The move is designed to make more titles Epic Games Store exclusive…
The Epic First Run programme allows developers of any size to claim 100% of revenue if they agree to make their game exclusive on the Epic Games Store for six months.
After the six months are up, the game will revert to the standard Epic Games Store revenue split of 88% for the developer and 12% for Epic Games.
I'd expect EGS exclusivity to be the norm then. People who will buy the game eventually will buy the game eventually. Those are fixed sales since they'd get the same revenue from them either way. It's just a breakdown of the sales lost from people refusing to buy the game ever outweighs the 30% you gain. Which at this point it seems like a ridiculous proposal since every game seems to launch to bigger and bigger numbers regardless of what bullshit the game pulls. People who wait for sales would barely matter since a steam sale is like a year after release and they weren't making bank on them anyways.
But at face value, getting 70% of one Steam sale is only 10% more than you'd make off two copies sold at 100%. So one "never buy" looses you 2.3 sales of a game in revenue. Cool but any converted sale from someone who wouldve bought on Steam but can't wait and buys on EGS offset that in favor of EGS. I guarantee more people will buy from EGS compared to never buying the game. 2.3x more? Yeah, for sure, lol. I'm sure someone could do some clown math for a break even point per 1 million sales at that point. But considering a bulk of a games purchase is at launch it's just skewed so heavily toward EGS exclusivity makes more financial sense.
There's also the percentage that just don't buy on PC and buy on console instead, but again that's the same cut you'd get just launching it on Steam
I'd love to see the actual sales numbers of recent, big titles on EGS vs Steam. I absolutely hate using EGS, and with the awesomely high game game density these days, I just don't mind missing the few exclusives until they get on steam, and even then it is only if I remember them, since usually the hype has died out by then, and other games are out. I have no idea what percentage of users are similar to me.