Epic Games Exclusivity Expired?

[L E B R 3]

I'm surprised to see the pre-order for an Assassin's Creed game that wasn't been out yet on Steam.

Their deal to release the game first on Epic and than a year later here is gone or the game being delayed so much helped this situation?

Either way I hope Ubisoft can finally see the impact of having the game being released here on day 1 and forget all the $$$ from Epic, it's something as a consumer we have: freedom of choice to buy WHERE we want, WHEN we want and not being forced to wait because of these stupid deals

[space]

it was never epic exclusive, none of the ubi games ever were as they were always available on ubi store

[🍃🪻🪷Sylvie🩵🍸🍵]

Forget about EGS. Steam platform is better.

[justdrop]

This game was never Epic exclusive? I couldn't tell you the last Ubisoft game that was, if there was one.

[L E B R 3]

Originally posted by justdrop:

This game was never Epic exclusive? I couldn't tell you the last Ubisoft game that was, if there was one.

Valhalla & Mirage was, it took a litlle more than a year for those to come to Steam after release (I'm not counting them forcing Uplay and selling there too)

[justdrop]

Originally posted by L E B R 3:

Originally posted by justdrop:

This game was never Epic exclusive? I couldn't tell you the last Ubisoft game that was, if there was one.

Valhalla & Mirage was, it took a litlle more than a year for those to come to Steam after release (I'm not counting them forcing Uplay and selling there too)

Exclusive = limited to
Not counting Uplay is literally defeating the purpose of the word.

[Happy]

Originally posted by L E B R 3:

I'm surprised to see the pre-order for an Assassin's Creed game that wasn't been out yet on Steam.

Their deal to release the game first on Epic and than a year later here is gone or the game being delayed so much helped this situation?

Either way I hope Ubisoft can finally see the impact of having the game being released here on day 1 and forget all the $$$ from Epic, it's something as a consumer we have: freedom of choice to buy WHERE we want, WHEN we want and not being forced to wait because of these stupid deals

There was no deal to release any Ubisoft games first on Epic. Ubisoft did it because Steam takes 30% of all the revenue for units sold on their platform (nearly a third), while Epic only takes 12%. Basically if you sell a $60 game Steam takes $18 leaving you with $42, while Epic takes about $7.20 leaving you with $52.80.

So if you sell 5,000,000 copies at $60/each you're generating $300,000,000 in revenue. Steam takes $90,000,000 for the simple privilege of being able to sell your product to their user base, leaving you with $210,000,000. Meanwhile Epic takes $36,000,000, leaving you with $264,000,000. So selling those units on Epic lets you keep $54,000,000.

It's the same abusive percentage Google and Apple on mobile, and console manufacturers charge. It's the kind of exorbitant fee typically associated with walled gardens, but on an open platform.

Would YOU want to give away a third of your revenue in a high risk industry where products cost $100-200+ million to make over 5+ years when you could instead part with less than half that? Especially when you're hemorrhaging money, and everyone across the entire "AAA" industry is having issues and downsizing?

But of course... not enough people adopted Epic to make that viable. So you keep it there for a year and you move substantially less product for a year, and time is money. Delaying access to the bulk of potential customers lengthens the time before you see a return, reinvest, and put that money back to work to generate more revenue. It's an opportunity cost, and apparently the number crunchers have decided the extra revenue generated per unit on Epic wasn't worth the opportunity cost of not collecting from the Steam user base earlier.

[NoxNtella_TTV]

It was never exclusive, they were just siding with Epic because Epic took less cut, Obviously it didn't work.

Also i'm assuming this game is Ubisofts make or break to see if they shut down or not so this game needs to make any income it can.

[Machine Spirit]

That Ubisoft deal expired more than a year ago I think, and Epic doesn't pay for exclusives now unless they are the publisher.

I don't think Steam is going to save Ubisoft because as evidenced with games like Avatar and Star Wars Outlaws, their games don't seem to be selling well generally across PC and console.