a thing I consistently wonder is
is Epic paying pc-first devs enough for Epic Games Store exclusives to actually be worth it
by worth it I mean essentially "you have a fairly dead launch on Epic's store and no one buys your game til it hits Steam" - like consistently a thing I hear from friends who mostly play PC games is "wait, that game is out?" when it's in the epic exclusivity period, even if it's been out for months or even years.
It's pretty clear, too, from the statistics we've seen from devs willing to share it that even among high-profile exclusives, the audience just isn't there. Satisfactory reportedly made more money in a few weeks on steam than they made in 3 months on epic and they were maybe one of THE most heavily promoted early exclusives for the store. More recent reports I've seen suggest recent indie epic exclusives basically sell zero, now that the marketing blitz is mostly over and the frontpage is primarily dedicated to AAA sales/releases.
and it's hard not to wonder like................... what is the lost marketing/reviews buzz worth there, financially, to an indie. We know from the lawsuits epic has filed that they offer VERY different personalized deals per game for exclusivity, and that that number has generally been trending downward.
And so the question I guess is, at this point, is it ACTUALLY free money? How easy, I wonder, is it to make it back to relevance if you pretend the steam launch is your actual launch 1-2 years later (assuming you have not gone out of business by then)? Momentum is maybe the key element of games marketing these days (just look at how time between announcement and release has collapsed for many big titles) and like. How much are you willing to be paid to lose all of that, right?
idk, this is mostly spitballing; I'm not involved with the business side of any company I've ever worked at. But from an outside view I feel like if you're feeling confident in your game, you'd have to either feel VERY solidly that you're going to have a strong steam launch post-facto or demand a big paycheck
(..if you're tiny and desperate maybe you take the money under the assumption your game was never going to sell anyway, I guess.)
me, waiting for Saints Row to come out on a platform I actually use whilst Embracer report the game hasn’t exceeded their sales expectations: 🤷🏻♀️
