Total War Saga: Troy launches exclusively on Epic, will be given away free on first day of release

It was such a flop that it outsold previous two installments on EGS and skyrocketed THQ Nordic's earnings by 500% months before hitting Steam (according to their own data at least).

 

I skipped claiming this game as I probably will never play it

 

My alarm is ready.

 

Can we appreciate that EPIC buy us free Entertainment? Which nowdays none of greedy companies will do?

Pirating pc games should be considered a very shameful act, it especially discourages our beloved small companies who make good games, if we love that game we all shall pay for it instead steal from them, and who pirate games should really come out from mother's basement and look for a job.
Microtransaction offers boots to those casual players who don't have real life time to grind ingame stuffs, they are good as soon don't create significant impact to avalage game experience, such example we can get from ACTIVISION with WARZONE, all ingame weapons and skins can be earned freely but what if one has no time to grind them? no problem, you can just save time buy them, and those extra don't give advantage over other ''free'' players. And the most important things is: YOU DON'T HAVE TO BUY MICROTRANSATIONS.
And just to sum up, videogames are just luxury good as they are not as important as foods, if you can afford game at release day, buy it and support ur beloved devs; if you can't afford them then wait for sales. Pirating pc game is just harmful to game company, maybe should you really look for a job?

 

False:
A - It never outsold previous installments on EGS, where the game sold more, most of the sales at the time were on PS4, not PC.
B - THQ Nordic has nothing to do with Metro Exodus, the devs are DeepSilver, and the publisher is 4A, not THQ.
C - The only data we have from the exclusive-era is from EGS themselves... Not a believable source if you ask me.
D - 500%, wrong, way less, at the limit, 50% more. Deep Silver did gain more than Metro: Last Light as it launch, but most of them were from PS4 sales and the game did well, but it did poorly on EGS compared to Steam. Numbers prove it as when the game became available on Steam, 200 000 copies were sold in the first week to first month, which represents a third of Exodus total sales in that period if i remember correctly... This game was also one of the most pirated during it's EGS-Exclusivity, making the total players count a wrong indication of sales. The game did sell more as Last Light became very popular years after it's release, setting the license's fanbase, that means that Exodus had more fans to begin with, compared to Last Light which didn't have that much as the first Metro game wasn't very popular yet...

To more illustrate the fact that Metro Exodus was way more pirated in it's EGS-Era, here's a screenshot of the google trends search for "metro exodus crack download" between the game's announcement and this day, with the release and steam dates added:

And here are the searches for the different versions of Exodus: PC and PS4, which proves my point:
​

 

Can I get an invite to your universe if there the big devs don't pump millions into a game only to turn out the most repetitive, inoffensive and bland mush on an annual basis?

 

Celeste is an amazing game

 

The BigBrain move is to just the claim free games with your Epic account and then pirate those games. The developer is still compensated by Epic for your "purchase" and you don't have to download the EGS launcher.

 

I wonder what will happen when the CCP stops funding these giveaways. Will any customers remain loyal? Doesn't seem like there's much of a reason to. Epic games launcher could end up like Origin or UPlay: just an annoying third party launcher you keep around to play some games that you own.

 

A) Whether the game sold better on consoles is irrelevant to the topic - the game was still a big success on EGS, which is an opposite of a flop.
B) People in charge of THQ Nordic legally own Koch Media and Deep Silver (by the means of Embracer Group).
C) You don't seem to post any "believable data" yourself, so in that context I'll go with official statistics.
D) See "C".

As for piracy, I wouldn't take it as indication that people "boycotted EGS and flopped their sales" - It's more that a lot of people wanted to play it for free day one, like with pretty much any new release. Heck, I can pick literally any hyped game and get the same results with a large "I wanna pirate it" release spike - here's Animal Crossing one just for fun.

Dunno what the second graph should tell me, since both lines seem to be at similar range.

In any case, the whole argument is kinda off-topic, so with all respect, I won't continue it further.

 

A - Where that would be true in most scenarios, that doesn't work here, as the official stats only provide vague infos on the total number of sales (which might not be accurate obviously but let's consider it is), we don't know how much sales EGS made.
But as we know a lot of sales were made on PS4 and XBONE, we can deduce approximately how much was made from Epic in that era, which is not much compared to other platforms. It's not the fact that they game wasn't popular (which it is), it's the fact that the game sold way less on Epic compared to Steam, which can be easily proved and verified by Steam's sales number on Exodus, which was around 200 000 units in the first week, aka. what Epic made in a few month was achieved in a few days by Steam, pretty much. And on a scale that big, it means that Epic didn't sell that well.

B - THQ doesn't own Deep Silver, it was a sister company, and even then, THQ made much more money from Darksiders and Saints Row games (especially the first to The Third, which were published by them) than they did with Metro.

C - I did, see D and A
D - I already mentioned the steam sales number in my previous post and in A, but here it goes again, 200 000 units in a week, where we don't have any unbiaised sales number on Epic, Steam sales, or atleast steam searches can be easily verified. We just know that the 200 000 units number is the number of real sales made on Steam. Another important data to look at is the game's searches in general, which can be found here , with that, you would notice that the game had a resurgence in popularity around the time when it came to Steam, although not being really accurate as this data also includes all the news articles talking about Metro Exodus, it can give an estimation on how much people cared for the game at a specific time... I would agree that Google Trends is pretty inaccurate, not taking into consideration the searches made directly on the PSStore, Microsoft Store and others, while also including news articles in it but atleast it can give us a direction.
Where it is normal for newer games to have a lot of searches for cracks, it isn't normal for them to stay heavily downloaded on crack sites. I do agree that the unzoomed spikes look similar, but if you zoom closer, you can pretty much see that the ps4 searches are almost always on top and sometimes even double, and that's even without taking into consideration that most of the searches for ps4 games are made on the PSStore.


I can also pretty much say that most of the Epic users won't buy games on the platform, compared to Steam.
I mean how much of "users" would stay if Epic removed Fortnite and the free games (even removing them from your library, just imagine for a second)? Not a lot. Like pretty much none or so low that the store wouldn't be able to continue anyways... EGS doesn't lead to consumers spending their money, it's mostly used for free, unreal engine or the f-game.

 

Is the hurdle getting them back or getting them there in the first place? If the giveaways get people to make an account then sign in and go, if they also have to take 5 minutes including a confirmation email to sign up (see any number of studies or reasons why guest checkout is a thing nowadays) then that is a different matter.

If they can continue to offer discounts on games afterwards then... someone was buying those games at gamestop $2 less than full retail.

That said having read their engine contract and seeing what the current one can do in that demo the other week I don't think they will be out of money any time soon.

 

Well getting them there doesn't seem like it'd be hard for Epic to do without giveaways. Just like EA and Ubisoft use their AAA games to force people to register, they did the same with Fortnite. Sure, you can't exactly compare EGS with Origin and UPlay since the latter two mainly just exist to sell a single publisher's games, but the reluctance to leave Steam is very real.


And while I doubt they will run out of money any time soon, giveaways are simply unsustainable, especially since their profit margins are so low compared to the competition. Steam's 30% cut gives them a huge advantage even if EGS has more customers than them. Epic's product is less profitable, has less customers, less features, and (probably) little or no customer loyalty. Common sense says they're fucked, and shouldn't have even survived this long. If Winnie the Pooh cuts their ties with them, they're probably going to kill the store.

 

There are plenty of stores that linger on and still get stuff done, and have done for years. Pare things back and overheads are not the worst.

"giveaways are simply unsustainable"
Yeah if you want to break into a saturated market, much less one that is already under a monopoly, you advertise your way in, whilst making a viable product. It is an expensive hobby but you hope to have enough share to break even before you run out of runway/funding for it.
Equally are we expecting the Chinese will, be it political or capital, to dissipate any time soon? I know they have the lack of building and inverted population pyramid crisis to come but if the prize is major player, possibly even control, of a media format that most of the rest of media is scared of then that sits well within the China long game they seem to be going in for all over the shop.

 

I know there's an unspoken rule of never comparing Steam to social media or claim that it's one, but I really feel like doing it now. Steam is social media and this really looks like when people started moving to facebook, there was already a nicely-working and popular social media in my country, Orkut. Almost everyone got mad at first. In the end the amount of dollars that is put in a platform decides the outcome. It's hard to compete with money even if it's just about a website's implementation. I kinda hope the Chinese win this one, not because they are better people, but because there's no impression of "purity" surrounding them as there is around Steam in it's users perspective. All the while both are equally evil, using proprietary software to distribute DRM'ed software and spying on their users.

 

anyone without a brain would mind

epic can keep their free games

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Yes it was still very much a flop.

Selling better then other games doesn't make you successful.

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Good laugh thanks

 

Being the best-sold game in the series kinda does though. The game outdid its predecessors, publishers were satisfied, investors didn't seem to complain, and EGS liked it enough to push forward with more exclusivity deals, so it was definitely not a flop, no matter how much wishful thinking and flimsy Google trends data some may want to apply to it.

 

This failure or not debate has me curious.

Would not being on Steam have some depressive effect on sales numbers?
I would not doubt it. The cult of Steam is strong, not to mention general consumer desire to convenience, and enough people seem to consider Epic the absolute worst for some reason they seldom can elaborate well upon.
Some would also likely turn to piracy instead. Numbers here are hard to gauge both in terms of raw download numbers and expected dent (age groups, technical inclinations of playerbase, ease of methods at a given time, market competition, reviews, ease of use of copy, being a single player vs serial tied online... factoring into things for this one)
A game coming to Steam a year later (also around the time we usually get game of the year/gold editions with DLC/expansion packs and bugfixes, maybe also a price drop/sale) seeing a surge in sales is also not unexpected. I don't know what profit models will be in use by the pubs here either.

If companies of that size (and I presume legal capability -- you don't tend to have a corporate structure like the embracer group without a lawyer in house or many thousands of hours per whatever retainer contract at a big law firm, and likewise would hopefully not have gone in for a 3 game deal or anything right off the hop if you have that kind of catalogue and potential) went back for more then that is a strong showing that it, or at least the general ecosystem, works for them and at least something of merit happened.

At the same time Epic are clearly playing the long game. There are many ways to take a shot at the king and slow build to an unstoppable monster by splashing a lot of cash around the place is one of those. If I am allowed to continue mixing expressions then to create an omelette you tend to have to break a few eggs, and if your egg layers are happy enough with the scenario then great. You can hope for the overnight victory but have a reasonable plan and stick to it is the thing most go in for.

 

Possibly the best thing ever!

 

LOL! Please set a reminder to necropost an apology here in five years. Or have you forgotten how everyone hated Steam at first?