When Epic Exclusives Come To Steam

After taking an exclusive deal with Epic Games Store, many games have hoped for a second sales bump when they eventually return to Steam, the world's largest PC gaming marketplace - but only a handful have succeeded. In this video, we'll look at how those few games pulled it off.

Is the Epic Games Store failing to capture new customers, other than those collecting free games? Is the customer experience still bad, or is it improving? Only time will tell, but I think the Epic Games Store's exclusivity deals are bad for customers, bad for gaming and bad for you.

(Player counts, reviews and review averages in this video were captured using Steam, SteamDB and Metacritic in March 2022. Player counts and user review averages may adjust over time.)

Chapters:
0:00 - Intro
2:14 - Hitman 3
5:03 - Hades
7:03 - Satisfactory
9:16 - Shenmue 3
10:34 - The Outer Wilds
12:25 - Control
14:27 - Untitled Goose Game

This video contains the following music:
Fortnite - Get Ripped (I looked all over and couldn't find the artist/s - I'll update this once I do)
Hitman 3 - Mission Accomplished, composed by Niels by Nielsen
Hades - The Painful Way, composed by Darren Korb
Satisfactory - Pygmalion Effect, composed by Jannik Reuterberg
The Outer Wilds - Outer Wilds & Final Voyage composed by Andrew Prahlow
Control - Counterfeit, composed by Martin Stig Anderson & Petri Alanko
Untitled Goose Game - Preludes / Book 1, L. 117, composed by Dan Golding

This video contains clips from:
Q&A: Satisfactory Exclusive to Epic Games Store by @CoffeeStainStudios

Releasing Satisfactory's Total Number of Sales by @CoffeeStainStudios

This video contains game footage from: (in order of appearance)
Final Fantasy VII (Original)
Final Fantasy VII (Remake)
Fortnite
Hitman 3
Hitman 2
Metro Exodus
Hades
Pyre
Bastion
Transistor
Satisfactory
Factorio
Civilization VI
Stardew Valley
Goat Simulator
Shenmue 3
The Outer Wilds
Control
Quantum Break
Borderlands 3
Untitled Goose Game

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[KevinHelpUs]

Epic's fans have been posting the same four points in the comments, and I can't keep reposting the same responses, so if I sent you here, you said at least one of these.

"I'm angry that Steam takes 30%". - Amazon, WalMart, Best Buy, Apple's App Store, Google Play, PlayStation Store, XBox, Nintendo eShop and more all take 30%, as do plenty of other e-commerce platforms. Steam did not invent the 30% cut. Epic started pushing the 30% cut as bad to push their own platform as an alternative. And it's fine if Epic's competitive messaging pushes them taking a lower cut - I have no problem with Epic offering a 12% cut. But Steam is not abhorrently price gouging, Steam are taking an industry standard cut for aggregating their customer base.

"Steam is a monopoly." - It isn't. You do not have to publish your game on Steam. There are plenty of other stores, including Epic, Humble Store, GOG, Itch and more where you could publish instead. However, as a customer, I believe Steam delivers a superior customer experience, and so I and many others prefer to buy on Steam. The market has rewarded them accordingly. So you would be sacrificing access to a significant number of customers by bypassing Steam, but nothing is stopping you if you prefer not to be on Steam.

Since a number of you still don't believe me, here's the definition of a monopoly. You need to have exclusive control of a commodity or service to be a monopoly, and as mentioned above, there are multiple other storefronts to buy PC games without going through Steam, therefore, Steam is not a monopoly, no matter what Tim Sweeney tells you. He lies to you so that you will do his marketing for him.


"Steam should have competition." - I'm fine with competition. This is the opposite of competition. Competition would be placing a game on every store, and letting customers choose which store provides them the most value. Epic has taken away your choice because they know if they competed fairly, most customers would choose Steam. Why would you defend a company that paid to take away your choice as a consumer?

"Exclusives are the only way Epic can compete with Valve." - Then they don't deserve to compete. Seriously, if your business plan does not offer any alternative benefit (and Epic doesn't, there is no advantage to me to split my collection between Steam and Epic), and your strategy is just to make your customer's experience on their preferred platform worse, you have a poor plan - and your business does not deserve to succeed. Epic is not owed success just because they opened a store, they have to earn that success. And they haven't. Epic is trying to buy a seat at the table they didn't earn, and I'm glad their reputation has suffered for it. I hope it continues to as long as exclusives are part of their strategy. If Epic wants to win over customers, they have to do SOMETHING better than Steam, instead of just trying to make Steam worse - and annoying the same customers they are trying to win over.

[standard-carrier-wo-chan]

Epic's one fatal flaw is not understanding that Steam isn't just a games market, it's a whole social lounge. Steam's community side is almost as prevalent as its game market side, and just as polished. The UI might be simple and, dare I say, outdated, but it's familiar, functional, and accessible.

[JeffHanke]

Steam also gets major points from me for eschewing exclusives and their support of gaming on Linux. They have a native Linux Steam client and Proton is a compatibility revelation. The Epic Store isn't officially supported on Linux at all, although Epic *is* making an effort to support Linux for developers using their Unreal Engine and (barf) Easy Anti-Cheat.

[qStrausSp]

I also wanna point out that Epic wanted the developers of Terraria to delist their game on Steam and release it on the Epic store, the Terraria chads denied the deal and as a consequence, they skipped their trailer on the E3.

[mariokarter]

The problem with the Epic Game Store is the same problem with Google Stadia or that Amazon thing everyone forgot about. They're not actually a competitor in the market, they just bought their way in and expected players to flock to them for merely existing. Steam spent 20 years building a service people like, you're not winning those same people over with a less functional knockoff version.

[SammMoney]

Epic brought to the PC table what Xbox, Sony, Nintendo, Sega, and Atari were doing for consoles for years. It's bad form, it's greed, and especially if a Kickstarter reneges on a promise they made, the Kickstarter supporter has every right to their money.

[FadedOxide]

"Eagerly awaiting the game to escape from jail" perfectly put, that's exactly how it feels.

[bigiron]

"The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates."
Epic is not providing a better service than steam, and isnt even a better service than the pirates

[economicalgamer]

Very well said
"if you complain about it online, but buy the product anyway, you're only encouraging them to do so"
This applies to every product
Not just games

[francisquebachmann]

Most of my problem with Epic is their Launcher, It's too slow and unoptimized compared to Steam which is much faster. Gabe is kinda right, Piracy is a Service Problem

[TheRibbonRed]

15:23 "but as long as [Epic] is willing to write checks for 10 million dollars".

Only for the AAAs. The Epic v. Apple lawsuit has shown that Epic only pay about 100k for indies to go EGS exclusive.

[en--ev]

"Epic has created a problem to sell you the solution." Couldn't have been said better. So many anti-consumer practices can be summed up with that. Instead of actually improving, and in turn, enticing you to use their product/service over the competition, most large companies nowadays seem more inclined to just force you into a corner where you have no choice but to reluctantly use theirs instead.
Why compete with the competition when you can just eliminate them? You could work hard, train long and arduous hours to win the race, but why do that when you could just shoot your opponent in the knee? A race is a lot easier to win if your opponent can’t run! Even if the audience hates the show, that’s not what matters right? No—the only thing that matters is winning! By any means necessary.
I yearn for the day it comes to backfire on all of them.

[SpencerHHO]

Steams contributions to the open source community is also worth a lot too. There are games I got for free on Epic only to end up buying on steam so I can play them more easily on my Linux desktop.

Proton is mostly open source, Lutris uses Proton to run EPIC games and other launchers on linux. Valve created software that makes Epic games more useful.


Valve isn't perfect but no other platform has resisted the enshitification of the internet as much as valve has.

[LessThanPeachy]

What a lot of publishers and such don't seem to realize is that Steam's client does a lot of things way better. It has a built-in overlay for all your games to access friends, messages, recently played with players in online games, quick settings like an FPS counter, and much more that isn't available on many other clients, forcing devs to either entirely rely on an in-house implementation that's often subpar or to scrap those features altogether. You can't even message people or talk through voice chat without being in a game using Epic's software!

[sd]

I'm simple guy living in India & I don't buy games from Epic because they won't let me buy the games. Their store has 2 payment methods, Credit Card & Paypal. In India, Debit Card is prefer over Credit Card and I still don't understand why I can't buy games via Paypal (Btw last game I've purchased via Paypal was Division 2 on Uplay). Abt other stores including 3rd party sites as GMG, Fanatical & Humble Bundle, my card & internet banking works on their payment methods.

[jgamer]

I’ve been saying this for years: if you want this to stop, quit supporting it. Vote with your wallet because money is the only language our corporate overlords understand

[vogonp]

This doesn't just affect Steam. It also impacts smaller stores as well. They can't compete with Epic for exclusively.

[shadowdragon]

Im surprised you didnt discuss the person who made a game on his own, got offered by epic and rejected it, only for the opposite to happen and his game was essentially black listed from their stores instead because he refused their deal

[liamsz]

I find it so hilarious that epic LOVES to point at other companies calling them out for monopolistic practices, just so they can get a chance to get a monopoly of their own.

[SwordsmanOrion]

Regardless of every other terrible problem the EGS has, their worst crime is siding with publishers over customers by selling their lack of customer reviews as a feature to them. That tells you every thing you need to know about why you don't want to buy from Epic.