Game developers and publishers can now independently publish their games in the Epic Games Store. Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney took the opportunity to criticize Steam.
Who is the person you are talking about?
What does the head of Epic Games say? As the American games magazine PC Gamer reports, Sweeney left out in a phone call about Steam and said the platform had created a problem for the industry.
Sweeney addresses Steam’s multiplayer API “Steamworks”. Valve’s online system doesn’t work on any store other than Steam:
They have a classic lock-in strategy where they develop these services that only work with their store and they use the fact that they have the largest market share to encourage everyone to ship games that are in other stores not work. […]
Tim Sweeney via PC Gamer
Additionally, Sweeney reports on issues he and Epic Games had with multiplayer games that had limited multiplayer functionality due to the Steamworks limitation:
“We were affected by this issue early on with a number of multiplayer games coming to the Epic Games Store. Steamworks didn’t work on our store, so they either had limited multiplayer or no multiplayer at all, or they were limited to a much smaller audience in the early days of the Epic Games Store, so there were a lot of multiplayer games that really stood out felt broken.”
Why is the Epic boss talking about Steam? As Epic Games announced, today is the official launch of the so-called “self-publishing tool”.
The self-publishing tool offers developers and publishers the opportunity to publish their games independently in the Epic Games Store if the games meet certain requirements (via store.epicgames.com)
For some time now, game developers have been able to publish their games independently on Steam through the Steamworks distribution program (via partner.steamgames.com).
However, the difference between Steam and Epic Games here is a requirement by Epic Games that multiplayer games require that those games allow PC crossplay between the different launchers.
Players should therefore be able to play with their friends even if they have the game in another launcher such as Steam, in order to avoid the problems with Steamworks mentioned by Sweeney.
One of the many indie developers who have released their game on Steam is YouTuber Belluar. In a recent video, he addressed the “30% cut” that Steam takes on every sale.
The ‘greedy’ Steam takes 30% of every purchase – Indie dev says, ‘We’re very happy with that!’