Tim Sweeney: commitment

Transcript context

…They’re going to speak up. And I should also say that the Steam Launcher, for a long time from my memory, but also just looking online, was also very clunky in the beginning. Yeah. And one of the criticisms of Epic Game Store from the beginning was, “You don’t have all of the features of Steam,” but we very much don’t want to have all of the features of Steam. Steam has forums dedicated to your game, and we decide we don’t want to create forums. And our partners, when we talk to them, generally didn’t want us to create Epic Game Store forums for their games because there’s already channels that they prefer to them. There’s social media and a number of platforms, and there’s Reddit, and there’s lots of places for gamers to discuss their game, and they prefer those discussions to be there. And so it’s very much not our goal to mimic everything of Steam, but we do want to have all of the convenience features that makes it easy and fun to use [inaudible 03:47:54] Steam. So there’s a long journey ahead. But we continue to reinvest it, and we’re working to build a multi-billion dollar business there and think we’ll succeed. Already, the Epic Game Store supports an immense amount of Epic games commerce in Fortnite on PC. Now, on Android and iOS and the European Union too. So it’s a forever facet of the industry, and we are never losing heart in it. And we think, at some point, I really feel that the benefits of the Epic Games approach are going to outweigh the benefits of the Steam approach, especially as gaming becomes multi-platform. One of the things that really sucks for all gamers is that you have a lot of friends in the real world. Some have… Everyone has different platforms. Your Steam friends aren’t connected to your Xbox friends, and they’re not connected to your PlayStation friends or your Nintendo friends. And so you’re very much bottling up PC gaming into kind of a hard-core group of PC-only folks and making all of the other aspects of it difficult. A lot of games have flocked towards Discord, which is a mess in itself because can now your Steam name is not your Discord name, and that’s not your PlayStation name. And so now you have three… two people in a game, and they have four different identities, and that sucks. Our aim for that is with Epic online services, and the social systems that we built for Fortnite opened up to all developers to have cross-platform social features be super easy and free for all developers. This is not something we’re trying to gatekeep or rent-seek on or lock people into. It’s just a way that we’re making social gaming easier for everybody. As more and more games follow the Fortnite approach of being multi-platform, especially multiplayer games, Metcalfe’s Law is a very real phenomena in the industry. It’s the thing that’s upending some games and causing growth in other games. It is the number one trend for pervading the world of gaming today. And it says that your game is quadratically more valuable the more percentage of a user’s real-world friends they can connect to. s. It is the number one trend for pervading the world of gaming today. And it says that your game is quadratically more valuable the more percentage of a user’s real-world friends they can connect to. Your game vastly benefits by connecting all of its players together and not segregating them off into different online platform populations and so on. And so I think the future trend is in that direction. I wish Valve had opened up Steamworks to just work on all platforms. They could have easily done it. We did it. But they seem to be using it as a lever to keep people locked into the Steam PC Game Store. And that’s going to be a long-running battle because there’s always a very toxic group of Steam users who they even created an entire sub-Reddit dedicated to criticizing Epic and our store, and they create basically harassment campaigns at times against developers who use Epic online services. Developers do that so they can their players across platforms and have friends across platform and voices across platforms, but suddenly, that’s trying to be turned into a negative.…

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