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In a base defending mission, a scientist wanted to prove his swordsmanship, so he charged toward a lizardman with a scalpel in hand. Then BOOM and ketchup...

No doubt. And when I use my amateur choice of traffic checking tool, www.Alexa.com/siteinfo, to compare steam with epic, I found out that steampowered.com has a global rank of 163, and meanwhile the epicgames.com has only 1,298,680. The traffic ranking alexa provides won't be very precise, but my conjecture here is, alexa ain't joking around neither. humblebundle.com is not surprisingly having a score of 553, gog.com is at 1801 which is still pretty nice, ubi.com is better which has a globel rank of 1199. There are other traffic spying tool around but I didn't check them out because I'm lazy. You can give other tools a shot if you thing those ranking scores are ridiculous. Although I do believe epic store will grow as they start to have more games on it but not in near future, not when the player community still remembers what they did with Deep Silver. Steam is the realm of fairy tale for any developer who create decent game, unless Steam start to charge for the marketing service. And Steam is not like Youtube, the subscribers from Youtube pay nothing but their time.

Exactly, for now, not publishing game on Steam could cause losing most potential buyers from the 2nd category you listed. Gamer like me will search for key word like "upcoming strategy games in 2019-2020" on youtube or google (btw, these videos or article are quite time consuming, in other word, lacking the efficiency), but the frequency is rare comparing to how often I open the shortcut of Steam.exe which leads me to a window that has a storefront tab in the UI that is visually hard to miss where I can browse the latest recommendation from Steam. I purchased Xenonauts because I already owned the new Xcom in Steam. Steam has this information so it shows me Xenonauts along with some other games that share similar tag with Xcom. I find this game, Xenonauts, very interesting and since I'm already familiar with the payment on Steam and have confidence about Steam's refund policy, I added it to the cart and checked out. I own 129 titles on Steam, and I heard only few of them before the purchase. Also, I do believe that Steam has some deeper "big-data" thing running as well, not just sorting the users by tags from the games they own, but also collecting information like: for how long they spent with each tag value, which tags are included in their wishlist, the user's behavior with steam/third party's discounts, the average pricing on purchase in the library of a user, then build different modules according to the generic behaviors and classify/link the similar ones, so they can not only advertising (recommending) games for their players, but also probably able to provide some advises to the publishers(developers) on a promotion strategy if they feel necessary. The first page from video game storefront is the most valuable place, you just won't showing any game in storage there. Sadly, neither GOG nor Epic could obtain such vertically detailed & large user information database in the near future, it requires years occupying big part in the market, like what @Pave shares above about what resources Epic possess, Epic is, no doubt, a marketplace with hell lot of potential (greater advantage comparing to GOG) and have a very bright future, but it will take years to have its user to help generate such valuable database to make this new competitor a "Marketing-Worthy" choice. Reviews on Steam is the other reason I choose Steam than others, even reviews from professional media like IGN couldn't compare to those home made buyer reviews because, those official reviews cannot cover every feature that potentially bothers me or interests me. Developers may hate those "mixed" or "mostly negative" labels, but I do need them to picture the first impression. Besides, I'm more confident when purchasing on Steam. It's not that Steam offer a great purchase experience, but simply because I've been doing it for a while. For example, both Amazon and Ebay are great, but I only buy stuffs on Amazon, because it have my payment information saved. In the other word: on Steam, you are more likely to sell more copies and snowball further your fan base. Kickstarter + Steam + other store is the smartest combo a studio can have. From kickstarter, you get part of your fan base buying the game with a fixed price in a fixed currency (which skips the pricing zone policy from some stores like GOG and Steam) , then have it on stores to let your fan base know about it or to purchase in special zone pricing, after the reviews grows, more non-fan-base players will see it and may give it a try. Since every criticize I've heard here and there towards Steam is about that 18% cut, so I imagine that there is no other cost charged by these stores that had variation significant enough. 18% is not small, but upon the release(pricing), earning 18% extra from a sell of 7k copies can't compete with 10k copies without this extra: Let's say, a game sells for 50 when release, may earn 50-6=44 on Epic, while on Steam is 50-6-9=35 . Means if Epic helps you sell X copies of your game, Steam need to sell X*1.25 copies to stay equal. But the fact is, at the moment, Steam can do better than this. TLDR: Steam (at the moment and the near future, like 2-3 years) = Most Affordable&Effective Marketing Solution (Pay per Final Purchase) = Earning More

Pilot's experience can be implanted as an auto-resolve modifier. If successfully shot down the alien aircraft in a manual fight could improve the result from auto-resolve, then the middle/late game would be smoother. It can be something like this: In manual: - Bind the pilot to the hanger to represent the pilot team and other crews who are responsible to a aircraft, so no more click is required. - Survived Pilots in a successful mission may gain exp. - The more disadvantage a pilot's aircraft has comparing to its foe, the more likely he/she would gain exp. - Disadvantage = (tier X foe's strength * number + tier X+1 foe's strength * number + ...) - (tier x friendly's str * number + tier x+1 friendly's str * number + ...) - Set thresholds for Disadvantage in order to define the exp gained ==> low=only healthy survivor from low rank(see below) will gain 1 exp; medium= every healthy survivor will gain 1 exp; high=everyone get 1 exp As the result, in Auto: - the exp a pilot has become a modifier in auto. - set ranks for exp level and then allow pilots gain bonus modifier accordingly in auto: rank\disadvantage low medium high low + n/a n/a medium ++ + n/a high ++ + + - high rank will lose 1 exp if survived with yellow condition and will lose 2 exp if red - medium rank will lose 1 exp only if survived in red - destroyed friendly aircraft will have a 80% chance to have its pilot killed(lose all its exp), if the pilot survive from crash, he/she will still lose 3 exp. Conclusion: I believe by introducing pilots like this will make auto-resolve become more dynamic and help out those players who love the ground mission more, meanwhile it's not complicating the development too much and still able to add some flavor to the game. If the development allows, generating random traits for the pilots when they rank up will add even more immersive experience: Lucky=the pilot has 50% chance instead of 20% to survive if the plane was destoryed. Resilient=if has 0hp after match, instead of been destoryed, the plane has a 10% chance to return to the base with only 1 point of health. Dogfighter=receive additional modifier in auto when fighing against the Fighter type of foe. Tactician=receive additional modifier in auto when on a mission with other pilots who has lower rank. Wingman=receive additional modifier in auto when on a mission with other pilot/s. Engineer=the repairing rate for his/her plane get improved. Trainer=20% chance to add 1 exp for a standby lower rank pilot after gaining exp from a mission. trumaed=after match, if the plane has only red health condition, the plane will still be destoryed. But if the pilot survive the crash, he/she only lose 1 exp, and will never lose more than this value from a mission. Death squad=receive additional modifier in auto if has medium Disadvantage in a mission, but has 60% chance to have its plane destoryed after winning the battle (imagine the kamikaze style) and 100% chance to be destroyed if the battle was lost Nothing=the pilots usually don't get any special traits when they rank up so that the special traits can stay special.

It would be fun to see some reporters around. And there can be an extra bonus by saving them, like extra funding from saving them in a terror attack. Also, some riot style civilian fighting the alien would be also interesting. Using cleaver, club, machete and even fist, or maybe throwing rock, brick and bottle.

Comparing to Amazon, Steam is an angel from hair to toe. For those who think Epic is more friendly to developers than Steam, I would like to ask you, is there anything better than having the marketplace itself to help you worry about your own selling? And if they do a great job helping you to do the marketing, will you be rather happy to offer them an cut, let's say 18%? But what if the marketplace you choose piss off your potential customers? And what if the marketplace you choose does not have enough data from its users to analysis so it don't know who is your potential customer?

It's sad to know, but thank you for the answer Max.

I'm not a big fan of Star Trek, but I found its very interesting having some Star Trek looking aliens to kill in Xenonauts 1. (Btw, I do like the new Android's looking a lot) So, I would like to know, if that new muscular big head alien will replace the old Star Trek crews, or its just a new enemy? Also, I think the postures of human are somehow off, especially when they are standing.