In an unsurprising move, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney is defending the practice of recruiting developers for paid exclusives. In an effort to cut into the PC gaming pie that Valve’s Steam store and launcher has dominated for years, Epic has started securing exclusive games for the Epic Games store. A conversation taking place on Twitter included Sweeney breaking down the reasoning for this approach.
GOG Galaxy is a PC game launcher with its own storefront that was created by CD Projekt Red, the studio behind the Witcher franchise and upcoming RPG Cyberpunk 2077. The 2.0 version of GOG Galaxy aims to make game libraries from all launchers, including Steam and Epic, manageable from one place, and Sweeney tweeted an article about the platform update with the words “Connect ALL the launchers.” A specific question about the reasoning for exclusive games that Epic Games has secured for its own store and launcher catapulted Sweeney into a series of lengthy tweets. Sweeney was pretty frank in his response.
“This question gets to the core of Epic’s strategy for competing with dominant storefronts,” he said. “We believe exclusives are the only strategy that will change the 70/30 status quo at a large enough scale to permanently affect the whole game industry.”
He pointed to other independent PC gaming stores and their failure to achieve the scale Steam has reached as another reason for exclusivity. Sweeney points out that nearly all of those platforms have more features than Epic as well.
“This leads to the strategy of exclusives, which, though unpopular with dedicated Steam gamers, do work, as established by the major publisher storefronts and by the key Epic Games store releases compared to their former Steam revenue projections and their actual console sales,” Sweeney saidd.
With any platform that has as significant foothold as Steam does, there’s going to be pushback when a new platform enters the space. Epic’s strategy is especially polarizing because it focuses directly on the main objective: Gaming. Unfortunately, how those exclusives are handled is less straightforward because of the sudden about-face for games that were already promised for Steam releases.
Epic Games store exclusive games like Phoenix Point, Metro Exodus, Ashen, Borderlands 3, and Dauntless are still coming to Steam but well after launch. This will be less of an issue as Epic shifts its focus to unreleased games or games where the developers haven’t already established launch platforms, but crowdfunded games will still have a PR nightmare on their hands if they don’t find a way to communicate the platform change earlier and clearly.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.