The acquisition of Epic Rocket League made the situation even more complicated

The acquisition by Epic Games of Rocket League The Psyonix developer should have been a success story of the game industry for ages. Psyonix was a small studio, mostly under contract, which had created an online game that became an immediate success and which, a few years later, is now recovered by the creator of Fortnite.

But in a short time, this announcement became the last point of controversy in Epic's relentless struggle to compete with the PC game market with Steam, owned by Valve. At this point, it seems that Epic can not do anything without plunging the PC gamer community into a frenzy.

Pysonix has been known for years for his work contributing to the great games of other studios. But with the launch of Rocket League, a football mix with race cars powered by a rocket, the studio has become a major force in the industry with tens of millions of players and a title that has become a shining example of how to maintain a game in direct.

So it makes perfect sense for Epic to buy some. The two companies have been working together for nearly two decades on Epic's Unreal technology and were just 12 km apart from each other in North Carolina, until Psyonix moved its office to San Diego in 2009. two companies were also multiplatform partners in the sector. push to force Sony to play nicely with its competitors in the console market. And Rocket League e-sport that could largely utilize Epic's technology and resources.

But it's the announcement and its vague wording that triggered the latest epic-steam storm. In a press release, Epic announced a transition Rocket League to his own competing game store. Although the company stated that it would continue to support the Steam version of the game in perpetuity, it did not specify whether it would continue to sell the game on the platform. In fact, its initial wording suggested that this would not be the case.

"The PC version of Rocket League will come to the Epic Games store at the end of 2019, "the company wrote. "In the meantime, it will continue to be available for sale on Steam; Subsequently, it will continue to be supported on Steam for all existing buyers. "Phrases like" meantime "and" afterward "suggest that there will be a time when the Steam version will still be supported at best, but perhaps no longer available. purchase.

Later, Epic clarified by saying, "We continue to sell Rocket League on Steam, and did not announce its intention to stop selling the game there. Rocket League remains available for new buyers on Steam, and long-term plans will be announced in the future. "Psyonix also issued a statement also vague through his Rocket League Twitter account reading, "Rocket League is and remains available on Steam. Anyone who has Rocket League via Steam can still play and hope for continued support. We still do not know what will happen if the game inevitably happens on Epic Games Store (EGS), but it seems like it could become an EGS exclusive. .

This leads to one of the few possibilities. Epic and Psyonix may not have really defined the part of the agreement that would dictate exclusivity, and that could come back later. Alternatively, Epic could wait for the reaction to fade before making the announcement, a way similar to the way Gearbox Software first revealed Borderlands 3 trailer end of March and waited about a week to confirm the exclusivity of EGS.

A more reasonable reading of the situation is that Epic is waiting to see if EGS can reach parity of functionality with Steam with respect to some critical features. Rocket League depends, like mods, trading and rankings. If this does not allow EGS to get where it needs to be by the end of 2019, Epic could keep the game up for sale on Steam until it is. The most generous analysis of this announcement is that Epic has always planned to sell the game on both EGS and Steam, but nothing in the wording of its press release or in the obvious obfuscations after the fact makes it likely. .

We still have many unanswered questions about how this transition could work, on Rocket League It might look like it exists on both platforms, and how complicated it can be for Steam players to keep playing the same version of the game they're enjoying now, once it's mostly distributed via EGS. Epic is also compelled to face the uncomfortable reality that a vocal and potentially growing vocal subgroup of the gaming community will never accept exclusivity as a business concept or strategy, in any form whatsoever. whatever.

Before this announcement, critics of Epic's approach had often used various arguments as to why using EGS was not as easy as opening another application. These arguments included age-old complaints about fragmented game libraries, grievances charged with conspiracies over user privacy, and Chinese spyware (the Chinese game giant Tencent is an investor in Epic), as well as legitimate concerns about exhaustive list of missing functions of EGS. Disregarding exclusivity has always been the broadest and most visible position of EGS critics, but it has generally been grouped with these various other arguments for the opposition to feel more substantial.

In this case, however, the potential for exclusivity – and especially the exclusivity of a game already available on PC for years – seems to be the only source of anger that PC game fans may have had after this ad. No one except fans who think that Epic will ruin Rocket League – an unlikely scenario considering the success of Fortnite – Epic legitimately blamed Epic for buying a studio. It is also perfectly logical that Epic distributes its own games on its market, as it does with Fortnite. But removing a game already available on Steam is a different story with a lot of unknown and unprecedented side effects. As a result, this seems to have reinforced the intensity of the criticisms leveled against Epic's strategy.

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said last month that his company would cease to guarantee exclusivity on PC games and could even consider distributing its own software via Steam, if Valve matched its 88/12% income distribution. The distribution of revenues is the main motivator Sweeney has publicly expressed in favor of Epic's continued assault on Valve. It is not certain that Valve will concede that day, and Sweeney's statement may be more of a confident provocation than a promised compromise.

Anyway, Epic has managed to pull out of the game in exclusivity, despite the vocal repulsion. Yesterday, the company revealed the first sales figures of exclusive games at EGS, claiming that the Saber Interactive survival game World War z has sold more than 320,000 copies since its release on April 16.

Beyond World War z and Borderlands 3, Epic has earned exclusivity for a number of high-profile releases, including the new independent game from Supergiant Games Hades; Deep Silver and 4A Games » Metro Exodus; 505 Games and Remedy Entertainment Control; and the last three games of the French studio Quantic Dream, exclusive to the console. Among the most prominent titles to become an exclusive EGS well before its release, the famous developer Obsidian Entertainment The outer worlds.

Given what we know, it seems hard to believe that Rocket League will be an exception to this strategy, unless Epic specifically takes into account ongoing complaints and does not decide what to do next. Since Epic literally buys the game in question, it seems unlikely that the company will relinquish pressure on Valve unless it is absolutely necessary to save face. But we can not guess the company's intentions, especially after its series of public statements seem designed to halt the spread of the fire rather than extinguish it completely.

What we do know is that the war between Epic and Steam is getting worse and showing no signs of slowing down.