Epic Boss Criticizes Steamworks API, Says EGS Exclusives Will Focus on Big Games
Epic Games did a round of announcements yesterday. To begin with, self-publishing tools are coming to the Epic Games Store, allowing developers to easily add their games to the store for a mere $100 fee (which is the same that Valve demands on Steam).
Interested game developers can take a look at the full self-publishing overview here. There are a few notable differences to Steam, such as pornography being banned and PC crossplay being mandatory for multiplayer games, with Epic allowing custom crossplay implementation, third-party SDKs, or their own free Epic Online Services.
Regarding this latter point, PC Gamer reports Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney criticizing the Steamworks API for creating problems with PC crossplay in multiplayer games.
They have a classic lock-in strategy where they build these services that only work with their store, and they use the fact that they have the majority market share in order to encourage everybody to ship games that have a broken experience in other stores. And we were bitten by this early on with a number of multiplayer games coming to the Epic Games Store. Steamworks didn't work on our store, so they had either a reduced set of multiplayer features or none, or they were just limited to a much smaller audience back in the launch days of the Epic Games Store, so you had a lot of multiplayer games that really felt like they were broken.
Sweeney also shared an update on the company's exclusivity strategy. The reason there are far fewer EGS exclusives nowadays is that Epic noticed only big titles (like Borderlands 3, for example) really swayed a large portion of users over to their store. In contrast, smaller games often didn't do much. Some future EGS exclusives include Alan Wake 2 and
Read more on wccftech.com
