FortyWaterBottles
Sad to hear you all decided to sell your souls and partner with DS. Hope the Fortnite money is/was worth it. You really should be aware for the future, and make sure that DS is aware, what this whole Shenmue debacle has done to tarnish the already less-than-stellar reputation crowdfunding campaigns have.
Sheep_wielder
Community Manager
Yeah the Shenmue situation is not good, but not all DS games go to EGS.
Important to shut down EPIC/DS shenanigans;
signorrossialmare
if i would be valve i just wouldn't let you generate keys anymore for devs/publishers who don't sell their game on steam itself.
Generating and marketing steam keys to pre-orders/KS and then go Epic exclusive post-launch is FUBAR.
Gabe Newell needs to get into the Arena and realize this is not 'fair' EPIC competition but a fight to the death who will dominate third party content.
https://twitter.com/CaseyExplosion/status/1129713218321027073
*SNIP*
They're buying customers.
There's an anxiety about Epic because what they're doing is aggressive. They don't want to be competition, they want to be the last man standing and be the defacto monopoly. That's the end goal, drive Valve out of business and reap the benefits.
In the GameFocus article, it says (translated using Google) “Samurai Shodown wanted to sell his PC on a PC download sales platform on condition of a pre-order of hundreds of thousands of copies, but SNK Chief Commander declined Samurai [Shodown] as a title to be sold more than a million copies.”
Epic has a total 43,285 payments promised to players due to professional competitions that started in July 2018 with the Summer Skirmish. The company says it’s sent out 4,398, about 10 percent of the total, and is waiting for player confirmation to send another 1,687. Epic is holding back 37,200 payments (about 86 percent of what’s promised), all related to the Fortnite World Cup Qualifiers, for after it fully reviews the results to filter out cheaters and ineligible players.
The Fortnite World Cup rules say that players who earn prize money in the qualifiers have 45 days to send valid payment information to Epic Games. If they fail to do so, Epic may refuse to pay them without choosing another player to receive the prize. In this case, Epic says it’ll either add that prize money to a future event or donate it to charity.
It’s unclear at this time if players who have complained about delays have sent their payment information to Epic correctly.
"Thank you very much for contacting us," begins the official reply. "The launch was previously planned for distribution on Steam, however it was decided together with Deep Silver after much discussion that the Epic Games Store would be the best distribution platform option."
"Shenmue III will be distributed through the Epic Games Store and will require the Epic Games Store Client to activate. We apologize for the sudden change in platform, however, refunds will not be granted for this change. We thank you for your support and look forward to delivering the Shenmue experience fans everywhere have been waiting so long for."
kickstarter will not intervene:
If you are in EU this is a legal violation and you can take them to court yourself, or join a class action lawsuit. There is a lot of discussion about this on Shenmue III Steam page. So I would suggest you go here if you want to contribute: https://steamcommunity.com/app/878670/discussions/0/
DrQuint
Man, the real loser is Kickstarter themselves. This was a bunch of people who have now realized they paid early for the priviledge of paying more and with no choice of platform. I very much doubt any of them will back other projects ever again.
ours
Kickstarter campaigns are based on faith. The more campaigns screw over people the less faith people will be able to put in future campaigns.
And as if there weren't enough Kickstarter messes already these guys and a few others further make things worse with going platform exclusive after the campaign finished.
The next games will have to start making hard promises for multi-platform or at least Steam support.
Iron Harvest, Crowdfunded game recently acquired by Deep Silver of Metro Exodus/Shenmue 3 infamy, is now refusing to say that they'll release the game on Steam for non-backers, citing that "no decision has been made"
"Thank you very much for contacting us," begins the official reply. "The launch was previously planned for distribution on Steam, however it was decided together with Deep Silver after much discussion that the Epic Games Store would be the best distribution platform option."
"Shenmue III will be distributed through the Epic Games Store and will require the Epic Games Store Client to activate. We apologize for the sudden change in platform, however, refunds will not be granted for this change. We thank you for your support and look forward to delivering the Shenmue experience fans everywhere have been waiting so long for."
kickstarter will not intervene:
If you are in EU this is a legal violation and you can take them to court yourself, or join a class action lawsuit. There is a lot of discussion about this on Shenmue III Steam page. So I would suggest you go here if you want to contribute: https://steamcommunity.com/app/878670/discussions/0/
DrQuint
Man, the real loser is Kickstarter themselves. This was a bunch of people who have now realized they paid early for the priviledge of paying more and with no choice of platform. I very much doubt any of them will back other projects ever again.
ours
Kickstarter campaigns are based on faith. The more campaigns screw over people the less faith people will be able to put in future campaigns.
And as if there weren't enough Kickstarter messes already these guys and a few others further make things worse with going platform exclusive after the campaign finished.
The next games will have to start making hard promises for multi-platform or at least Steam support.
We're going to come to a point where we need to respect mobile games as much as console games. I know that's difficult to see when you come to E3, but our mobile business is growing quite significantly, and we look at those teams with the same value and the same integrity as we look at our console teams. And we believe this is the best interpretation we can do of the brand right now."
In game development, we often talk about “whales”. They are an outlier; a small group of consumers that make up 50% of all in-game revenue:
“These people are very valuable users who are single-handedly making games profitable so that game companies can make a lot more games for those people who don’t pay anything.”
– VentureBeat, “Only 0.15 percent of mobile gamers account for 50 percent of all in-game revenue”
Before Diablo Immortal we had 'dishonest harmony' now we have 'dishonest conflict'.
This conflict/shitshow is not entirely fair for those caught in the crossfire. But the game industry brought this on themselves.
Blizzcon Diablo "boo guy" was so disappointed he could barely speak: