What Does the Epic-Apple Battle Mean for the Gaming World — and How Do We Want to Help?
The world of gaming, which is ripe with inconsistencies that have been plaguing both the buyers and the publishers, is undergoing a sea change. With the Epic-Apple battle about Fortnite still looming large, it becomes imperative for us to be aware of the implications that befall us. This is where the October Beta Launch from FiPME is important. Why? Find out in this blogpost.
Gaming Universe: a World Full of Fun — and New Opportunities
The current challenges that the gaming industry faces are caused by the lack of a coherent ecosystem. An ecosystem, which would enable ingame content trading between participants while ensuring win-win deals for each of them.
It’s well known that we, gamers, are often the ones to suffer from these trading inefficiencies. Be it paying crazy commissions on every item we trade, waiting for weeks to get the item needed, or tons of other irritating and stupid things we have to go through. Before starting FiPME, we, Boris and Stefan, have gone through it ourselves and even shared our frustration in an entire blogpost on this topic — check it out here. That’s what evoked our desire to build FiPME.
Yet, it would be unfair to think we’re the only ones to suffer from the status quo. It has gone on to hurt everyone involved in the gaming industry, including the major game publishers. To be fair, they do deserve their cut of the pie — at least as a gratitude for the mind-blowing games and experience they created for us. Yet their life is also far from perfect: take the latest example of the Epic’s fight with Apple and see what’s wrong.
Epic’s Fight with Apple: What Dynamics Does it Reveal to us — and Why it Matters?
The monopolisation of the gaming industry by the bigwigs of online gaming has started to hurt the entire industry. It has come to such a pass that a court suit is now in the offing between Epic and the tech behemoth Apple. Epic accuses Apple of desecrating the very idea it once stood for — that is a democracy in the world of gaming. The fees they charge for the games that are showcased in their app stores are as high as 30%. But that’s not all: both Apple and Android are also being blamed for creating a barrier for other entrants as well as challenging competition. No surprise, some game publishers are sick and tired of this and they’re not going to be quiet about it anymore. Epic is just the first one to raise the voice, but it’s most likely not the last one.
It is in such circumstances that the industry has started to look at alternatives which will hold them in good stead. One such alternative may well be FiPME — with our October Beta Launch preparations in full swing. Why do we consider ourselves a perfect fit for all publishers including the large ones? Keep reading!
So What is it Exactly that Spoils Game Publishers’ Lives — and Why Would they Want to Use FiPME?
Lots of our subscribers wonder why we are so sure that both small and big publishers won’t be against us. Furthermore: why are we so confident to think they’d want to use our exchange or even partner with us to integrate our tech straight into their games?
Considering we’re in talks with many of them and get very positive reactions, while some partnership deals are already progressing fast, our traction with publishers is no longer a question for us. But since we can’t tell you much about that due to all the NDAs we sign, we’re going to share some objective reasons for publishers to be more than motivated to join FiPME.
Our strategy is simple: FiPME will give the gaming community another angle to interact with the game and have more fun, while making Publishers benefit, too. How? By helping Publishers get over the inconveniences that the existing shady in-game items marketplaces often expose them to. And also, by offering them new tools that could open up new ways of growing their business.
Now, what are those inconveniences, you may ask? In fact, they are pretty similar to the ones that the gamers face — but magnified, since publishers are dealing with these challenges on a much-much larger scale. Plus unlike most gamers, publishers are trying to build a sustainable business out of this content trading and not just have fun (sorry for them!), thus the efficiency of such trading is high on their list. Let’s hop straight to the topic:
Publishers’ Issue #1: Being Cut away from the Secondary Market Trade
The game industry is a vast pot of different players each pursuing their own interests. Starting with the gamers and ending with the large game corporations. They all indulge in trading, which is ultimately how ideas are built, games are played, and revenue is generated.
However, the current system basically divides all this trade in two separate sectors. The primary market, in which publishers push content sales through payment operators like Apple, bearing with their 30% commissions and lots of restrictions. And the secondary market, where gamers trade between each other or with shady marketplaces, feeding numerous scammers and leaving nothing to the game publishers — who have gone a long-long way to launch their games and in fact, rightfully deserve a part of the commission from these trades.
Now, how can this situation be changed for the better? By introducing a full-fledged peer-to-peer exchange where everybody is welcome and everybody gains. Not just Apple, not just Epic, and not just your friend next door who keeps playing day and night. All of them!
That is the only sure way to not only let everybody participate in trading at their own terms and with their rightful returns, but to also cause a synergetic effect and multiply the benefits for all of them in particular — including the publishers. And that is precisely what FiPME will enable in a month, once we launch.
Publishers’ Issue #2: Security versus Affordability
Another huge dilemma for publishers, showcased by Epic, is the same as for other traders: you either go for secure transactions or for affordability. For big game publishers like Epic, it is always about security but that is also the same for small-time game publishers. However, they end up making a choice between extremely expensive transaction facilities like the Apple’s or dicey yet more affordable transaction facilities.
With FiPME, they no longer need to choose between the bad and the worse: they’ll have affordable transactions — and low fees.
Publishers’ Issue #3: Figuring out the Best Pricing and Ramping up the Demand
For traders and game publishers, deciding on the right pricing is as much a pain as that for an individual gamer. This often leads to a loss of potential benefits — which is something few of us adore, right?
Moreover, considering that publishers normally don’t just trade one on one as most gamers do but instead apply their pricing strategy to the ingame economy, incorrect pricing does much more harm to their business. In the best case, they end up receiving a much lower ingame content sales level. In the worst case, they’re screwing up their ingame economies, turning down gamers’ interest to play the game — and then screw their own businesses as a result.
Yet if we all had more insights on the demand and the equilibrium pricing for particular in-game content, then both sides — the gamers and the publishers — could have even more satisfying results. Publishers could potentially set more appealing prices thus driving up the demand and benefiting on a big scale, while gamers would have an even more awesome time playing — yay! And yeah, we’re talking about the old boring economic concepts here, the supply and demand stuff, yet that’s something that the publishers care about a lot when crafting a game — and that’s something FiPME could help them optimize, given the trading data we assemble. Just like NASDAQ provides insights on the overall economy’s state and commodity exchanges provide insight on particular goods pricing, supply and demand, we’ll do the same for the virtual worlds. An unprecedented shift towards efficiency for all!
Publishers’ Issue #4: Less Comfort for Gamers — Lower Revenues for Publishers
For game publishers, ensuring instant trading of their ingame content drives up the time gamers spend playing (rather than waiting for their items to be sold or arrive) — a crucial metric all publishers work to optimize. However, the current systems, though available, aren’t best suited for that kind of lightning transactions the business requires.
And due to this, publishers lose potential clients — the gamers like you and me — and the money we bring them while playing. That’s something they could avoid should FiPME be around. FiPME would help gamers to have an awesome time playing without any trading hurdles — and thus help Publishers to build more sustainable business on that.
Publishers’ Issue #5: The Unpopular Games as a Drain on Publishers’ Budget
Not all games that big publishers launch are equally awesome. For unpopular games, overall sales and subscription revenues are low. Yet such games are also filled with a huge inventory of ingame assets that some gamers would love to buy or sell. The problem is that gamers have a hard time finding sellers & buyers for these items — and with that, potential gains for publishers vanish.
How do we aim to help everybody to resolve this situation? By letting publishers open a market for that unpopular game at our exchange and assemble all the target gamers there, while getting commissions from each trade made at that market. Cause even if the trade turnover isn’t that big, having effortless additional revenue doesn’t sound bad, right? Moreover, new traders from other markets can get attracted and ramp up the trading volume for that particular no-name game nobody seemed to know about yesterday.
Publishers’ Issue #6: Small Publisher? — Few Chances to Grow
Marketing often outstrips the cost of game development, which is a hard reality in today’s world. So while big corporations can afford to spend millions on marketing their products, the small-timers will not be able to compete. The gaming field then becomes skewed and more pronouncedly biased towards the ones carrying the bigger wad.
If the gaming industry has to grow and move forward, then the existence of a level playing field is a necessity. After all, some of the best gaming ideas come from the small-time publishers and it will be criminal to overlook them, right?
With FiPME, everybody will have a chance to shine. Publishers of all shapes and sizes can open up their markets at our exchange, engage with gamers from different gaming universes — and professional traders! — there, and make the money they need to survive. Survive — and create even more awesome games for us, gamers.
Now we’re Calling for You to Make This Happen: Shape the History with Us!
Summing up, the gaming industry is replete with wonderful players, each with inherent strengths and capabilities as well as its own interests and needs for survival. What FiPME wants to create is a level playing field which will attract not just the smaller players but huge gaming corporations like EPIC and EA too, and provide them with some benefits to stick to. Moreover, with myriad pain points still lingering, the community is looking for some respite.
We at FiPME aim to build on the innovations of the past and the existing platforms and improve on them, while implementing the best practices of financial exchanges that have been serving humanity for centuries.
We aim to nullify or remove whatever concerns gamers and their affiliates had with previous platforms — for instance, trading the odd game stuff that few have heard, or trading fast yet at low cost. FiPME intends to create a virtual NYSE for the gaming community.
We are offering an alternative solution that will not only remove the gamers’ pain points but also not leave behind the traders and publishers when it comes to the lucrative ingame item market, where the trade clocks over billions of dollars. And even if the current rules the publishers try to push through to the gamers might not yet be prepared for such solutions, these rules will change, just like anything else in this world. The very moment they feel they can benefit from such exchange as FiPME — unlike anything else that’s currently present at the market — they will have a strong motivation to reconsider their policies. But first we need to show it’s not a dream but a reality. A working exchange that gamers use and adore. And that is something that’s up to you to judge! We’ve gone a long way to build this thing and now it’s you who decides if it was worth it.
Hence, this is a loud call going out to all of you in the gaming community as well outside it. Join us in this quest to build a new tomorrow.
Subscribe for the October Beta launch here and help us test the hell out of it! Your opinion is all that matters to us now.
