Tim Sweeney: belief

Transcript context

…Well, I hope Epic and Apple find a path forward together and flourishing together, and Apple embraces competition better. One of the things I admire about this conversation that you mentioned, Steam a bunch, with kind word supportive and basically never mentioned Epic Game Store. I love that. So I really love that. It really embodies the fact that you want variety, you want freedom for people to choose the best thing, and, in so doing, create this large network of humans interacting freely with each other. Okay. That said, one of the competitive pressures that Epic has created a few years ago was by launching the Epic Game Store. And instead of Steam’s 30% revenue cut, you went with 12% revenue cut creating the competitive pressure saying, “Listen, this shouldn’t be that high of a cut,” which I thought was amazing. This is a brilliant idea, and I think it still is a brilliant idea. It’s wonderful. Now, in preparing for this conversation, I looked on the internet, and I saw there’s a lot of criticism of EGS, Epic Game Store. First of all, I should say, the internet is full of drama and criticism. There’s not enough celebrating of awesome shit. That if I can ask the internet as a blob one request, can we just celebrate awesome shit and also criticize, but just like there’s not enough celebration. Anyway, the two directions of criticism is just straight up, “The launcher interface is clunky and lacks a lot of the features of Steam.” And then the second set of criticism is the exclusive contracts which were made with some of the games that are on Epic Game Store. So, first, huge props on the 12%. Maybe you could speak to the vision of that. And second, can you comment on those two criticisms? Sure, yeah. I think one of the reasons that people characterize the Epic Games Launcher is clunky is because the Epic Games Launcher is clunky, and we need to improve this. There’s a lot of work going on there, and I wish we’d gotten better at addressing quality-of-life features and prioritize them above all of the other features because Steam has 15 years of built-up work by many of the best programmers in the whole industry working on that, a much larger team working on Steam and a lot more time working on it. And so we’ve had to make a lot of prioritization decisions about what do we support with the Epic Game Store and when, and a lot of the time, it’s been supporting commercial features like merchandising, offering multiple versions of a game for sale, and offering upgrades from the regular edition, the deluxe edition, and other things that partners work and other priorities have been quality of life and launcher load times and other things. And we’ve not put enough emphasis on the quality of life features. We’ve recognized this very clearly multiple times and we’ve gone through multiple refactorings, but that’s definitely been a disappointment to us and to a lot of users. And I think one thing we had to… it took us a while to realize was it’s not ununiform. Depending on your proximity to a CDN and the size of your game collection, it can be either awesome or really clunky. And the users for whom it’s really clunky are the people. I think [inaudible 03:47:04] large part of the complaints. 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.…

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