The CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, has been on Twitter and made some pretty interesting comments regarding exclusives and Steam.
If Steam committed to a permanent 88% revenue share for all developers and publishers without major strings attached, Epic would hastily organize a retreat from exclusives (while honoring our partner commitments) and consider putting our own games on Steam.
— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) 25 April 2019
A fan asked: “I mean Valve operates how it does today, except that they come out and say that they are going to slash their revenue cut and do not plan on increasing it in the future. In such a scenario will you still give money for exclusives and compete with them?”
Sweeney replied: “If Steam committed to a permanent 88% revenue share for all developers and publishers without major strings attached, Epic would hastily organize a retreat from exclusives (while honoring our partner commitments) and consider putting our own games on Steam.”
He continued: “Such a move would be a glorious moment in the history of PC gaming, and would have a sweeping impact on other platforms for generations to come. Then stores could go back to just being nice places to buy stuff, rather than the Game Developer IRS,
“There are solutions for all of the problems of high-overhead payment methods like retail cards. Epic’s approach is just one. Other stores could ask developers and publishers to agree to a rate chart with a variable revenue sharing rate per payment method,
“Keep in mind, most of the other problems developers and publishers face (not all problems, but most) can be solved with money, and that extra 18% provides a very significant amount of new funding,
“The key “no major strings attached” points are: games can use any online systems like friends and accounts they choose, games are free to interoperate across platforms and stores, the store doesn’t tax revenue on other stores or platforms (e.g. if you play Fortnite on iOS+PC),
“More “no major strings attached”: if you play the game on multiple platforms, stuff you’ve bought can be available everywhere; no onerous certification requirements. Essentially, the spirit of an open platform where the store is just a place to find games and pay for stuff,
“Epic offers developers free codes everywhere for non-exclusives, and free codes for exclusives through Humble and hopefully more in the future. The cost of download bandwidth is much lower than the cost of payment processing and purchase support, which is born by the key seller.”
The tweets started through a discussion of Epic’s 12 percent revenue share.
H/T: PC Gamer