author: Frozen
Tim Sweeney Explains Why Epic Games Bets on Exclusive Titles
Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, explained on Twitter why the strategy of mass buying of exclusive titles, though unpopular, is beneficial to gamers.
- The CEO of Epic Games believes that signing exclusive agreements is the only way for the company to threaten Steam;
- As long as Steam has no real competition, Valve will not give up on 30% revenue share;
- Lowering the share of shops is to benefit players - publishers will get more money, so that they will be able to invest in new productions, and the prices of games will become lower.
The theme of exclusive titles in Epic Games Store returns like a boomerang. Representatives of the company like to remind once in a while about how revolutionary and beneficial this system is for the players. When asked on Twitter why his platform is still "stealing" titles from the competition, Tim Sweeney, the head of Epic Games, once again decided to defend temporary exclusivity.
Sweeney believes that buying exclusive titles, although unpopular with players, is the only effective way to fight the 70/30 revenue share ratio used by Steam (70 for the creators, 30 for the store). Epic Games Store uses the 88/12 ratio, and although this is not the most advantageous ratio among platforms (Discord has 90/10 ratio), it can be decisive for the success or financial failure of a game. A higher revenue share for creators means bigger profit for the players, because the money obtained in this way can be used by publishers to invest in new titles or to make the prices of games lower.
Epic Games emphasizes that many independent stores have tried to threaten Steam's monopoly in the past, but (excluding major publisher platforms such as Uplay, Origin and Battle.net) none of them achieved even 5% of what Valve's platform earns. Although many of them have beaten Epic Games Store by the number of features available, they never came close to the results achieved by the store run by the creators of Fortnite. Why is that? Because they didn't have that many exclusive titles.
This is not the first time when CEO of Epic Games has actively defended his platform on Twitter. Just a few days ago, we wrote about how Tim Sweeney denied accusations of overstating the sales of exclusive titles for Epic Games Store and how he defended Ys Net's decision to break obligations to Shenmue III supporters on Kickstarter by signing a temporary exclusivity agreement with Epic.