"Let's release a worse product. Hey, no one likes it. Okay, let's spend money on games so THEY can essentially force people to use our software. Hey, still, no one really likes it. Okay, let's try to give away stuff for free. Hey, people use our thing for the free stuff but still no one likes it for any other reason."
They just keep spending money to up their numbers and their product is still missing features and inferior to competition. They spend big money on exclusivity, but that is only temporary - if that's how you're getting your customers, you're going to have to keep doing it forever to retain them. If people only use you for free stuff, you're just going to have to keep giving stuff away at a loss to retain them.
This model is not sustainable. You're not doing anything that aligns value with your customers besides just throwing free stuff at them. That's not a business.
What's especially sad to me is they could literally have just spent that same money to improve their launcher and have an actual product. Instead they've invested in temporary stats. They're essentially bankrolling other devs on games with temporary popularity instead of in their lifelong product.
Using other games exclusivity as sway into your ecosystem only works when you have a good product the person would be interested in but they haven't seen it yet. EGS is currently something people are essentially coerced into using but no one really gets any real value out of it other than "well I couldn't buy this game anywhere else"
Plus it's not like there wasn't room for a good shopping client, if you go smart about it.
Steam had at the time - and still has - tons of bad UI design, stemming for its very old layouts wrangling with newer client additions and changes. Plus Steam for the longest time until the new client solved it had serious issues with late boots and hanging closures. GOG had just tried to bring out their own client a few years before, but in the move to GOG Galaxy had gotten a lot of ire and fucked a lot of things up. All the per-developer clients were berated constantly.
There was room there. But Epic, hell, this is so not it. Your client is so much worse than even the bad competitors...
Steam may suck at extra goodies like streaming but they sure as hell don't suck at selling games. Constant sales, cloud saves, pre-downloads, a solid friend system for co-op games. They nail all the important shit and that's really all that matters to most people.
I think it just depends on how long they can do this. I think they are banking on getting the fortnite kiddies hooked on the store. They typically have far less disposable income (yet they still charge kids for 20$ skins), they will most likely not have a super large steam library (probably due to the aformentioned skins) so they are banking on the store being that kids default to Epic rather than steam. Its not terribly odd since Steam basically did the same thing, when it used to have those mega sales with the flash sales and the such. That is when the love for Steam basically exploded and its been cruising on that hypetrain for a while.
Well not to discourage them but I like Epic games because every Thursday they give me a free game sometimes two. Hell all the 100 games I own on their platform I gotten for free. So maybe that's why it's not profitable?
Beyond that I see no monopoly every game on their I can find on Steam and so far have had no issues with it.
They literally pay for exclusivity. It's weird that people seem to selectively ignore that every time someone brings up their desire to get free games from them.
Epic still has to pay the developers even if they give away the game for free. I'm happy to help bleed Epic dry by taking their free games. But I will never ever spend a single cent on their platform.
You're lying to yourself. They pay a fixed amount for the giveaway and it doesn't matter if the games are claimed. If anything, you owning a game on Epic means you're more likely to mention it to your friends and possibly get them to use the platform and spend on it.
Yes, but those buyout prices aren't negotiated in a vacuum. When the number of entitlements goes up, studios will demand higher buyout prices. There's a reason free game quality has been lackluster lately. Studios demand a higher buyouts and Epic doesn't want to spend too much money, so they go with smaller titles.
I'm pretty sure the prices are based on the projected sales using industry knowledge and tools like SteamSpy, created by Epic's head of the publishing strategy at the time. It's not common that a publisher participating in a giveaway would get to use their own figures from a prior giveaway to change the price offered by Epic, while the others' figures are available only for the games in those leaks. In other words, claiming many copies in the present is extremely unlikely to have any effect on the future buyout prices.
I mean, I get why people hate this, but some games would literally not exist if not for that exclusivity funding. For example, the newly released Alan Wake 2 is completely funded by Epic. I'd say at that point, the exclusivity is fair game.
Epic funding games development was only a recent thing. For the most part, they were buying exclusivity for games that were already set to be released or were already in active development. The other reason why this was hated was because they bought exclusivity for games that were crowd-funded back when the store was newly opened.
After Control's success, I'd imagine AW2 still would've been made even without Epic's exclusivity/publishing deal. If anything, Control's timed EGS exclusivity hurt their numbers until they eventually hit Steam.
They are literally releasing their games on another platform that actually requires them to put money into the project again to develop a port. So yeah, even PS atm is better than Epic.
So Playstation releasing some of their games literally years later as often sub-par ports is better than being able to play a game day 1 native on PC? I'd love to hear to the logic for that lol
You also don't like exclusives and want ppl to be able to play the way they want.
...and somehow Playstation - actively releasing their games on PC, investing time, money & effort - are worse than Epic who just want to lure ppl to their store/launcher and actively taking away the choice of playing method?
And they release them day 1, without the multiple year wait from console release, and not as shitty ports. Fuck yes that's better than PlayStation, it's a no-brainer.
I'm truly baffled that anyone could have this take seriously. PC =/= Steam.
Okay, fair, there are some exclusives. But reading through these, wow, nothing of value is lost.
Most importantly because for the newest ones like AW2, they're just on a 1 year Early Access release in a lot of ways. Every time someone I know bought a game there, I was grateful they did the paid (as in, they pay, not get paid) bug testing work for the poor devs. And then once it releases on other stores, you can buy a somewhat patched-up version, and usually for 25%-50% off.
Yeah, if I'm reading that right they're complaining that they're stuck at phase one of enshitification - lose money on aquiring users. The reason behind that is they're not able to monopolize the market for their games. "These damn mobile stores won't let us turn the corner and put the clamps on our users. Fix it please."
If you count all of Steam’s features (Steam Input, Big Picture Mode, Proton etc), then Epic has decades of catching up to do.
The problem is that usually executives will choose the “easy way out” of problems, so let’s just give free games instead of making a good platform.