anticheat garbage does nothing to prevent cheating, the only thing that prevents cheating is proper separation of the client/server logic and sanitation of all input received from the client.
In order for that to be sufficient you need a game that isn't impacted by reaction time or processing/tracking information. Hardware is strong enough that you can cheat processing just absolutely critical client data, like final video/sound output.
Tested: How the Epic Games Store can drain your laptop's battery life
This gaming app demands a surprising amount of resources.
As laptop performance improves over time, you may be excited to discover that the PC you reserved exclusively for Excel and Zoom calls now can serve as a gaming PC, too. But beware: Leaving a game store app like the Epic Games Store open may significantly slice into your laptop’s battery life.
Consider Intel’s latest Tiger Lake H35 announcement. The new CPUs enable a class of ultraportable laptops that wield office apps and Zoom calls by day, then play Destiny 2 or Valorant by night. The problem is that if you buy a game via, say, the Epic Game Store, the EGS app must be running while you play the game. The app remains active once you quit the game, too. As we found, simply leaving the store app in place when you’re not gaming can reduce your battery life by as much as 20 percent, cutting hours off of your laptop’s longevity off AC.
What we found appears to be specific to the Epic Games Store and Intel’s Tiger Lake platform, though the time required for battery rundown tests and the available equipment we had on hand limited our tests. We can say the battery hit that our Tiger Lake platform experienced in conjunction with the Epic Games Store did not extend as significantly to Steam, and we could not reproduce it as extensively on a laptop powered by AMD’s Ryzen processor.
Normally, these taskbar icons are hidden on the Windows 10 Taskbar, and they’re easy to forget. What we wanted to know was whether the Epic Games Store, even while hidden, was the culprit behind our lower battery life. It was.
How this all came about
Our discovery was a by-product of testing the Microsoft Surface Pro 7+ tablet, which uses a tablet-class Intel “Tiger Lake” Core processor inside. Who games on a tablet? Good question. As processor and GPU performance increases, more and more platforms are becoming hybrid productivity and gaming machines. Tablets are simply an extreme example.
Because of the incredible leap in graphics performance engendered by Intel’s new Iris Xe GPU, we wanted to test its capabilities in a few games. But we ran into an odd anomaly while testing: The battery life tests we ran didn’t deliver consistent results.
To be clear, the first two results were consistent. PCWorld has traditionally used a video rundown test, where we loop a video over and over until the battery expires. In the case of the Surface Pro 7+, the first two test runs provided consistent results; the third did not.
So we ran another. And another. And another, each requiring hours at a time. Somewhat exasperated at this point, we reset the PC—and our battery test finally again generated a score consistent with our earlier results.
What had changed? None of our benchmark software, or even the games, ran in the background when not in use. But the Epic Games Store, the service by which we downloaded our games and the service those games required to run, had remained hidden in the taskbar the entire time. Could that have made a difference? As we discovered, yes.
The main Epic Games Store home screen, within the app. Leaving this app open and running lowered battery life, too, which we expected.
Though we’re using Epic as an example, all we’re pointing out is that your PC can be running any number of background apps at any one time: antivirus, audio enhancements, instant messaging apps, and so on. We typically remove, block, or simply don’t install those apps when we’re testing battery life. Depending upon how well each one is coded, and how active they are, they all can affect your battery life.
What we tested
We were a little shocked at how profoundly just one app could affect your battery life. To test it, we decided to run a series of scenarios:
In all of the cases, we ran the battery tests in airplane mode, preventing the app or PC from connecting to the Internet. The goal was to emulate what you might do at the end of a long day: play some games, exit out of the game (but not the Epic Game Store app) and then see what effect leaving that app running in the taskbar would have on your battery life at work the next day.
- A battery life test on a “clean” PC after a factory reset
- A battery life test after loading and signing into the Epic Games Store, with the app hidden in the taskbar
- A battery life test after loading and signing into the Epic Games store, with the window active
- A battery life test after loading the Epic Games Store, then signing out
- A battery life test after exiting the Epic Games Store app
The first two tests—the clean PC versus signed in to the Epic Games Store—were what we were concerned with. The other tests were merely edge cases, simply to see if other behaviors made a difference.
On average, battery life dropped by 20 percent while the Epic Games Store app was signed in but the app was hidden in the taskbar— approximately two whole hours. (We would expect that battery life would drop more significantly while the app was active, and it did.)
We also tried loading the Epic Games Store, but not signing in. (The Epic store remained in our taskbar, hidden in a cluster of other apps.) Those results fell roughly in line with the battery-life scores we recorded when signed into the Epic store. Finally, we installed the Epic Games Store, then formally exited out of the application. That, fortunately, seemed to solve the problem, and battery life returned to the levels found in our “clean” PC.
We also performed one more check. We uninstalled the Epic Games Store, then performed a similar test with Valve’s Steam store. Would battery life decrease proportionately with Steam, not Epic, running in the background? We tested while signed into Steam, with the app running quietly in our Windows taskbar. As you can see, there was an effect, though not as profound.
We also speculated that, for whatever reason, the battery-life issues could have been tied specifically to Intel’s 11th-gen Tiger Lake platform, the associated chipset, or just the Surface Pro tablet line. As a check, we performed similar tests on Microsoft’s Ryzen-based Surface Laptop 3. (This doesn’t rule out some Microsoft-specific firmware bug that could affect both platforms, but we had to cut off the test somewhere.)
Battery life also dropped while the Epic Games Store app was loaded and minimized on the Ryzen platform, though by not nearly as much—about 8 percent, by our estimates.
We contacted Epic with our findings and provided them with the details of our test. “In general, we are actively working to improve the performance and reduce the power consumption of our launcher,” an Epic representative replied via email. “The power consumption varies based on whether the launcher’s window is open.”
Accurately measuring battery life has become more of a challenge over the past few years, because the number of variables has increased. Display brightness, whether Wi-Fi is on, and even the Windows performance slider can affect battery life. What we’re showing here is that a hidden app—even one that you might want to leave open—affects battery life, and even those effects may vary from one CPU platform to another.
So many games now require some sort of overarching game store or monitor application—Steam, GOG, the Epic Game Store, even the Xbox app—to be active when the game runs. But we don’t think of those store apps as the anchor that drags down battery life—we expect the games themselves to do that.
In all, it was a bit of a rude surprise to discover that the Epic Game Store slashed as much battery life off our test tablet as it did. But if Intel and AMD manage to enable laptops that can be used for both work and gaming, consumers are going to have to adapt to the demands of both worlds. In this case, it might mean “cleaning up” your PC for work by shutting down game stores to ensure maximum battery life.
Oh shit, if epic closes down, does that mean you can sue them because they won't be able to provide services to the games you have bought? I know in USA that probably won't happen, but in EU the laws for this sort of stuff is stricter, especially in france.
Fortnite is still making about a billion a year in 2020 so they still probably have plenty of money to burn though enough so that they can't be sued for shutting down the store anytime soon but yeah, their general strategy of temporary exclusivity and free games have completely backfired at this point given the bad PR. Surprise, surprise, those things don't keep up a large retention rate of consumers who'll come back to said store once those deals are eventually over and they'll just go back to stores that are better established. Can't wait to see their publishing deals with studios like Remedy go to complete shit on PC when most don't buy them on EGS for being 100% EGS exclusive.
these figures should be surprising to nobody, EGS was always going to be a longterm investment with short term losses.
You just know there's an easier/shorter way of saying "We have had absolutely no growth as our Excl000sive buying spree sputtered to a halt and our bribes didn't incentivize enough people to actually buy anything."
Epic Games today offered an update on the growth of the Epic Games Store. Launched in December of 2018, the store to-date has racked up $680 million in spending from 108 million PC customers.
While much of that total can be accounted for by Epic's own hit Fortnite, the company noted that $251 million has been spent by players on third-party PC games.
Also infographics.
This surge in player growth has also led to an increase in purchasing and play time! In 2020, PC customers on the Epic Games Store spent over $700M of which third party games represented 37% at $265M.
Check out more year-end results:
Wait... are you implying people actually BUY games on the Epic Store?
Epic is losing hundreds of millions of dollars in its war against Steam
Apple wonders whether the EGS will ever be profitable.
In its bid to take on Steam with the Epic Games Store, the company behind Fortnite is burning through hundreds of millions of dollars on exclusives and free games.
The Epic Games Store releases free games every week, and has snapped up a number of eye-catching PC launch exclusives since it went live in December 2018.
Of course, it's expected that providing so many free games and timed exclusives would cost Epic cold hard cash - but the sheer numbers at play are eye-watering, and it's all spent at a loss.
Court documents published this week as part of Epic's high-profile legal battle against Apple reveal Epic committed $444m in minimum guarantees for 2020 alone.
A minimum guarantee is an advance paid to a publisher or developer whether or not the game itself makes enough money to claw the advance back. An example is the €9.49m 505 parent company Digital Bros received from Epic for PC exclusivity for Remedy's Control.
It's a huge amount of money to pay out to developers for minimum guarantees last year, but it's something moneybags Epic is willing to do in order to take on Steam and its 30 per cent cut of revenue.
As Epic boss Tim Sweeney said in June 2019: "We believe exclusives are the only strategy that will change the 70/30 status quo at a large enough scale to permanently affect the whole game industry."
According to Apple's summary of the arguments it's bringing to court next month, and citing depositions from Epic executives, the Epic Games Store is unprofitable. Apple contends it "will not be profitable for at least multiple years, if ever".
Apple's filing reveals Epic lost around $181m on the Epic Games Store in 2019, and it projected to lose around $273m on the store in 2020. Even with "significant" growth, revenue for last year was projected at $401m. Epic has confirmed $700m was spent by PC players on the Epic Games Store in 2020, although only $265m of that was spent by players on third-party PC games in the Epic Games Store. So its $444m in minimum guarantees for 2020 alone is a big loss-leader.
Apparently Epic has admitted this trend will continue in the immediate future, and Epic projects to lose around $139m on the Epic Games Store in 2021. These are all "unrecouped costs" resulting from Epic's attempt to grow the Epic Games Store. That includes at least $330m in unrecouped costs from minimum guarantees alone. Ouch. That's a lot of games that missed their minimum sales target.
Here's the bombshell: "at best, Epic does not expect EGS to have a cumulative gross profit before 2027." Then: "As a result, Epic has funded, and must continue to fund, EGS through funding and capital raised by other parts of its business, which have been 'incredibly profitable' for 'several years'." That'll be Fortnite, then.
The Epic Games Store offers new free games every week.
Epic has had its say on these points, of course. In its response, the company said it expects the Epic Games Store to become profitable by 2023 - four years earlier than Apple's claim.
"EGS is not yet profitable at its current scale and stage of development because it has front-loaded its marketing and user-acquisition costs to gain market share," the filing reads.
"EGS's 12 per cent transaction fee is sufficient to cover the variable costs of running EGS, including payment processing, customer service and bandwidth."
Ultimately, the points about the Epic Games Store's profitability are a minor part of a sweeping court case that has broader strokes. Epic is after Apple because it claims the company monopolises the iOS app distribution market and the iOS in-app payment solutions market within its iOS ecosystem.
Apple is putting all it can into protecting the way it operates the App Store - and of course its cut of revenue. But it's also framing Epic's legal battle as a nefarious attempt to revive interest in Fortnite.
In its filing, Apple claims that between 2018 and 2019, Fortnite's average monthly active users and revenues declined. There's a lot of redacted information here, so we don't know the exact numbers. But, according to Apple, Epic launched a "pre-planned media strategy" called "Project Liberty", retaining a public relations firm in 2019 to execute its plan.
"These trends were consistent with Epic's observations that gamers were growing dissatisfied with Fortnite," reads the filing.
"The company understood that Fortnite was late in the video-game life cycle. And it took note internally when "#RIPFornite" was trending on Twitter. Epic knew these trends were not a blip; the company expected the declining interest and revenue to continue.
"As a later board presentation revealed, Epic coalesced around a goal: to revive and reinvigorate Fortnite by turning it out to developers to create new content. This would make Fortnite a platform and Epic the middleman. But in order for this new business model to succeed, Epic needed to find a way to cut the commissions charged by platform providers so Epic could 'share a majority of profit with creators'. According to Epic, 'Platform Fees' posed 'an Existential Issue' to the company's plans for Fortnite."
The result of all this: Project Liberty.
Epic denies all this, of course, which you can read about in its response. Epic vs Apple goes to trial in May.
This generation has already grown up 15-20 years ago with torrents and abandonware sites.
