Epic Games To Stop Pushing For Exclusives

According with Epic Games Store’s Steve Allison they will stop their pursuit of exclusives after Epic meets their objectives, this might be a relief for Steam who was badly hurt for the Metro Exodus situation. It’s quite interesting as I would’ve expected a different approach from Epic. Xbox with their massive growth in development studios is pushing for the opposite, more exclusive for their platform.

“I don’t think we plan to [negotiate exclusives] forever,” he said. “We’ll probably do it for a while. It’s just about pushing the business model, helping people thrive, but at some point hopefully people just come, or the industry moves down and matches us … I understand the sentiment about it, so I’m pretty sensitive to how I answer this question, but the answer is yes, at some point we could go to zero, or we could go to very, very few major exclusives in any given year. We will definitely not be doing it on the scale we’re doing it on now for an extended period of time.”

Steve Allison confirmed that it’s Epic’s desire to continue offering a healthy business practice in which developers can create freely and have a better revenue that it’s offered by Steam.

“We’re trying to socialize a new financial model for developers that they can thrive on,” said Allison earlier in the panel. “What happens is developers have some reasonable success, half-a-million units, that’s a lot of units, but in a 70/30 situation, depending on their publishing situation, or maybe they’re cost structure, maybe they just survive when they should thrive. So we want to see them thrive, and the difference in the business model is substantial.

“We need to help people get there, and if we have someone who decides to go—from a business case perspective, they want to see what they can do for their business—if they go into five stores, four of which have a 70/30 business model and one that has 88/12, and their sales get spread around at any proportion, kind of less than 70 percent than their total sales, their going to get a blended result that is probably not going to change their minds in any way, shape, or form. We’re trying to change the minds of our developers. The best way we can do that is have the majority or all of their sales happen here.”

Ron Gilbert’s Thimbleweed Park was recently offered for free at Epic Games Store, which it’s another reason to switch to the new platform, Epic seems to know how to convince developers and players to make the change and they’re ready to invest all the money generated by Fortnite which seems like a smart move for the future.

For now the PC game’s store seems to be won by Epic Games but Steam and Discord are also doing some interesting moves to stay relevant, tell me in the comment section below which platform do you prefer and why. Also keep it tuned to Gaming Instincts for more updates on Epic Games Store.