Epic Games Exclusivity and how it will affect the release of Hitman 3

Within the old forum, this was already heavily discussed and even I gave myself some statements regarding this matter.

However, I’m heavily interested in the following now:

  • On which platform will you get Hitman 3?
  • Are you criticizing or agreeing with the decision of it being on PC for a year Epic Games exclusive?
  • Will you get it on PC on day one, even when you don’t agree with it?
  • Do you think this will affect sales numbers or do you think that it won’t make such a big difference due people still buying it or Epic having paid for said exclusivity?

Last but not least:

  • What do you think of what has been shown so far, and are you hyped?
  • Do you think progress will carry over between Steam and Epic Games Store without any further problems?

Thanks for answering so far, and well, I’m not gonna get it myself due Epic Games Exclusivity on day one, but only once it arrives to Steam, but I’m heavily hyped. :hugs:

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hmm well i dont exactly like EGS’s practice of making games exclusive for their store while EGS is still missing many features.

but for me, personally, the launcher’s missing features dont affect me at all. so i will be getting the game on EGS.

also, i dont think it’ll affect sales. most people on PC will buy it on EGS, where Epic has probably already guaranteed a minimum sales number. add onto that the console releases, other deals, and the Steam release that will make them even more sales… IOI’s gonna be fine

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PC. Not a fan of the EGS exclusive, but it gives me a good excuse to wait for a sale… even if that sale won’t be for a year, since I’m only going to buy it on Steam. I was pretty annoyed by the way they handled the expansion pass for Hitman 2; $40, but when the first piece of content for it came out, they put it on sale for 50% off. I felt like a real moron for pre-ordering, and it makes it a really easy choice to wait.

I hope the exclusive pays off for them because I really love this series, but it’s going to suck missing out on making contracts and participating in the community from day 1. On the plus side, nobody’s going to have to put up with my stupid nonsense contracts getting featured.

If they sunset their community participation and ongoing content delivery after ~18 months (like they did with Hitman 2) then I’ll be very sad. Their advertising really sucks so there’s probably not a lot of money in maintaining a presence anyway.

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PC.

This move is understandable in retrospect with what happened before on PC.

Yes.

Yes significantly in my opinion but that it won’t make such a big difference because :

  1. Even when the game was exclusively available on Steam, sales have never been dazzling during the initial launch window (same with H:ABS, H1, H2)

  2. Epic is bankrolling the game. They paid Phoneix Point devs approximately $3.3 million. I mean I didn’t even know this game wtf. Imagine what they gave to Hitman’s devs… IOI were on the brink of bankruptcy a couple of years ago and we nearly didn’t get any more Hitman games. They can’t refuse 5-15M$, being an indie dev company with a niche franchise which has never sold very well during the initial sales timeframe for a decade.

  3. The game is coming on every possible console.

  4. IOI will have a second release in 2022.

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I’ll be getting it on PS5.

Whilst some might not agree with the exclusivity deal with EGS these days it happens quite a lot with DLC content etc.

Do I think it will affect sales? Potentially all though most Hitman fans will buy it whenever it comes out on there diaries platform. Just a bummer that people on here will have to wait a year to get there hands on it.

PC

I don’t mind it. I will have to install it some time in January as I never used it before. I kinda dislike having another software on my PC for games but I settled with that long ago when I gave up buying discs and switched to Steam.

I am really bad at estimating the effect of marketing as I don’t feel like it has much of an effect on my at all. But I know it is wildly different with others. I guess it will lower the PC player base around the first half year somewhat but with Steam release it should even itself out.
Due the way these contracts work IO will have no harm either way. No idea how it looks like on the long run past H3.

All maps look great so far. I still hope for upgrades of my favorite mode, contract mode, but by now I don’t see information coming before release and I get ready for disappointment when there are no changes done to it. I am hyped but not too much, there is enough going on in my mind besides Hitman. :slight_smile:

Yeah kinda. There will probably nasty edge cases but I think in general it will work out.

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I will be getting the game on PC.

  • I strongly disagree with the decision to make the game exclusive on Epic for a year.
    It’s certainly not technically hard to get the Epic Store and buy/launch the game from there, but the idea that they’re trying to force me to use their store by holding the third game in a trilogy (of one of my most beloved game franchises) hostage makes my blood boil.

  • I am likely to get it day one nonetheless (though I have not pre-ordered or anything like that, and I’ll make my mind up a few days before release). It’s like if someone kidnapped a loved one. I’ll be paying your f-cking ransom, but don’t think it means I’m OK with it.

  • Will it effect sales numbers? Probably. But I’m sure IO got a good amount of money from Epic, so it probably won’t effect them. Which is another thing that annoys me. It seems to me that if IO gets enough money from Epic that it doesn’t matter, then we’re not the customers anymore, Epic is.

  • Am I hyped? Yeah. If I wasn’t, I’d wait for Steam.

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I pre-ordered it for PC on EGS.

I have been using the Epic launcher for over half a year almost daily (mainly playing Fortnite) and have no complaints. Their support replies to your mails even if they can’t always help you with stuff, so I don’t think it will be much of a difference to steam tbh. Also I personnally don’t really like Steam so kinda don’t mind the change at all hehe…

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I will get it on PC, when it arrives on Steam. The exclusivity deal is economically reasonable, but a big Fuck you to fans.
I don’t mind the wait, it doesn’t really matter to me if I play this game in 2021 or in 2022, and in fact I think in 2022 I will get to play a better, bugfixed game. I am a bit annoyed though that it locks me out of participating in this community for sharing new contracts, screenshots and so on.

I would not have preordered anyways, I preordered the gold version of Hitman 2, and while I got more than my moneys worth out of it due to contracts, the way bonus content was handled from advertising to implementation was very unsatisfying. I will get all content gradually when it releases this time.

As I am not using Epic, I personally don’t care for carry over. Progress transfer from H2 would be nice, but if it turns out to not work, I know before I buy in 2022, and will just choose to not 100% the old Maps again in HIII. Just a few useful unlocks here and there.

Edit as I forgot two questions:
I think it will affect PC sales quite heavily. If you have a look at the steam forums and reddit, it is not just a vocal minority that is pissed about it.
I do think, howeverr, that financially it will even out due to Epic easing the lost sales by their guarantee.

I am hyped, but my hype is heavily dampened by my (kind of self imposed, kind of forced) 1 year delay.

The Epic store is complete garbage and actively eats a lot of your hardware resources (10% of the CPU in my case) in case anyone actually is dumb enough to think “it’s just another launcher”.

I think this is the most reasonable comment I’ve seen regarding the hate of Epic

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EGS : 15% opened and 5% idle. Steam : 3% opened and 0.1% idle.

It means that EGS still need some work about resources optimization. Steam being very full featured, 3% is very reasonable. EGS even by doing “nothing”, takes 15% of CPU for me.

GOG Galaxy : 0.2% opened and 0.0% idle.

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Project 007 exclusive to GOG then?

Don’t worry, by the time the game is out, they will.
There is always a first time

I’m playing on a PC and I will be playing on day 1. I don’t really care whether the game is launched from Epic, Steam or from a disc. It’s just an icon on the desktop.

I suspect that a lot of the people who hate Epic will still buy the game instead of waiting a year, even if they continue to claim that they haven’t. Things like Elusive Targets and the ongoing community will spur that.

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But unlike steam, EGS’s launcher is not required, you can go through some open-source solution like Legendary to download, manage, update and launch your games. @Notex suggested that some months ago, and I loved it. I tried with Hitman 1, and it works perfectly, even in online mode. Epic games features a quite open DRM.

I’ll do that with Hitman 3. Legendary is just a 7MB command line tool (.exe) with no installation required, very easy to use, you just need some basic command line understanding.

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The other thing I’ve noticed is that for other Epic games I have, I don’t even have to have Epic running in order to play the game (presumably after the first time). Right now I only have Watch Dogs Legion installed and that has it’s own UbiSoft thing that has to run but I can start Watch Dogs without Epic and that game at least doesn’t force Epic to run. Don’t know if Hitman 3 will or won’t, but at least some games can be run completely independently of Epic, even if you bought them through that service.

Pretty much my stance on all this:

But to answer the questions with a bit more nuance:

  • On which platform will you get Hitman 3?

I’ll be getting it on PC, it’s the platform i’ve been using for several years now. I played the entirety of Hitman 2 through Proton, and I’ll likely do the same with Hitman 3 via Lutris.

  • Are you criticizing or agreeing with the decision of it being on PC for a year Epic Games exclusive?

See the image, i’m doing both. I’m not against exclusives on PC, and those that decry it as “the death of PC Gaming” really don’t know what they’re talking about, as consoles have had this as standard practice for more than two bloody decades, and the console space has turned out fine, if anything it’s stayed stagnant, and consoles have kept up with the times, in fact, this generation, they’re leading the charge in raytracing.

  • Will you get it on PC on day one, even when you don’t agree with it?

No. In part because £75 is a lot of money to pay for a game, and i’m not against waiting for a sale, be it summer or Spring. If a PC Physical release shows or (or 47 does the default Fortnite dance, I’m serious about that), then I may get it earlier as the former has feelies that cost a decent amount to ship/ make etc, while being the same price. I do have a WOA Trilogy review to do, so My statue of Limitation is 6 months.

  • Do you think this will affect sales numbers or do you think that it won’t make such a big difference due people still buying it or Epic having paid for said exclusivity?

The niche Hitman crowd probably will buy it, in part because IOI are seen as a pretty small company (They’re not indie, just Independent, there is a difference) and that they make a niche stealth game series that are constantly rated highly and critically acclaimed. As for the general gaming populous; they’ll likely ignore it, as they did with Hitman 2. Hitman is a fairly hardcore-stealth game, and while attempts have been made to make it more casual, it’s not gonna lose that stigma anytime soon, nor should it I feel.

The average Player numbers on Hitman 2 are ~4000 (to the surprise of nobody, Ghost Mode did not move the numbers down when it got shut down, go figure) on Steam. Now, of course, that is only a portion of the userbase, but it’s still quite telling for its status in the gaming community; It’s popular, but it’s not seen as a “must play” game until people get round to it. Hitman gets news coverage, in part because of its established IP nature, but those do not translate into sales. I’ve seen more Youtubers play Hitman 2 now than when it released because the games are a slow-burn sales-wise. Basically, a lot of people who are criticising it being exclusive aren’t gonna buy it anyway, not on release, and certainly not anytime soon after launch, regardless of exclusivity. Not everybody thinks this way, of course. The sales on EGS are likely going to be lower due to EGS’s stigma, but by how much I cannot say.

  • What do you think of what has been shown so far, and are you hyped?

I like where the story is headed, and contrary to what many think of WOA’s plot, I find it quite inspired and intriguing. It kept me guessing, and I’ve no clue what’s in store. To be fair, i’m in the privileged position of reading those darned comic books (Birth of the Hitman, seriously, go read them), so I’m more invested and I understand the intricacies of the plot more than most.

As for “being hyped”, I try to keep off the Hype train as much as I can, and I want to be fairly objective. However, I’m not a robot, and I’m human, and so I have some good feelings H3 will be good and satisfying to play, and I cannot wait to get my hands on it.

  • Do you think progress will carry over between Steam and Epic Games Store without any further problems?

Knowing IOI, they’ll likely be a server overload of people doing the transfers at the same time (which isn’t entirely their fault, servers be weird), but otherwise, I expect it to work on the day.

These are not my complete thoughts, and I have much more to add, but I think i’ll leave it here…it’s already quite long.

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EGS doesn’t force DRM, it’s up to the devs.

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