Indie title Ooblets announced as timed-exclusive for Epic Games Store, triggering racism and threats of harm

[AnotherGills 25]

Independent development studio Glumberland has announced in a blog post that their debut title, Ooblets, will be debuting exclusively on the Epic Games Store.

Furthermore, the post explains the motivation for the decision.

Quote

"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."

"The investment we’re getting upfront from Epic will allow us to ramp up our development resources which will lead to faster development in the long run, but it might also delay our initial launch a tad because it takes some time to ramp things up and because we won’t have as much financial pressure to prematurely shove something we’re not happy with out the door."

While many are not thrilled with the initial shift in platform, it seems this will lead to higher production values for the title.

Regardless, many have taken issue and have vocally expressed their discontent with Glumberland. In another blog post, Ben Wasser (co-founder of Glumberland) addressed the community chagrin towards the move to the Epic Games Store. The post chronicled some of the hatred spewed at them, ranging from racist insults, to threats of harm and death, on platforms such as Reddit, Discord, and Twitter.

While displeased with the extent of the backlash, he also thanked the users who have stood by the studio, and assisted in moderation of their Discord server. What are your thoughts on Ooblets moving to the Epic Games Store? Do you think Glumberland should have taken the deal?

[Rose 268]

There's also this lengthy article investigating the matter, though at least one aspect of it is inaccurate. The 7 hours period between the message of the Malaysian user and that of Ben is the result of the former being a screenshot re-posted a minute before Ben's response.