Epic creating their own Steam to support games based on UE4 (and others) is not so crazy. It actually makes sense by offering a complete package (engine and outlet). Keep in mind that Valve was largely a one-trick pony show when Steam was introduced.
If anyone has the resources to pull this of is Epic.
I was going to create a category page and a detail page to show how it could look with the launcher integration.
I realized this is Epic we’re talking about and they never cease to amaze us. Look at the Engine UI, the manual, the forum.
Everything they do is well Epic. I trust they’re going to make a beautiful store. I was in ecommerce in my previous life and know how to
make a beautiful stores. I hope is reading this and wish the best for Epic as always.
btw:
Epic does not have to be a Steam killer, once the word gets out about Epic Game Store and maybe Unity the rest is history.
Epic replacing Steam?
Epic: “Hey Gaben, remember when you gave us a s<3t ton of HTC Vives?”
Gaben: “Yeah, hope we can work together now like a big gamer family! <3”
Epic: “Family? How about we kill your store?”
Gaben: “…”
Ok we are seriously going to discuss Epic opening a store, the obvious question : How many people have downloaded and actively using the epic launcher?
What is the customer profile of “marketplace” users?
Paragon has anywhere from 100.000 to 400.000, a lot of those are PC players while some are on PS4.
There’s also a lot of modders who have launcher installed for the other games.
Developers buy games too, one going through marketplace may end up buying games as well.
The problem are the hosting costs, but there’s moneis in there for Epic if they manage to do this; but they are so focused on Paragon and Fortnite that I believe their interest on something like this is close to zero 
Epic making their own game storefront? HAHAHA. They wont even make their marketplace good, let alone starting a storefront
I do agree with some of your points. One thing you are not tkaing into account is most these guys dont have a business, like, at all. “Wicked gamer llc inc edu .com” is just some random tag they use. No company, no legit business, no actual LLC, no employees … im willing to bet most, dont have jobs, or, well paid jobs to fund themselves. That wasnt a negative on anyone, just facts.
I think $500 free is fine for new Steam setup. Would that be an issue? Nope. 500k wouldnt for me either. I own my business, its a legit business. If i can show 1$ income to any bank, i can loan up for **** near anything i want. Now, this story/discussion has MANY sides tho …
- The side of “well, i have the money”
- The side of “i dont, and, i dont want to get it”
- The Side of “i dont and i tried and failed”
… and on and on.
What i see here a lot is “well, i have a budget of $x00 dollars and its not fair!”
Have i ever, in my life, played a game that had a $100 … $500 … 10k budget that was anything with REPLAYABILITY?
no … no … maybe.
Facts kids, facts. You can copy/paste from marketplace, do how ever you want …
You want to make money, it takes money …
Should it be 10k for Steam? No, f-them. They take 30% of sales lol … thats HIGH AS HELL, +5% to UE, +tax … its like 50% sales are gone before you see it … fine, whatever … i digress …
Step 1. Game Idea
Step 2. Can you make it 100% alone?
Step 2B. Hire ppl
Step 3. Make a legit company and stop using some gay *** tag as your company name
Step 4. Get business loan + UE grant!
Step 5 … stop ******** about hwo you have nothing. You have that machine that can apparently dev up some games. Prob have some nice 1080 GTX in there as well. At least you spent 600$ on that PC. You have money. If not, get a job, a FULL TIME one. Game comes second. This isnt starving artist day where you come up with 100 reasons why you CANT. You can, you made this choice. Sorry its not easy.
anyways … i think yall are all right in your own rights. I see more complaining and “snowflake BS” in here i do at a Trump rally.
Well… Life ain’t fair.
I wanted to say that, but some would find it offensive and false statement lol
Still I agree, from my personal experience, I don’t know of any way to make money without expending a lot of money you already have worked for (somewhere else) to grow your own business; if wasn’t that the case, nobody would be employee everybody would own their own company.
I think that Steam Direct is better than Greenlight, but the size of fee will be 200-300$ and its big money for indie devs from East EU.
It’s not the job of Valve (the business) to drive or counteract any “democratization of gamedev in frontier markets.”
It’s the job of Valve to make publishing fees, and they now believe they will make the most publishing fees by having some kind of bar to keep the value-sapping time-sucking cr@p out of their store.
Regarding “games should be judged by their artistic merit, not the size of the developer’s pocketbook,” again, that’s not Valve’s job. Valve’s job is to sell games that people actually want to buy.
Either Valve can pre-guess what people want to buy, and have a board of censors. This is the traditional publisher route: EA, UbiSoft, and the rest, publish your game if they think it’s good enough and will sell well enough. They judge your game by quality. This model is already served well by the publishers, so I don’t see how Valve could make a big impact there.
Or, Valve lets each developer guess how well the game will sell, but they make that guess be a little more realistic than just a daydream, by saying “If you believe your game will sell $10,000, you should be able to put up $1,000 to make that come true.” And if you don’t believe your game will sell $10,000, you don’t believe the game is good enough for Valve’s customers for them to sell your game.
Finally, Steam doesn’t need a “**** category.” That’s what the Internet is for.
Go look at gamesalad, or kongregate, or newgrounds, to see a large number of indie games, available to the public, with a very low publishing bar.
Regarding Epic Launcher turning into a Steam Client: The original Steam client was boosted throught he sale of Half Life 2, which required you to install it.
The last few years, Blizzard, Epic, and others have tried adding their own similar management clients. (Even EA Origin, or that Ubi horror.)
However, they have not replaced Steam as the default online game store, for various reasons. I think that doing so, will be really hard, just like it would be hard to replace Facebook, or Google.
I would strongly recommend setting up a company to release your game on Steam, even if it is going to be free. If you don’t, you leave yourself personally liable for all manner of things, and you do not want to get in that position.
A semi-good game can easily fund 5k. Even a donate button on it’s official website would bring that sum.
LOL get real! Unless you forgot to put the /sarc tag. Epic doesn’t have the numbers, devs != players.
Whether you’ll need an accountant will vary based on your jurisdiction (here in the UK it would be largely unnecessary, as keeping basic books is not too difficult) - but there are other considerations; for example, what do you do if somebody sues you for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars? Without something like an LLC, you are personally liable. There was talk earlier of the $5-10k fee being a risk that could ruin a person, but this is just as dangerous.
The amount of labor that goes into a good game these days is vast.
Are you really saying that regions with cheaper labor can still afford the developer workstations and man-years of labor, but can’t up-front a $1,000 fee that gets paid back as the game actually sells?
If that is the case, I have a business idea I want to start, where all I do is provide the up-front fee, and I take a cut of the sales 
This discussion is pretty interesting so far.
A lot of posts about Steam being more serious platform and being $1k-$5k low enough for any developer and if it’s too high you’re not serious enough to be on Steam. What is funny to me that all previous years developers without such money were fine on Steam and $100 price tag was telling that this platform is FOR them, yet now half of community says “Find more money or publisher, otherwise you’re not good enough for the platform and probably should go away”. Just the fact that people suddenly is not good enough after years of using the platform is kinda infuriating.
There are problems with Greenlight, there is abusement of the system, there is amount of lowcost copy/paste games with swapped models and yada-yada. And while steam is trying somehow to resolve these issues seems like community trying to focus on people who was target audience for Greenlight system instead of focusing on people and problems which led to current situation:
- Abusers who are making tons of games from templates with asset flips. Will they stop? No. This is all about money so they will find a way. Like a publisher which might “reduce” entry price enough for this to be a viable money stream
- Underdeveloped or just bad games. In perfect world Greenlight was filtering undercooked/bad content and generating release hype(which is essential) for good products. In real world it actually did the same, yet was abused by people selling “votes” outside of platform and other manipulations which led to bad games being released on the platform. High entry just allows everything if you paid enough money. It does not stop bad content(directly) from being released, it does not say that game seems nice but need more development to be a viable product and it does not help good content to get more exposure.
Honestly, I might not like the system, but okay, whatever, it is their system and their rules, however community reaction to this is disheartening. I don’t get how indie devs became the main villains of the story instead of people who is abusing the system and ruining it for users and developers.
I just don’t get why give so much importance to Steam.
You can sell your games outside Steam, let them charge whatever fee they want.
If you think “-I’ll just put the game in there and the millions will come!” you’ll have a big surprise (I mean small sales surprise).
I’d rather pay the fee on marketing if the fee is significant.
Selling your games on Amazon or Steam is pretty much the same: you need marketing to succeed.
I know, but Tencent could make a move.
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The Steam snowball effect is real. If your game sells well on Steam, it will be featured in more places on Steam, and likely sell even better until it’s basically on the front page. This also leads into getting more media, news, and critic attention.
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Every PC gamer has Steam, trusts it, and likes having their Library in one place.
I personally never liked the idea of Greenlight, largely as it looked like a popularity contest from a day one. Game winning a popularity contest doesn’t make it a “good” game. Neither only “good” games should be published as this is something too subjective.
Greenlight is basically just replacing a publishers with opinion on what makes a good game and what would sell, with the same opinion of the crowd. It gives a chance to some games but it has the same limits.
A fee to entry, in my opinion, is more democratic and fair solution.
Yes, you would need to get somewhere those starting fees, yes it can be tough in certain cases. Here I mostly agree with @Ambershee and would prefer fee to be relatively high, maybe higher what steam suggest.
But hear me out, let’s say you just don’t have 1000-5000$ to publish your game on steam. Well, what will happen is that we will see a lot of smaller publishing companies that could help you out in such case - there are few of them because of Greenlight. Important part is that those small publisher will be working as a rick buffer + early prevention of low quality products from reaching market. To get signed up with them, you could first demonstrate viability of your product on other platforms. You could even run your own shop (I did this myself in past) and accumulate necessary fees on your own.
Overall, the argument that high entry fees are too high for some countries, can be turned into the opposite direction - if 5000$ is low wage yearly income in your country, selling just couple of thousands of copies can finance you for few year. To me this sounds like a golden deal. Especially taking into account that high entry fee will eliminate so many of your competitors who had barely any risks at all.
For countries with higher income, 5000$ might not a big problem to deal with, but your running costs are much higher too and making 20k in profit over something that you’ve spend a year working on, will drive you into debt.
A better manual curration is very welcome, but as some people already mentioned, should be limited to technical compliance - aka “does it run” and not be a judge to viability of the game in terms of it’s content. We already have publishers for this 
I very welcome this change. If fees are set to a certain reasonable level (at least 1k$ or higher) it will make a good change.
While I find it very well and I completely agree with it.
Steam direct is the best way.
In the rest I’m absolutely against.
The two most important things an indy has are:
1 The ability to risk new and different gameplays and plantings.
2 Maintain possession of the IP.
Both things will be endangered with high rates to publish in steam.
All the games I have done in my professional career have been with publishers, for me they are the enemy.
The biggest evolution that Steam brought is precisely skipping the publishers and maintaining the IP of your game, as the most precious object of any Indy.
I think that 1000$ per tittle (Recoverable) is enought for stop the worst part.