Working on a game...

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endgegner

The Saviour of UTA. Worship me as DJ worships sofa
Mar 5, 2006
6,650
38
Boston
Been working on a game with some of the original creators of Myst, Command & Conquer, Red Alert, BioShock: Infinite, Metal Gear Solid: V, and others. We've been working our asses off for about 3.5 years now and finally going to release Spring 2019, getting published by Cyan.

Some of you know I got my start in gamedev with UT99 mapping and it's incredible that it's come this far (I've worked on a fuckload of games now, but this is a first from the ground-up for me.) Would be great if some of you would take a moment to look or at least 'wishlist' on Steam. Steam gates everything based on how many wishlists it gets, so just the click of the button helps a lot. :)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/953370/ZED/

Trailer: :
 
One week before launch:
ZED is now an Epic Games Store exclusive!
I wish. The Epic Games Store is terrific for developers, and if the sales numbers they're saying are true then it's amazing for developers. Picture this (and this is accurate to the best of my knowledge):
Steam takes a 30% cut of the original sales.
Engine licensing takes a 5% cut of the original sales.
Publisher takes a 30% cut off the remaining 65% until they recoup a certain amount, and then 20% after that.
50% of the remaining goes to our partner studio, 50% goes to my studio.
Company pays off its bills and taxes.
I get 3% of the leftovers.

On Epic:
Epic takes 12% of the original sales
Publisher takes 30% off the remaining 88%.
50% of the remaining goes to our partner studio, 50% goes to my studio.
Company pays off its bills and taxes.

The extra 23% means Publisher gets paid off faster and everyone else gets a bit more piece of the pie. Heck, we could reasonably afford to drop the price of the game after dev recoup 20% to make up for the savings.
 
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I have no problem with Steam getting some competition. They have grown lazy, and maybe this will make them actually do something other than basic maintenance. I agree that Epic is giving game devs a much better deal than Steam.

I don't like how Epic is going about getting people to use their store though. Their launcher is fairly bare-bones compared to Steam, so they are taking the relatively easy route of chucking their Fortnite/Tencent money at game devs to make their games exclusive for at least 6 months. This is good for people making games, but doesn't provide a better user experience.

Having to wait so long to play a new release on Steam is just annoying also. If Epic did things a little differently, and say for example a game came out just a week early on EGS compared to Steam, with the EGS price being cheaper, then IMO that would be fine. It would encourage people to use EGS over Steam, while still giving them a choice. They also probably wouldn't be having such a backlash right now.

Of course, most people just want to play a new game when it comes out, and don't care about overlays, achievements, user reviews etc. To them, paying a little less for a game is only a good thing and they are happy to use the Epic store. For me though, I won't even consider giving Epic my ££ until they've finished building their store functionality to a level at least on par with Steam.
 
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Having it be bare bones is nice for a lot of people. We have a lot of people asking "How many people actually care about trading cards?" and Steam doesn't release stats like that. Achievements, Friend List, Library is all I really care about personally, and I'm not sure I'd care much about the achievements. Steam has a 15-year head start on Epic so thinking Epic will catch up with everything anytime soon is unlikely by their own admission. They've got a decent road map to get most things at par with Steam in a relatively reasonable fashion and timeframe IMO.

What's upsetting to me is that people, as you just did, said "Fortnite/Tencent" money - TenCent injected capital in the early 2010's and that money has been used up by Epic. There are a ton of other investors in Epic, such as Disney but nobody is complaining about them. People keep using Tencent in a pejorative term on Reddit (60% investment) to describe Epic while playing LOL and PUBG that are wholly owned by Tencent. Tencent had a 40% investment in Epic and that investment has gone down as more investors have joined. Tim Sweeney still is the majority shareholder and Tencent doesn't have the right to say anything to Epic.

I'm not a fan of exclusives, but they're both not the end of the world and probably a necessary evil to compete with Steam. If Borderlands were releasing simultaneously on Epic/Steam I'd have no reason to go to Epic because my Steam library is bigger. Epic have to do it to get competition with Steam. It's the only way to take down a monopoly unfortunately.
 
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You make valid points, but I think if I discuss Epic more I'm going to derail your thread. Either way, I'm sure Epic will do fine even without my business :D

I'm pretty sure ZED is the only game I've backed through Kickstarter. I've been following most of the updates, and it's genuinely cool to see how far along the game has come. It seems you guys have a lot of really creative and experienced people working on it, and I'm looking forward to the Spring release. I'll be sure to leave a positive 'user review' when it comes out :P
 
We'll chat sometime elsewhere.

Thanks a lot for your support - it's been a really wild ride and an execution of Murphy's Law, so we'll see how the final product comes out. I'm excited for the next projects.