If you spend any time in the gaming-centric areas of satisfactory reddit, it’s easy to think that everyone and your mom despise the Epic Games store thanks to “shady business practices,” “anti-consumer biases,” and possibly worse. . But at least one developer says the anti-Epic backlash is more solid than furious.
For Coffee Stain Studios, the developer behind Goat Simulator and Satisfactory, the opportunity to trade in Epic store exclusivity for financial security during development paid off.
“I think as an independent studio, it’s nice to have the assurance that you know your game is going to be released and you don’t have to worry about meeting certain financial deadlines,” Nathalie Verwei, UI / UX designer at the studio, said. in an interview with PCGamesN. “You can focus on making a good game. Of course, we had some negative reactions, but I think it’s a noisy minority.”
Epic Store
Gamers more used to Valve’s older Steam platform have understandably complained about the relative paucity of features on the Epic store, which have slowly made their way onto the platform in the roughly ten months that it has been active. But more often, the complaints center on Epic’s insistence on exclusivity deals, where Epic pays a developer a certain amount of money in exchange for exclusive distribution rights, at least for an agreed period of time.
“Epic is trying to do something to get game developers to improve it so that we can offer better quality products, basically,” she said.
There are players who don’t see it that way and who have made their feelings known with torrents of abuse targeting developers who have signed deals with Epic, as Ooblets developers Glumberland discovered firsthand this summer. But as numerous as the online store’s detractors may seem, they don’t seem to be hurting sales. Satisfactory, which is still in early access, has been Coffee Stain’s “best release ever”, selling over 500,000 copies in its first three months on sale.
