Now we have a good idea of just how much money Epic Games is offering developers to be an exclusive title in their store.
Epic Games has been making waves ever since they introduced their own digital distribution platform late last year. Suddenly there was a massive company that might break the stranglehold that Steam has on the PC gaming market. Not only that, they offered game developers a better deal: just a 12% take of the profits instead of Steam’s hefty 30%.
Nobody’s going to argue that a little competition is a bad thing, but even with a more favorable distribution of money developers are loathe to abandon Steam and its many millions of potential customers for an upstart platform.
So Epic started throwing out gobs of cash at the problem. Join Epic as an exclusive Games Store title, and they’d just hand out money. We knew that Epic was offering big paydays to become an Epic exclusive, we just didn’t know how much.
Well, now we have a good idea.
A Reset Era thread recently posted this tweet from Korean game community account @gatoray_kof. In a post about SNK’s upcoming fighting game, Samurai Showdown, game director Nobuyuki Kuroki is quoted as having been approached by "some PC download platform [that] wanted an exclusive release on condition of pre-order of hundreds of thousands."
The only digital platform we know offering exclusive deals like this is Epic. And offering a payment the equivalent of “hundreds of thousands” of games works out to tens of millions of dollars (assuming the Samurai Showdown releases at an expected price point of $59.99).
Kuroki reportedly refused Epic on the grounds that he expected Samurai Showdown to sell in the millions if distributed on all PC platforms rather than just Epic’s. That might be wishful thinking, but at least it gives us some insight into how much money Epic is throwing around.
Honestly, we can’t really blame a developer for taking Epic’s handout. Game development is risky business--most studios are just one bad flop away from closing down. A guaranteed payday is almost unheard of in the games industry, so when someone comes along and offers one, it's hard to say "no."
Metro Exodus, Borderlands 3, Shenmue III--all have gone Epic exclusive because they were offered tens of millions to do so. But one really has to wonder how long Epic can toss around that much cash before it finally affects their bottom line?