I was thinking, there is no good game store for PC games apart from Steam which has an awful Greenlight process. Who made Steam guardians of the indie games?
What do Unreal think about opening their own indie game store to sell games made with the Unreal Engine? Aimed at the PC/Mac/Linux market.
I mean we have the tools with Unreal Engine to make games but no tools to sell them which is kind of the whole point in the end.
I mean if Valve can do it why can’t Epic? They have 330 employees. Epic has about 160. So they are comparable in size.
Personally, while I find issues with Steam I find it more annoying to have all these different platforms, it drives me nuts as a consumer… Steam, Origin, UPlay, etc. All require you have their own bloatware **** installed… I think it’s wise to stick to what your core business is and what you do best. Epic’s core business is not being a digital distributor. Also, I am not sure about employee counts, but that is a massive difference in numbers you’ve quoted. Your saying valve is twice the headcount. That’s not comparable. It also indicates, valve being that size, that running a system like steam requires massive resources which I personally think Epic best to put into their engine and games. Hope that doesn’t sound in anyway an “attack” on your suggestion, it’s a good one, I just have a different personal view and opinion.
While I’ve not seen anything directly, I get the feeling here that if you’ve a really nice game made with UE which is a good showcase (mind you not just shovel-ware like I am building :p) , Epic are very likely going to leverage their position in the industry and help you in some way to promote and get your game to where it needs to be. That’s part of what I feel makes what Epic are doing really amazing. Not only they want their community to succeed, their own success depends on it. Win-Win.
Yes, sure, tons of indie game stores, uplay and origin is clearly not enough.
And steam is just an awful monster we should fight, it abuses clients and don’t want to give an opportunity to young game developers to make their games and sell it succesfully with free in-store advertisement and sales.
Other than consoles like you mention STEAM GREENLIGHT is a wonderful opportunity you just need to get voted by the community which won’t be that easy and also go to: Reddit.com/r/gamedev and /r/gamedevclassiefieds there are talented people in that community looking to work with anyone to make games for a price or ownership rights. Another place indie game developers turn to are sites like: http://www.indiedb.com/
The LARGEST impact here is Reddit.com and STEAMPOWERED.com because if you put your interest to the community their community will put an interest on you. The key here is community relationship put all your work to them not for yourself or publisher if you work for one, but I suggest a good developer work for himself or with a team he trust. Oh yeah the tide is turn in this market publishers are looking for us indie dev. for work not us looking for them use this option and good luck on game development using UE4 or whatever game engine you prefer.
One more thing don’t forget where you came from and support a community that helped you garnish your ability by putting up free tutorials on their Wiki page we gave you the tools you need its fair to help others in need; people like me.
Yeah, ALL OUT ATTACK!
On a serious note, I don’t think that such fragmentation of market is a good thing, especially if it UE only games, it’s like racism by game engine
I agree. Opening it’s own game store would have all sorts of complications that I don’t think Epic wants to deal with at the moment. They are a developer first and foremost, not a publisher. Yes Valve started as a developer, but they positioned themselves over the course of many many years to become a publisher as well.
Exactly. I don’t mean they should create something like Steam. I just mean create the mechanisms where people can sell their games from their own websites. i.e. take care of payments, and (possibly) digital distribution, have a simple button that lets developers refund any unhappy customers (very important!), that’s it. Epic would take say 10% of the sales money.
In other words it’s just an API really that would link in with the Marketplace to let you sell your games with DRM.
So it would be a DRM API plus a Marketplace API. And that’s it. The developer could take care of the rest. Instead of a central repository like Steam. (Well they could if they wanted).
I just think those APIs should be part of the game engine as they are just as important as making the actual game!
It’s a money maker for Epic. Plus they can make sure they get their 5% instead of just by trust!
The only problem I can think of is that because Unreal uses unmanaged C++ there is the problem that people could put malware in their games. But that would be the developers fault not Epics.
