Epic Games Store improves the industry, but "the players do not see it"

As we observed earlier this week, there are limits to what this tells us about the quality of the establishment of the store, but at least that proves that Epic is acting correctly. In fact, CEO Tim Sweeney tells us that the game was performed "well beyond our expectations".

"From the beginning, the critical challenge was to review projects on Steam and ask how we could achieve that level of success in our store," he said. "Metro Exodus has far exceeded Steam's sales forecast, which proves that it's games, not stores."

Tim Sweeney, Epic Games

But for some members of the PC player community, it's basically the stores. Metro Exodus' exclusivity agreement provoked Steam fans, who complained and even resorted to the usual tactic of bombing previous Metro games on the Valve store.

This is not the only example either. Snapshot Games has also been criticized for making its next Phoenix Point strategy game temporarily exclusive on Epic Games Store.

Asked about these reactions, Sweeney reaffirmed that the goal of Epic Games Store was to "break the 70/30 seizure that ruled the industry for more than ten years" and that his methods would never make him happy. everyone.

"Changing the way games are sold is a big disruption for everyone," he says. "I understand that I have personally unsubscribed from Netflix twice because their film selections have changed, but this is a necessary step forward for the gaming sector if we want to allow developers to invest in creating better games and if we want the savings will eventually be passed on to players in the form of better prices.

"In the end, it's about making the industry a better place, starting with the conditions that developers have, I understand that players do not see it, they do not see the difficulty of getting paid and to see the store suck 30% of It can be shocking to see that the industry is changing in a way that is generally invisible to us as players. "

"Players do not see the difficulty of creating a payroll and seeing the store absorb 30% of the revenue from it."

Epic is not about to hold back on these exclusive offers. In this week's keynote speech, he announced an expanded partnership with Ubisoft (though it was left to the publisher Assassin's Creed to share details), exclusives from the private label Take-Two and the rights to the PC debut of PlayStation titles from Quantic Dream.

It should be noted that these exclusives are no longer technically exclusive, with Epic partnering with Humble Bundle to allow all games to be sold on the Humble store. Sweeney says Epic is also willing to "work with other well-known stores to offer more options", although this may not be able to instantly appease the growing frustration felt by some Steam users in the last few months.

The CEO adds, "It's important for game developers to keep up the good work and sometimes agree to be criticized while doing what's necessary for the industry."

Metro Exodus is sold 2.5 times more on Epic Games Store than its predecessor, Last Light, on Steam

With such support from developers and publishers after the first three months, Epic Games is confident they can conquer more partners, even those like Electronic Arts who are trying to build their own stores.

"The key for them is that they want a direct relationship with their customers and a fair share of their gaming revenue," Sweeney said. "They build their own ecosystems because they felt they did not get the deal they deserved on Steam.

"The world deserves a lot of shopping – it's very healthy for the industry to compete fiercely on a lot of fronts – watch all the players who installed Origins for the first time to play Apex Legends, all Korean players who have probably installed Steam for the first time to play PlayerUnknown's battlegrounds. "Great games drive stores."

"[Curation] must be a human process that takes into account quality so that customers can trust us to provide good games "

It turns out that free games are also fueling the stores, with Epic announcing that its first free offer – Unknown Worlds – Subnautica – had been downloaded more than 4.5 million times during this two-week promotion and Slime Rancher of Monomi Park was about to defeat him. .

"The free games have been a huge success, much bigger than expected," said Sweeney. "We worked with game developers and paid for the opportunity to publish their games for free for two weeks, which resulted in a significant number of new players.

"What's great is that we're introducing new players to Epic Games Store more cheaply than if we're paying ads on Facebook or Google, instead of ads, free games are moving the store forward."

Sweeney wants to get as many titles as possible from Epic Games Store, but this ambition is still tempered by the desire to offer a high quality catalog. Given the recent controversy surrounding the visual novel Rape Day and the slow response from Valve, the CEO of Epic is promising to ensure that such a title will never appear in his store.

"We will maintain a reasonable level of quality for games," he said. "It will be open to games of all sizes, but not to junky active games or controversial games designed to make noise.PC is an open platform; there are a lot of shops, I don? have no idea. " store in particular has the moral obligation to carry out projects of mediocre or very controversial quality. "

Does this mean that the Epic Games Store will focus more on conservation than on the Valve market, and that more effort will be devoted to monitoring what developers are submitting?

"Absolutely," Sweeney concludes. "It has to be a human process that takes quality into account so that customers can trust us to provide good games."