Tim Sweeney continues to drop nuggets of wisdom on our head here and there. The latest one being that the Epic Store games exclusivity won’t continue for a long time. The only reason it’s even there currently is so they can push their business model. However, Epic Store buying exclusives isn’t sitting well with the community at large.
If you don’t know what we’re talking about, we’re referring to the games that recently became exclusives on the Epic Store. Games such as Metro Exodus and The Outer Worlds. The latter of which Obsidian didn’t reportedly know about.
Epic spoke in an Epic Store Q/A at GDC where he expressed his “regret” at having to make Metro an exclusive.
We had been talking to those guys for a number of months, and they made some decisions on their end. This is not a throw under the bus thing, it’s just the timing of where that came together and what was important to their business-we decided to do it together. We both knew there was the potential for the thing that happened in terms of communication. I think it felt way worse and was bigger than we thought, and in real-time, we spent time talking … ‘we will never do this again in this way.’
Tim Sweeney has also added that gamers and consumers don’t understand the costs behind making a game for developers. This is added justification for the Epic Store buying off mainstream AAA games to be exclusives. This includes games like Metro, The Outer Worlds, and The Walking Dead Telltale games.
There’s evidently still miscommunication between Epic and gamers around the world. People do understand the cost of making a game unless they’re pirates.
The fact is that making games harder to access by hogging them isn’t the right way to compete with Steam. In fact, this method only makes people resent Epic Games more and the games that are being made exclusive to the platform.
The roadmap to success that the Epic company shared doesn’t really show any appeal to customers either. The store has made it evident that they cater to the developers over the consumers, completely forgetting that it’s a two-way street.
What else do you expect from a guy that wants the developers to help beat the competition?
