- Joined
- Jul 31, 2018
This isn't meant to spark an argument or a debate, or a defense of the EGS, I'm just thinking aloud really. But I do think people might be a little bit too fatalistic over what EGS means for sales and Shenmue IV. Games are still successful on that platform, some even seeing unprecedented sales numbers. Shenmue III can absolutely still sell high volumes there. Potential sales was never the issue here.
But even if people did boycott or decide not to buy the game, Epic guarantees revenue up to a certain amount of sales, whether or not sales actually hit that number. So the revenue it would have made on Steam is essentially guaranteed at this point. That's always been one of Epic's stingy moves to convince publishers to sign exclusivity contracts.
Also consider that a vast majority of people will be playing on console and won't be affected in any way by the Epic decision. That's where the largest chunk of revenue lies and thankfully the Epic deal can never take that away.
That's why I don't think that this whole thing puts Shenmue IV in jeopardy as much as people think. It's not the financial element that we need to worry about. It's more so the sketchy reputation that clings to titles entering into these deals.
They do benefit, potentially quite a bit, as they get 88% of the revenue (Epic takes 12% of the cut) per unit sold versus 65% on Steam (Valve gets 30% and Epic would've still received 5% per the Unreal Engine licensing agreement). If they also guaranteed revenue up to a certain point, making up for some lost sales, it might not be too bad.
As an example, if Shenmue 3 sells 100,000 units on the EGS at $50, they (presumably Deep Silver and YsNet together) receive $4,400,000 of the revenue. They would've needed to sell 135,385 units on Steam to receive the same amount of revenue. I can't blame Deep Silver for chasing the money, as long as it works out to not just benefit themselves. They also need to not screw over the backers, and work out a deal that benefits them while potentially maintaining the exclusivity for the general public.