Obsidians new RPG (The Outer Worlds) no longer coming to Steam until 2020

Cooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool beans.

It is deeply funny that a game about choosing between two shitty mega-corps now has you pick from two shitty launchers. Earlier this year I thought "Well even though Microsoft bought them at least they'll have their last hurrah with Outer Worlds" but nope. I know many people will look at this and go "Yay steam bad, competition good" but for the consumer this isn't competition. Epic and Windows aren't offering a cheaper or better version. They're saying if you want it you have to come to them. If not you can have it reheated in the microwave a year from now. Obsidian is a company I usually support without thinking but I strongly dislike being forced to use services that have no value to me. I don't want to be part of Epics powerpoint presentation about how many new users they got because those users didn't have any options.

Lucky for console players not to have to put up with this shit.

Nifty. Between this, Hades, and Satisfactory I'll probably finally go buy some shit on Epic. Obviously going to use a temporary CC number (Capital One is great) and am eager for cloud saves and the like, but I think they're rapidly approaching the level where I will just grab games wherever they launch and/or are cheapest.

At the risk of sounding like a haggard old man I miss the days when you just installed a disc and werent forced to install some shitty DRM software. (putting in the serial number or whatever when you installed it and installing patches manually sucked though)

@boozak: All the recent news in videogames all sounds bad to me so I think I'm done for as far as not seeming like an old man. I don't mind change but all these changes are bad.

Holy jesus, next year is 2020.

I wonder how much money Epic gave them for this and Control? My guess is at least a million each.

If Epic is gonna keep doing this they really need to double down on improving that storefront instead of sniping releases.

Eh whatever. I'm not bothered by it. When Epic was offering Edith Finch for free I downloaded the client and played that game for free. The game, like Jeff Bakalar advertised, was pretty damn awesome and all I had to do was just download a launcher. So honestly, I don't care. I have Steam, a PS4 and an XB1X at this point, so ecosystems mean nothing to me.

Yeah, I have no allegiance to Steam. This is the first thing that would get me to download the Epic launcher, or should I just get the Windows Store version with no fluff. Mhmm

I still can't understand how people think this is good or healthy for the industry. Products are being removed from a storefront and sold elsewhere with fewer/worse features, sometimes at a higher price, for the sake of profit. It's the textbook definition of anti-consumer practices.

Not to mention the potential privacy issues Epic has been dealing with lately.

Assuming the MS Store version is Play Anywhere, that's where I would have bought it anyway.

Because it isn't that simple

Right now, if a game is launched on Steam and Epic, "nobody" is going to buy it on Epic. Why would they? Everything else is on Steam and it will cost about the same either way.

So if the choice is effectively a permanent exclusive on Steam and a timed exclusive on Epic that comes with a payday, I don't blame the devs for doing the latter. Especially as Epic has much better terms for them and are avoiding a lot of the problems plaguing the current Steam store. While a bit extreme, I know that I would never want a game I worked on to be a recommended title on Rape Day's store page. But a lot of devs had to deal with that because Valve don't want to curate their shit.

And that is why I don't think this is anti-consumer. Right now, the benefits are mostly to the devs and the inconvenience is on the level of installing another launcher (remember back when we all hated Steam for that reason? Or when we hated the Battlefield browser launcher because NOBODY kept an internet browser open while gaming...).

But both stores are in basically the same state. Epic have the curation, store page design, and even Influencer integration pretty solid. They are lacking a lot of the back end and QoL features. Steam is pretty much the opposite. So if we start seeing competition, even artificial competition, then we start seeing Valve curating their shit and maybe even giving better terms to devs. And we see Epic paying for the cloud saves and the like. And we also start seeing what bloat from Steam we do and don't actually want, as consumers.

This is mostly a "war" between publishers/devs and storefronts with consumers randomly declaring allegiance for one storefront or another.

---

It is similar in a lot of ways to how Google handled Stadia (ugh). They knew that most "gamers" would never want to stream anything and would never give it a shot because it is obviously bad and stupid. So they gave a way a bunch of free copies of Assassin's Creed Odyssey. I know I tried Project Stream for 3 hours or so to get my free copy of AssOdd and I am a, pending monetization model, believer. I don't know if I'll personally use it, but I also know I won't refuse if the price and circumstances are right.

Same here. People who needed Metro or Outer WOrlds or whatever NOW are going to grab the launcher. And they'll spread word of mouth along the lines of "It is a launcher" or "I like it, the store page is clean" or "This would be nice if it had cloud saves". And that normalizes it and gets rid of the "it is different and bad" stigma.

Its comparable logic to Ubi forcing people to launch uplay as part of the startup process of playing a steam purchased ubi game. It made us realize that uplay isn't that bad and even has some nice features (achievements for "free" dlc and discounts). Same with EA and Battlelog(?).

This one hurts but I won't support Epic and their business tactics no matter how many games that they snatch up. Guess I either have to wait a year or get it on console now. Good thing my backlog is gigantic.

Here's the thing, when you allow a game about sexual assault that even the dev admits shouldn't be on the storefront, I can't blame any publisher or developer for not wanting anything to do with Steam. Epic store is shit, I know, but as an avenue for selling games, it's at least better than Steam.

Epic has a long way to go before I'm willing to put any money into their store and just throwing more and more money at devs to not release their games on other storefronts/sell them through other digital retailers just puts me a little more off every time.

@gundato: But they aren't even close to being the same. Epic store games cost more in certain territories, aren't available in some countries, they don't have native controller support, big picture mode, no centralized tech support page (steam forums) one click away, barebones social features. You say the only inconvenience is a different launcher, but that's just for you. I can't think of a bigger inconvenience than being straight up unable to purchase the game because Epic payed the dev to go exclusive. Even if you don't use some of the smaller features, plenty of people do.

If they wanted to compete, they should have tried something like what Metro gave a half-assed attempt at, using the extra revenue to decrease the price of the game. But they only did that for US customers, the rest of the world was paying the same price, or more, for a game with fewer features, that they could have bought a better, cheaper version of 2 weeks before release. But done right, that plus a storefront that actually had, you know, features and functionality, could easily have been enough to get people using their store.

Besides, this isn't going to do jack shit to hurt steam, at this point they're too big to actually fail. Who is it going to hurt? Gog, Humble Bundle, all sorts of smaller retailers that also don't get those games anymore. All the epic games store is doing is hurting consumers and smaller stores.

And it's not that great for all developers either. A heavily curated store with no search function, terrible discoverability and limited space, focused on making big payouts to famous devs doesn't really sound like an environment for the little indie devs to thrive. The Epic store isn't going to help someone new, it's only going to help the devs that are big enough to succeed anyway. Sure Steam's open floodgates approach sucks and they need to do a better job of keeping the really offensive stuff out, but it's better than it used to be when it was heavily curated because small developers still get to at least release their games and don't get denied for arbitrary reasons.

The problem with being a person who follows gaming industry news closely is that things you think are a big deal probably aren't much of a factor to the general public. The existence of "Rape Day" will have basically zero impact on Steam sales numbers. The vast majority of consumers have no idea it existed, and I very much doubt any publishers are basing their decision to leave Steam on that, or curation, or reviews, or whatever.

This is all about 30% vs 12%.

Not going anywhere near the Epic launcher.

@brackstone: Of course its just for me. I am a selfish jerk. I only speak for myself. I'll let other people speak for themselves

For example: you say that barebones social features are a negative to you. What about me? They are a pretty big massive plus. I don't WANT to talk to people or see Your Boy Just Blazing 420 No Scope's reviews constantly on the front page of the store because I can't be bothered to follow any curators. I like not having everyone wonder why I suddenly go offline or launch steamvr for twenty minutes at 2 am. And so forth

Same with controllers. My gamepad is an xbone gamepad. My fight stick has a toggle for xinput. If I am using my HOTAS I am relying on directinput and don't want steam to fuck with it. In theory I love the ability to remap my DS4. In practice? I don't notice it isn't there

And that is what it boils down to. Epic are missing a lot of QoL features. They have a lot of curation features. They chose to focus on that. Hopefully we, the consumer, can figure out which QoL features we actually want and which are low priority. And hopefully Valve will realize which parts of curation we want and which we don't (less influencers please)

As for the "what about the little guy" card? How the hell is Metro not launching on Steam hurting GoG (which is a storefront that is REALLY guilty of not offering QoL features...)? Humble will have no issues because they have a long history of being willing to use the storefront approved APIs to prevent key reselling.

GMG is probably hurting but... fuck them? Same with all the other grey market resellers.

And time will tell as to how the Epic curation helps. But right now the front page is Supergiant, the Satisfactory (Goat Sim?) folks, and whoever made that cool looking space ship building game. That seems nice. But let's see how that works as the store opens up more.

You're right in that sales numbers likely wouldn't have been effected majorly. Rape Day was a symptom of a much larger problem with Valve's handling of their storefront. There are probably many reasons why Epic looks more appealing than steam (not the least of which monetary) for selling games. Like I said, tho, I'm not a big fan of the Epic store, but I'll take it if it means Valve has to step up their game.

Remember back when Steam first launched and the internet was in an uproar because it was required to play Counter Strike?

I think Rape Day may actually be one of the rare occasions where this could have had huge implications

Not because of sales. If Valve became a porn store today there would be no problems

No. The issue is regulation and the media. You can bet politicians the world around were getting "What the shit is this?" phone calls. And even if Valve came out squeaky clean, the various news outlets would have made screen caps and posted those

And imagine if you were a dev whose game suddenly became known the world around as "being like that rape game".

And this is only going to get worse. Have the Nudity tag? God help you if someone realizes that isn't actually an 8000 year old vampire in School Girl Sex Simulator and you happen to show up in the suggested games page when CNN figures out how print screen works. Making a top down shooter the next time a Hatred-like pops out? Congrats, you got highlighted in a news story on School Yard Massacre 2020. And so forth

I think the sales cut and being on the front page of the store has been the big motivator up to now. But I would bet my bottom dollar that devs have been asking Steam to deal with the recommendations for years and it is only going to get louder as we have more "envelope pushing" games.

@ltcolumbo: Yeah the difference was that was 11 years ago and Valve owned Counter Strike. This is a game made by another company that was announced and listed on Steam that's been yanked. You're right. Steam wasnt good when it launched. Unfortunately for epic their launcher isnt competing with Steam from a decade ago. They need to make something as good or better than the current product which they haven't delivered.

And I still don't have my goddamn hovercars.

I don't think you sound like a haggard old man. I think you sound like someone who just wants the things he buys to be his and not a license from some megacorporation. Your ownership of many PC games these days relies on those megacorporation's continued existence, as well as the moral compass/financial incentive to not fuck over your desire to play something that's old, unsupported, and not giving them money anymore. (As an aside, I am aware that Steam isn't a megacorporation, they are a privately owned company, but whatever).

This notion sounds like a bit of an overreaction. Right now, it is, but also, game systems that once seemed massive are now gone. GFWL no longer exists and, for a while there, I was unsure if I would be able to play my copies of Resident Evil 5 or Halo 2 even in single player mode. Gamespy also no longer exists, another service that was pretty widespread at one time but doesn't exist these days.

It's nice to see some other people stepping up to the plate and giving Steam some competition... but what do you do when you've got a lot of competition and some of the competition dies out? What happens to the games you purchased on that service? If everything were big box PC game like the 90's or digital distribution stuck to the philosophies that GOG employs, then this wouldn't be a thing. Instead, I frequently wonder what would happen if Steam got shut down. I might wind up losing thousands of dollars worth of stuff because of decisions made on the other side of the USA that I had no say in. And future generations might have limited or no legal access to some of the most important video games ever made. Imagine a world where you couldn't play Final Fantasy VI or Doom in any legal way because the servers shut down and nobody has thought it profitable enough to turn them back on.

...but all this is way, way off topic. As far as the here and now goes, I guess I'll be buying this from the Microsoft store since I already have an account there and I've never had a problem with the one game I purchased on there (Forza Horizon 4). And yeah, I said all that above, but I still like keeping up with video games and I still enjoy modern games a whole hell of a lot. And console frame rates are not for me anymore.

^one hundo. i don't blame the devs for doing right by themselves- but i'm also not going to pretend that the epic vs. valve fight is somehow good guys vs. bad guys. it's cold hard business vs. business- consumers should go where the personal value is, period. for me that squarely remains with valve right now- but when epic buys a game i actually care about and has additional features come online- i'm happy to give them a shot.

I kinda laughed when Metro went Epic and people were upset, but I also didn't want to play Metro. This one does genuinely suck, because I was looking forward to having outer worlds in my steam library.

That said, I got the Epic launcher for Hades and free games so I'll probably get it either there or the Microsoft store. Leaning MS because I don't like the way Epic is poaching these releases either, its pretty scummy. Steam needs competition, yeah, but is this really the right way to go about it? If they were really confident in what they have to offer, Epic wouldn't need to do this. Their focus should be improving their feature set and tightening up security.

The Epic store Slowly becoming the Heel of the industry the hate is real, just let me pick where i buy games from :'(

Epic launcher more like Winnie The Pooh Launcher....

How long before i can log in with a QQ number :D.

Also wondering how much this will lead to piracy and then people buying it on steam down the line.

I’m with @boOzak on this one.

I can't help but think that the way this is going down is just gonna lead to more pirating. People seem to have forgotten why digital stores managed to curve pirating, it was better and more convenient. If Epic wants to grab a market share all they have to do is follow the same principle, make the store better and more convenient, don't make it more of a hassle for consumers to buy the products they want. The approach they're taking is too heavy-handed and will probably end up biting them in the ass.

@soulcake: @ares42: I have already heard the "pirate then buy on steam" sentiment from some real life people I know. People who stopped pirating stuff around '08. It's certainly all over various comment sections too.

I'm disappointed but it's not the end of the world for me. I have an Epic account and I've been picking up their free games. I just dislike the fact that we're having a proxy console war on PC. It already happened with EA and other publishers, but Epic has been making a big play of picking up third party timed exclusives for their store. I'm glad someone is challenging Steam's dominance, but I wish there was a less cut-throat way to go about it.

I think this is one of my issues with this. You're right, no one would use their service because nothing about it warrants using. They haven't come about their market share honestly. If consumers had any choice they wouldn't choose them. So they use dumptrucks of money to force consumers to make purchases against their own interest.

I’m not going to pretend Epic are the good guys here, but seeing as Metro sold better than its predecessors while being only on Epic, adding that to the better rev share and it’s obvious going on Epic is a good « business move » however you want to paint it.

Again, while Epic are still far from exemplary, Valve have been going downhill for a long while. The forums are filled with abrasive asshole when they’re not outright racists, sexists (believe me, I have a very small game on Steam and even I had to do some moderations on my forums). Valve has the money to do moderation but put the responsability on the devs, which sucks. Not two weeks ago they were okay with releasing a pretty shitty game that was only going for shock value. Valve basically devalued their own store at every turn.

I’m more than happy to support the devs more so I’m buying on Epic when I can. I won’t personally miss many features on Steam, though I understand that some do and I’m not saying everyone should buy on Epic because they’re more righteous or whatever (they’re not), but I am surprised at the sentiment that Epic are some evil corporate assholes as if Valve weren’t also fucking up right now.

@hayt: But there's no way they could've differentiated themselves without doing this. Think about any set of competing stores (two clothing stores, two grocery stores, two restaurants, two whatever), there's really only two ways the stores can differentiate themselves from each other and convince customers to come over to them instead of the competition: differences in products and differences in prices. Epic could offer sales on games, but they can't permanently do that if they ever want to make any money at all (and not be giving it all to developers to subsidize the sales); which means they have to have a difference in products, and the way to do that is exclusivity deals. If the Epic Store opened up and just had the exact same games as Steam, it doesn't matter what nice side features they added, people would never switch over to it; they'd have no reason to do so. In fact, many people would actively avoid it because they want to keep their game lists in a single launcher.

Exclusivity deals are the only sustainable way to take meaningful marketshare away from Value. And I assume Epic will eventually stop making these deals too, once they have enough customers who have internalized the idea of buying games from Epic. Epic will eventually want to turn a profit on the store and the Fortnite gravy train won't last forever.

Well I'll wait a year then. I wouldn't mind Epic Store unless it was this very smug hostage scheme they have set up. Epic Store is still really bad missing tons of features. Also I can only imagine how much of a nightmare it will be for most indie games to get onto it when they are talking so much about their zero tolerance to "bad games".

I just wanted to say that the stats the provided for Metro is not really indicative of anything. Since its intentionally kept super vague, its almost always a way to spin numbers that perhaps are not that impressive. What does the 2.5 even mean? in the first 24 hours? in preorders? It certainly is NOT lifetime sales, because Last List has sold between 2 and 5 million copies on Steam. And if Exodus sold over 10 million copies on the epic store we would 100% have raw numbers.

@justin258 said:

Missed this, but I think it is definitely worth acknowledging (sorry, the quote completely killed itself)

We actually do know this. Because it happened already. Steam rose out of the wreckage of D2D and whatever shit Bioware was using for Neverwinter Nights DLC (... maybe D2D). I think D2D is still a thing and so is Gamersgate (poor bastards) and if I could be bothered to I would check the latter for that 3d elite game that I bought because it was like the 2d space game that isn't a "prequel" to eve (I am only slightly exaggerating my horrible memory)

But more meaningfully, we had Stardock and Impulse. They were probably at the relative level of Uplay+Origin back in the day and they were even playing the "DRM free. Just log in and authenticate" card long before GoG. I think it was around the time of one of Wardell's lawsuits that they sold it to Gamespot/Kongregate (?) and I have no idea what happened after that. Mostly because I had already started migrating to other services and just picking up GalCiv dirt cheap during a steam sale.

Similarly, GoG had the "wonderful" idea of promoting their service by claiming they were closing down with almost no notice. We all hammered the shit out of them to grab our installers and swore we would never be caught unaware again. Yeah...

I personally don't see Steam dying. If I had to hazard a guess it would be that Google/Amazon/Tencent buy Valve one day. Most likely they would have to rebrand the fuck out of everything because Valve would somehow be associated with some truly horrible crap due to their refusal to curate, but the licenses would transfer. And in a hundred years during the corporation wars it will bounce around during raids until eventually we discover it had fused with Deepmind and Grimace and became a super AI that will either protect or destroy humanity.

@atwa: fair enough. It’s hard to know for sure but I doubt many publishers would go Epic only if they didn’t think they could get enough sales there. Epic’s audience and Steam’s audience don’t seem to overlap that much, so I’d be really curious about having numbers.

But you’re right, those Metro numbers don’t indicate much.

MS store for me. If that wasn't an option this would have been the game to push me to install epic.

Good, let the developers make their money.

@hayt: was it listed for sale on Steam? That’s an honest question, I never checked because I was planning on buying it through the MS/Xbox store. Either way, that doesn’t change the overall point: things change, people freak out, and it turns out okay.

This is about a game store, not a nuclear holocaust. You and everyone else can still buy the game in multiple ways, including Steam. If you choose to only buy games on Steam, you’ll have to wait, and the odds are that this is going to come up again in the future so you’ll have to decide if that’s a hill you want to die on. If I were a game developer I’d be super-stoked to have another option to sell my product, and as a consumer I’m thrilled to see competition in a marketplace that has needed it for a decade.

I also think CS started requiring Steam around the same time HL2 came out, didn’t it? So that’s more like 15 years. It was a bug-riddled sluggish mess at the time. Now it’s a mess for all kinds of different things reasons.

Lets be real, the devs aren't getting any more money for being on Epic compared to Steam its the publisher's greedy decision that if anything will fuck over the devs cause a lot of people see through Epic's insanely anti-consumer practices and their terrible cyber-security; there are all sorts of stories of people at random losing access to their account forever. Its not need its greed.

I don't see people mention how the support-a-creator system could affect devs in the long run. Basically, this system lets creators share referral links with their viewers which gives them a piece of the pie on those games. The floor is at 5% but the devs can up this cut for their games at will.

Right now, there are only a few games on the epic store and discoverability is at a high. But as more & more games will appear on the store, Epic will let streamers do the promotion for these games and lead their viewers to the good stuff. Which games will streamers play? The big games that draws the biggest audience. Fortnite, Apex, League, Overwatch, Fifa, COD, Dota, CSGO you name it. Whenever these streamers play a smaller indie title, they will lose a bunch of their core audience. That doesn't only lose them donations & subscribers, but having 1% of your 20k audience buy a game using your referral is often more valuable than getting 5% of your 3k audience to buy a smaller game. The past has learned us that when there's a direct monetary relationship between the streamer & the game they play, most streamers will choose for the option that makes them the most money. I point you to the rise & fall of Conan Exile & Reign of Kings that were the biggest games on Twitch for 1 or 2 days before falling back into obscurity.

Enter the variety streamer. Because the biggest games are oversaturated with streamers, there's a gap in the market to play smaller diverse games and set your channel apart. These streamers will be able to retain their audience across smaller games , which means that they can pick & choose between indie titles without huge fluctuations in views, donations & subs. This makes them able to hop from indie to indie game and truly choose for games they think are worthwhile of the spotlight. The issue arises when Indie A offers a 25% cut of the salesprice while indie B offers a 10% cut of the salesprice. Suddenly, there's a direct incentive for those streamers to get their viewers interested in indie A. I could see an issue arising where these indie titles are forced to up their streamer cuts to get a fair shot of exposure among those variety streamers. The initial price to get on the EGS might be lower, but this streamer revshare program might drive the cost up anyways.

As a streamer, why would you play 7$ Reprisal Universe if you could play 30$ Rust? Reprisal Universe would have to give a rediculous high cut to make financial sense for the streamer to spend time on. On top of that, the multiplayer aspect of Rust gives viewers an extra incentive to actually buy the game themselves. Like which viewer goes out there to watch a playthrough of Thimbleweed Park & then afterwards decides to buy that game to play through it themselves? Certainly not enough people to make it a sensible choice for a streamer to play over a multiplayer game.

TLDR: To get any exposure at all, indies on the EGS will eventually have to compete with eachother for the variety streamers through pricing. Not playing along means that your game won't get exposed by a variety streamer. I believe this is worse than the current model, where variety streamers don't necessarily have a direct monetary reason to showcase one indie title over another & where the devs can set a pricepoint that they're comfortable with.

@onemanarmyy: yeah that whole thing is vomit inducing. I really don't like the way streamers are basically becoming sock puppets for game companies. EA has a whole stable of young hip youtubers who just act as a skin for EAs message.

I actually do use a lot of the niche features steam has incorporated the past few years(namely controller support and configurations) but I've got no I'll will for developers going where the money is. I certainly dont think its "anti consuner" to go with one storefront over another.

@hayt said:

Right, but why is that consumers would choose Steam? For some I will concede it is because of features that the Epic store doesn't have. But for many (most?) it's just because all their stuff is already there. And Epic can never compete with that, even if they offered 100% feature parity. Hence the free games, exclusive games, etc. I think that's what @gundato is getting at and I agree. I think it's, on balance, more pro-competitive than anti-competitive.

Imagine if someone invented a social network that offered complete, 100% feature parity with Facebook, but was less awful about user privacy. It would barely make a dent in Facebook's user base, because everyone is already on FB. It's kind of the same issue.

The only reason I even have Epic Games launcher on my computer is because I got Metro Exodus with my rtx 2060. I'd never use that shitty launcher for anything else.