alt Hacker NewsThey aren't losing money on Fortnite, they're losing money on vanity projects like the Epic Game Store where they spend tens of millions of dollars for exclusivity deals with developers, and give away free games to try to poach Steam users with an otherwise inferior product. Unfortunately it is their employees that are paying the price of leadership making it rain with their overflowing coffers they couldn't help but burn.
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> Unfortunately it is their employees that are paying the price of leadership making it rain [...]
Epic's employees reaped the gains while it rained in the form of paychecks. While it sucks that people are losing their jobs, those individuals received (much of) the upside of this investment and their jobs never would have existed in the first place had the investment not been made. Their paychecks are not being clawed back. Shareholders (including executives who are largely paid via out-of-the money options) are bearing the costs. Consumers also benefit from increased competitive pressure on Valve and subsidized game prices.
Would it be "better" if Epic had not invested in the Epic Game Store and paid a dividend or conducted a share buyback?
> they're losing money on vanity projects
Among other vanity projects, they hired Simon Peyton Jones, long the most prominent developer of Haskell, to build "Verse", Tim Sweeney's hobby language [1].
I'm sure SPJ isn't that expensive, but still, it's pretty far from Epic's "core mission."
A truly fascinating part is that feature and quality-wise EGS is still, after years of development, miles behind Steam.
Epic likely has talented devs and clearly invests a lot of money into all of this, but it took them years to finally implement a cart. It's not the end of the world to not have one, but not if you are a digital store!
It doesn't even have (or at least didn't the last time I checked) a review system. Steam isn't just a store anymore- it's closer to a social network with communities, discussions, mod workshop (which makes it stupid easy to install mods if a game supports this). With forums dying and reddit turning into whatever it is turning into, Steam forums is IT for a lot of gamers. If I see a game on sale the first thing I turn to is a review section- more often than not it's enough to gauge whether I'll buy this thing or not. And it's a nice place to ask whenever something in the game bugs our or doesn't work, or to just vent.
EGS is (or least was) really damn slow to start (never mind to launch an actual game). Linux support is non-existent.
Sure, it is extremely difficult to tackle a leader when a headstart is this large, and when people already have massive libraries of their own on Steam, but it's been what- 7 years of development? Epic had a clean slate, no compatibility to worry about and all the features their main competitor had, mapped out to copy- and they didn't even try to reach feature-parity.
Giving out free games only takes you so far when people lack the necessities to stay at your platform
In my experience, the Epic Games Store downloads faster, installs more efficiently, and launches games faster than Steam. The social features I actually use (i.e., add a friend, join them in a game) work fine. I'm not aware of any features Steam has that EGS lacks that I actually use frequently (Valve's VR, streaming tech, and Proton are great, but I don't use those frequently). It's not just me, many indie game developers are also big fans of EGS (most recent example that comes to mind are Jeff Kaplan's remarks during his 10 hour stream a week or two ago). Gamers' vehement defense of what is effectively a monopoly continues to confuse me.
Epic lost billions of dollars when they were kicked out of the App Store and Google Play and they were out for a long time. Only now Fortnite is coming back to mobile.
Do we actually know that this is the case? Have they released any figures? How much money are they actually losing on the store?
The exclusivity deals they struck early on are an albatross that still drags them down. I think the audience would have been much more receptive to deals like Alan Wake 2, where that money spigot got turned into something totally unique that wouldn't have existed without that capital investment.
there’s a huge component to gamers that they are emotional and resistant to change. gamers hated steam when it came out. and now the backlash against epic store is huge. they haven’t done a good job fixing the perception of epic store the way steam did
bingo. At least they didn't use AI as the "excuse" for the layoffs though ...
It's hilarious how I must have like 80 games there, with zero intention of ever installing Epic, or even playing those games. Yet I must "claim" them... just in case. I bet the majority of users do that hahaha
Everybody says this. It's so weird.
How on earth will epic win without exclusives? It's like launching some Facebook competitor "but you get two profile pictures". Noone would switch.
All these geeks singing steam and lamenting competition. Competition bad for me mkay, steam good.
/me shakes head
Interestingly, I don't even think that the Epic Game Store was a vanity project. It was probably a good idea, they had a successful product and could build up their store out of it. Basically what Valve did originally.
But instead of focusing, you know, in making their story desirable to use, they focused on shit like exclusives. And for that, they should fail.
I prefer GoG over Steam, even while I am super grateful for Steam making gaming on Linux possible. And GoG didn't need to rely on exclusives for this.
It's still funny to me that they would rather burn 9 figures in cash on these silly deals to try and 'trap' gamers on their platform instead of just... I don't know... making a better platform? The reason nobody competes with Steam is simply the sheer number of integration and platform features that make it easy to buy, play and share games with my friends. It's not that hard, stop trying to 'force' me to use your platform. Just make it a nice experience.