Ooblets developers address Epic exclusivity in the perfect way
Ooblets go epic.
The topic of Epic exclusivity has been near constant since the beginning of the year. A lot of people seem to be hostile to it, but for what specific reason? Over the past few months with so much conversation buzzing around it, its sort of been hard to tell.
The developers of Ooblets, Rebecca Cordingley and Ben Wasser, have done something to address some of these confusions in a recent blog post in which they announced their own decision to go Epic. They’ve done it in a magnificent, personality filled way, with mo-cap flossing included, obviously.
The Glumberland team (the studio the pair comprise) treated the topic with the humour that has really been lacking in discussions around Epic: “Here’s what these Epic folks are doing: First they teach every kid in the world these obnoxious dances and now they’re offering funding to game developers in exchange for PC exclusivity on their game store (…)
Just imagine if other companies got it in their head to offer funding in exchange for exclusives. What’d be next? Game consoles paying for games to be exclusive on their consoles? Netflix paying for exclusive shows? Newspapers paying for exclusive articles? It’d be some sort of late capitalist dystopia.”
When you lay it out like that – you can see their point. Is Epic’s current business model anything particularly different from what we’re already use to and have been buying into for years?
Through the course of the article Wasser goes on to explain the process of becoming exclusive with Epic, and what this has meant for their future development process. A lot of what makes the deal so inviting for a small developer is the minimum guarantees set in place:
“Because Epic doesn’t yet have the same market share as their competitors, they offered us a minimum guarantee on sales that would match what we’d be wanting to earn if we were just selling Ooblets across all the stores. That takes a huge burden of uncertainty off of us because now we know that no matter what, the game won’t fail and we won’t be forced to move back in with our parents”
So while we’ve all been complaining about having to download a new launcher, there have been benefits to these exclusive deals, especially for a smaller developer. Whether or not that means its good for the industry overall will perhaps only be determined once the dust has settled a little.
But, the bad news is, the injection of money may delay the launch of Ooblets further. We might not be getting this Animal Crossing/Pokemon/Stardew Valley mash up in 3D form soon, but when we do get it, we’re sure it’ll be better for having had the extra time and resource.
Either way, this post is some fantastic and much needed good press for a site that comes under near constant fire. To find out more about Ooblets, take a look at their Steam page. We’re sure this won’t be the last of our Epic discussions, to read more into the topic, go here.