Are you considering to release FF on the Epic Games Store?

Just a minor question, but do you guys plan to bring it to the Epic Store as well?

1 Like

:smile:

More like a “loaded” question. I’m not against them putting any games they make on the Epic Store if possible. Particularly I think Grim Dawn is a good candidate to offer up there at this stage. Epic is selling games, no matter what the Epic haters want to believe. But I think at the minimum they should avoid any “timed exclusiveness” controversy with any new games they make from here on into the future.

1 Like

Exactly this, despite all the hate it’s actually selling games.
People don’t just go there for the weekly free game they also go there to buy stuff. It’s a pretty decent platform as a customer to me, I am not sure how good\bad it’s from a developer POV though.

Would be nice to see Crate stuff there.

1 Like

GOG and Humble too is my preference, I still hate using steam (old issues dont need to start the flame wars yet :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: ). Be good to see the games on multiple platforms in any case.

1 Like

stupid question maybe, but with GD “hinted” to come to Epic Games (yay i can buy it a 3rd time), does that mean Farthest Frontier will also come to the epic store, and in that case would it be an exclusive for a year?
guessing it’s stupid asking since you already put up the steam page and probably wouldn’t have bothered with that if the intention wasn’t for it to come to steam “soon”
but the reason i ask is i remember seeing other devs mentioning that Epic “demands” (timed) exclusivity to be entered in their store, and so if GD was indeed coming to Epic, i wondered if that meant they made such demands/requests for other products/titles not directly connected to the one going up on the store but as an umbrella deal for a publisher/company, so that putting GD on Epic meant Epic would want FF too and for them to want it to be an exclusive too if so

1 Like

Personally, I believe we are “safe” on that front. Knowing medierra’s character (from reading year’s of his posts) he definitely doesn’t need Epic’s money, nor do I think he wants it. It simply isn’t worth the controversy and backlash for a company as respected as Crate to take that deal. Crate has the upper-hand in any such deals with Epic and I think they would “bend” before Crate would.

I am certainly curious to hear medierra’s views on it but I stand by my gut feeling as stated above: it would never happen like that because medierra is smarter than that. I could see them selling their game’s on Epic, certainly, but on their own terms.

;tldr: dont let me down medierra - everyone knows that the exclusivity deals end up rebounding back on them on the Steam forums from the hordes of Steam users who, ironically, hate Epic’s exclusivity yet themselves choose to be exclusive to Steam :smirk: I love people. Always rational. Like rabid little dogs.

2 Likes

“but the reason i ask is i remember seeing other devs mentioning that Epic “demands” (timed) exclusivity to be entered in their store, and so if GD was indeed coming to Epic, i wondered if that meant they made such demands/requests for other products/titles not directly connected to the one going up on the store but as an umbrella deal for a publisher/company, so that putting GD on Epic meant Epic would want FF too and for them to want it to be an exclusive too if so”

I’ve never heard of Epic demanding a timed exclusive - that doesn’t seem to make sense given they still have minority of the user base relative to Steam. Pretty sure all exclusive periods are based on Epic making a payment to the developer for exclusivity rights.

Epic is not really in a position to demand anything since they’re still the smaller store and our deal to bring Grim Dawn to the Epic store has no connection to any other project we’re working on. At this point, I’m sort of doing it for experimental purposes. We signed a distribution contract with Epic a while back for GD and it will be added to the store… when I get around to filling out some info and emailing it back to Epic… soon™.

2 Likes

It was quite the story at the time :

1 Like

I mean, its not really a demand, its an offer to buy exclusivity. I guess at that point, they were focusing on trying to gain users through exclusives and could probably only on-board so many games per month.

These days, they seem to be more into the phase of just trying to onboard whatever they think will sell. They weren’t interested in GD a year ago but they are now and obviously the exclusivity ship sailed for GD long ago.

I also don’t really get the financial dynamics of exclusivity. It seems like they’d have to offer a fuckload of money for that to make any sense. Since the email that guy in the article shared talked about “recouping” against the guarantee, it’s not even extra money unless he just doesn’t think he’s going to ever sell that much. Ethics aside, that just doesn’t even seem like a good deal to me to go exclusive on a smaller store just to get money up-front instead of over time.

Some higher profile games have gone exclusive though, so I have to imagine they do, in some cases, offer extra financial incentive beyond just guaranteed sales that they recoup against.

4 Likes

Well, if you project sales of 400k, know you break even at 250k (just making numbers up, obviously) and Epic offers you a deal where you get money for 300k sales guaranteed upfront and then money once you break 300k, it probably can be tempting.
If they offered 100k sales guaranteed it probably isn’t.

So yes, offering a fuckload certainly helps :wink:

afaik the argument for smaller studios was also about visibility and not getting crushed under steams flood of shovelware.

I assume the paperwork got buried under your draft of The Crate Story. :laughing:

I assume the paperwork got buried under your draft of The Crate Story.

Uhh, yeah that’s about right…

We actually started porting GD to epic store but then they wanted us to do some stuff that Steam doesn’t even require, that would have been a pain and our engineers were already slammed at the time, so we told them no and that was that.

After that, when it came to FF, it just seemed like too much work for too little upside and their overly complicated legal agreements and store requirements don’t make it easy…

Now, about that Crate Story … :wink: Should really get it done so we can enjoy reading it big M. Want all the gossip and juicy stuff. Plus it’s the only KS goal still unfulfilled.