studio working on their first project.

People often say that if you make a really good, original game you'll be successful in Steam, but that's not always the case. There have been developers who do everything right and still end up losing money.

You also have to consider that a lot of these devs were not happy with their treatment on Steam and were happy to leave.

There is absolutely no guarantee that a studio is going to "make it" past their game release. Take the Metro game for example, obviously the game was more or less done and was going to get released no matter what. But say for example they need to sell 5 million copies just to break even, pay back their loans and months of unpaid salaries, or their studio is bust, and they realistically can see that their game likely isn't good enough to do that. And then they got Epic who's willing to pay 25% of the money they need upfront before they've sold a single copy. That offer can be very appealing.

We saw the same thing with phoenix point, they said they got enough money to even continue developing new games by the upfront cash from epic. So it actually benefits small developers a lot to take the upfront cash in return of their game only being sold on EGS, despite the hate for the store it actually does treat developers well.

Lots of unreal dev grant recipients release on Steam. Epic funded the game and let her choose how to spend that money.

Epic isn't getting the cut a publisher is, they don't have the creative control or influence a publisher does.

http://partisans-game.com/en/news/epic-games-rewarded-alter-studio/

It's a high chance this will be Epic exclusive, just a glimpse of text from their website.

The fact that somebody requested Epic to release all information they have stored on him, and then managed to send it to somebody else is just glorious... The fact that they had to ask the other player to delete the info, which they "confirmed" that he did so lol.

Link.

The deals are worthless if they turn gamers away from the games. As with the recent news that came out Metro Exodus did poorly on PC with consoles dominating revenue sales when with previous titles PC was the most profitable and fastest selling platform for the Metro series. Metro Exodus did not need a deal like that as the Metro series is very successful on PC, plus I'm pretty sure they were getting money from Microsoft with all the promotions they did on the Xbox One.

Phoenix Point devs shot themselves in the foot. No one gives a crap that Epic gave them enough money to make future DLC free and possibly a new game because they did not crowdfund the game just for some random company to come at the last minute and bribe them to take the game off their preferred platforms. Phoenix Point was a pretty successful crowdfunded game too making over $2.1 million and making $100k a month in preorders. They better hope that Epic gave them enough money to make another game with out crowdfunding because after that stunt their reputation has gone down with little trust. Short term wise taking the cash infusion in exchange for exclusivity is good but long term wise is bad as it hurts the game's overall sales and especially damage your reputation with gamers if the game is crowdfunded making them less likely to buy or fund your next game.

@NoodleFighter: Well, that's why Epic paid them. Theoretically to make up for the lost sales. Not to be nitpicky, but sales for the Metro series in general only picked up from Steam sales dropping it to $20, and $5.

More money was made per copy sold on EGS compared to consoles, dont know why anyone would expect a EGS exclusive to sell anywhere close to the console versions. It's common sense that games on EGS are going to sell - by an order of magnitude - less than if the game was on Steam, just by looking at the install base of both platforms.

PC players with consoles who don’t wanna support Epic so they got it on their console instead.

Epic Store launched an update on May 1, 2019 regarding their store , and they announced an update to the WWZ numbers on Epic store , it was at 320K sold units.

"What surprises us is the fact that sales outside of the U.S. on the Epic Store have been so strong, with the U.S. being only one quarter of sales."

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/341895/World_War_Z_has_topped_320000_sales_on_the_Epic_Games_Store.php

Interesting that most of those are outside the US too. Might be an indication that US players are less likely to give up Steam while other countries are more open to it.

https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/news/epic-games-store-update

Other points in this update

- Satisfactory launched in Early Access a little over a month ago. Early projections of its popularity were slightly underestimated: this has been Coffee Stain’s best PC launch ever!

- Anno 1800 from Ubisoft, and Metro: Exodus from 4A Games, had the best PC launches in their respective franchise’s history. Congratulations to Metro: Exodus for leading the way as the top-grossing Epic Games store title.

@Ant_17 Who is this? Guy has like 400 followers.

There is a problem here. Satisfactory is only available on Epic Games Store as far as I know and this game is credited as a "better than expected" performance, so I don't understand how Wingefors could have been disappointed ?

Net sales of business area Coffee Stain were SEK 98 million. In the quarter we had a successful early access launch of Satisfactory on the Epic Games store. The game’s launch performance exceeded management’s expectations at the time of our acquisition of Coffee Stain.

http://www.thqnordic-investors.com/en/financial-reports/?releaseId=3313007

@vaeh: I think either an insider or works at THQN

Steam killed valve they really dont make games anymore and to my knowledge they dont help fund 3rd party developers either, they just sell other peoples shit and take a 30% cut. Thats all steam is now, whole reason for it growing so fast was the great games by valve. People downloaded steam to play those games. I could respect that, I dont respect steam at all any more lol

Steam = walmart.

Epic = Target

It's no secret Epic care more about the developer than the consumer, that's the problem.

The consumer should care about the consumer, this is like an alien concept to Epic apologists.

And we have a winner. Summed it up like a pro!

Such a stupid insider.

So Epic going the Wallmart route aka throwing money and buying everything so they can eliminate competition is a good think? Epic can f*** off already. All the talk about publishers and developers yet us the consumers we dont see any benefit over Steam/GOG/GMGgaming hell even origin etc etc. Their prices are shit ( at least here in EU) their client is barebones, the support is almost non existent , no forums yet some shills route for a company that not long ago was crying foul about Microsoft raising walled gardens in regards to pc gaming and now they are doing the same shit and even worst

I cant wait for fortnite fad to die out and lets see then if the 12% cut is sustainable in their line of business