Epic rejects Assault Android Cactus application, wont appear on their store

Stroe?

epic don't want niche games, they want blockbusters so they can spy on more computers.

AAC is probably the best twin-stick shooter I have ever played.

that's why it's called EPIC

UN-EPIC

What's this Epic store?

not approving the game for distribution on their platform is not the same as "blocking" the game. Your choice of words makes it sound like they banned the game or something. I agree it is a dubious decision though as it is a well-received game.

they only care if the game is highly anticipated, they don't actually care about game quality.. only if they can lure steam user to their shitty store because muh cOmPeTItIOn

that's fine, i wish steam did something like this but with those trash $1 games.

Okay, so I'll try and break it down for myself and I'm basically writing it down here in case anyone else is interested.
Before I start writing this, keep in mind that I have a bias against Epic Games Store and might be unduly harsh against them, even though I'll try and keep that bias to a minimum.

Epic promises high quality games and distances itself from the Valve's school of thought of an "Opened floodgates" policy for the games they allow on their store.
Assault Android Cactus (AAC from now on) is a well reviewed game on Steam so far with Overwhelmingly Positive reviews. Looking in-depth into the reviews shows that it's still positive (meaning key owners are also satisfied for the most part).

So what's the game lacking... Well, definitely popularity. They might have Overwhelmingly Positive reviews, but it's also easy to see that the game has less than 1000 reviews with the rest being key reviews. In general, it shows that the customer isn't enticed to the game independently and needs cheap deals to give the game a chance (keys don't mean discount purchases, but the generalization is true and there's no reason to guess it's any different for this game). The game lacks "top notch" graphical quality and the screenshots range from mediocre showcases to downright awful messes of color and flashes. The game's base price is also very low compared to most other games and is lower than most games on the Epic Store. They used to have "transaction fees" on their purchases at Epic, so perhaps this is a negative for them as well.
I doubt that the store's staff plays the games that want to come onto the store. So they're looking at outside aspects. Reviews, prices, screenshots, trailers, developer's Twitter/other social media and so on.

I'm not too surprised that Epic Games Store didn't accept this game. First the fact that they need to reject a couple of games for good PR for their store's exclusivity. The store page isn't great and their reviews aren't as promising as one might think. 30 months and all they really have is around 1000 confirmed purchases. I know this isn't the real amount and in fact it's way higher. But remember that Epic's not us. They're not the consumer and instead they're the businessmen that will willingly only see what's in front of them when it comes to something as minor as a single product in an entire store.

AAC isn't in a place to make demands and it has no right to really bitch and moan. They also flat out obfuscate the truth while also using some pretty shitty metrics to make their case. First they use Metacritic. As a Steam game that's also indie, this is a double-whammy of idiocy to show your mettle in the business. Second, they are basically lying about the number. The PC version's at a 79 with only 15 votes from the critic side and a very weak 6.8 from the user side, but even then it's only 28 ratings. So how did they reach the 87? By citing the Switch reviews. This isn't much better though. Critic and user reviews are 87 and 8.7 respectively. But it's even worse than in the PC version, because there are only 9 critics and 17 user ratings. This only serves to show Epic that their game's so unpopular that they barely got over 10 people to even rate their game. This isn't helping them in any way. Also doesn't help that Switch releases are rated way higher than PC, because their players are more favorable towards all games critically because of the smaller pool of games to even pick from. Also, the Switch, to a certain extent, is taking part in the console wars, which will inflate reviews inherently due to brand loyalty. But to add to this, it's a different version of the game. It's the "+" version of the game, which isn't their PC version, which is just a normal one. Unless they're planning to make an Epic exclusive "+" version's PC port, then they're full of shit.
So the developer essentially just lied. There's no objectivity in what he said and there's no reason to really believe what they say now. At the very least, expect everything he said to need a chunks of salt to morph back into any type of realistic situation.

I'm not surprised Epic finally started rejecting games properly. I'm also inclined to believe that losing out on Assault Android Cactus will not do anything to Epic. The game's not popular and its earning potential's most likely extremely small. It's a mixture of developer's ego clashing with questionable elitist business moves from the side of Epic. The issue here is that the developer's not in the right here. Epic made a dumb decision, but rejecting a game from their own store is something you should respect if you want to be a developer that people want to work with. Epic decided you weren't good enough. Don't prove them right by citing false reviews and badmouthing a store in public for not wanting you.

The linked site don't exist, so my informations are now very few.

They are a company and none of us know why they don't want this game at there store.
And to be honest it don't interest me too.
Did you try to say your supermarket what food (labels) must lay in there storages ?
They should handle THERE business how THEY want and if i am not pleased as customer i let them feel it with my money pocket.

Seems like the final nail in their store's coffin. They'll never get anywhere if they only sell popular games. They'll run out of bribe money eventually, meaning no more 1-year exclusives. If they haven't become a serious competitor to Steam by that point, they're done. Just another lame publisher store like Origin and Uplay, but with fewer in-house exclusives. If they want to compete with Steam as a generic store, they need to have a large enough library of games that people who are just now starting to build up their collections might consider them the best place to buy from. Excluding trashware is all well and good, but excluding obscure niche games is suicide. Aside from the casuals who only play whatever is popular right now (and who are mostly on consoles anyway), pretty much every gamer has at least 1 preferred genre and is interested in finding obscure niche games from that genre. If Steam caters to that and Epic doesn't, Steam wins.

Of course, a large library is not enough. Epic also needs to match or outdo Steam's regional pricing and the 3rd party key sellers, especially bundles. Also the game community pages, the groups, the workshop. And even after all that, they'll still only be the best choice for people who don't already have a huge library on Steam, so they'd need all that money they're throwing at exclusives to keep going at a loss until their userbase grows. Unless they manage some kind of spectacular GOG Connect -like deal.

In fact, you know what, they should have just duplicated people's Steam libraries. Then use their Fortnite money to pay for the bandwidth for people downloading games they didn't buy there for the next few years. And also offer some money to every dev of every non-trash game on Steam to get them to agree to put their game on the Epic store and to rush sending the files over so it doesn't take forever to build up the catalog. Also offer some money to the bundle sites to get them to push devs to offer Epic keys in addition to Steam keys. And in the meantime, rush to implement regional pricing and community features. And just like that, in a few months they'd have had a serious competitor to Steam, with the advantages of no trashware and a lower cut taken from every sale. And they absolutely should have split that lower cut between the devs and the customers, effectively having every game be 9% cheaper on their store.

It's ok for me if they just want to sell AAA games. I don't care. Origin, Battle.net, Bethesda... all ok also. I'm sure some people just have an acoount on each one. I don't. I'm a Linux player ant I just use GOG and Steam (Proton is so awsome!).

A few years ago the dev said that GOG didn't even respond to his request for inclusion there. So this is an improvement. Considering that GOG has thousands of games, and epic only dozens, GOG's rejection is also a lot more of an insult.

At this point Epic is limiting releases quite severely due to the state of the store, so I'd expect very few games to get in. Epic said that it's going to open the store more later this year. I suppose that's the response of 'get back to them in a year' meant.

I think they want to minimize the amount of games they have because their client's UI/UX seems like it would do horribly with a large amount of games. I'm already lost in the few games I have there... they need to work on this, seriously :x

Can't say I'm surprised Epic rejected AAC. Barely anyone's heard of the game, outside of bundle buyers. Not profitable at all for them at this point. Even as a freebie I don't think it'd get people to install the client.

Good. Epic should stay premium.