With several hundred million active users and thousands of games on offer, it takes a lot of guts to try to compete with Steam. The Epic Games Store invests a lot and offers new free titles every week, but it is currently struggling to fully compete with Valve’s platform.
It is in this difficult context that Ultra Games has just formalized the launch of its new service on April 25. The opportunity for us to take stock of what differentiates this French offer from Steam.
Resale of games
Who’s ready to start playing?!
Ultra Games is going live on the 25th of April ?#GameOnUltra ?
— Ultra Games (@Ultra_platform) April 5, 2023
This is undoubtedly one of Ultra’s strengths. The service will use NFTs and the blockchain to allow its users to resell their games. We can therefore recover part of the amounts invested or touch certain games for less. It remains to be seen how this new system will work and how the developers will navigate it. For its part, Steam does not like NFTs and has opposed their use.
As our colleagues from the Journal du Geek, we will have to see how this technology will work and if it will overcome the excesses already observed in the sales of digital objects. In any case, it is a concrete use that could benefit gamers.
Developer compensation
While Steam asks developers $100 to offer a game on its platform, plus a 30% royalty on each game sold, Ultra Games wants to do it differently. The start-up costs are free and they will only have to donate 15% of the income.
The latter can also carry out free promotional campaigns on the service and benefit from royalties on game resales. Clearly, Ultra Games is rolling out the red carpet for them in an attempt to better compete with Valve.
The game catalog
Here, the comparison clearly does not work in favor of Ultra Games. The new service indeed has a much more modest catalog than Steam, which offers a variety of very impressive games, from triple A to small independent games.
However, Ultra can boast of some fairly well-known titles in its store such as Lords of the Fallen, The Walking Dead Definitive SeriesWRC7 or the titles Siberia et Beholder. The ambition is also to attract developers to enrich the content library.
For your part, had you ever heard of Ultra Games, and could you be tempted to open an account there? Tell us in the comments.
