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Epic Games Store - the console war comes to PC

Ravielsk

Magister
Joined
Feb 20, 2021
Messages
1,514
The thing that fascinates me about this whole affair is that the more I learn about it the more I grow convinced that Epic just walked into all of this expecting to just buy up the whole market and finito. Even the whole lawsuit with Apple reeks of "oh, shit" desperation like they were expecting to dominate the PC market by 2019 and when that didn't happen they were sort of left with no plan forward. Its just bizarre, they are willing to burn millions for a temporary exclusivity but are unable to even offer a better price than steam, despite bragging about taking a lower cut. The fact that their store did not even have a shopping cart, for... what over a year(?), is just a cherry on top.

Initially I assumed that they hatched some sort of machiavellian scheme to joust steam from the market but as more comes out it just seems like they had a meeting one Tuesday and just randomly decided to take on steam and now they are too far deep into it to just stop.
 

ultimanecat

Arcane
Joined
Mar 19, 2015
Messages
575
Epic basically won the lottery with Fortnite and got to hold the jar that every kid will be putting their lunch money into for a few years. Now if I won the lottery I’d probably fuck off and never work again, but smart people and companies use that luck and try to turn it into evergreen income.

In principle, putting that wealth toward a new game store could have made sense for Epic, but Epic took their fuck you money and actually decided to say fuck you to many financially and personally invested people with it. The main problem is that the market is saturated and people aren’t going to change where they buy games or apps on a whim. I imagine Epic studied this and realized that most customers will not be leaving Steam without a compelling reason, so they attacked from a different angle: trying to get devs and publishers to abandon Steam. But as I’ve mentioned before, diddling the numbers of your cut vs. Steam’s or Apple’s is still just leaving you with a math problem that any competent college student could figure out, and no number favors Epic when Steam and Apple are already so deeply established.

The minor good news for Epic was that many indie devs and nearly all games journalists indeed are significantly more retarded than a competent college student, so they just saw “12%” and breathlessly told us how Epic was ending capitalism in the game industry and took the bait. The bad news was that the smart money was still on just releasing your shit on any store that will take it, and especially Steam. So Epic’s next option was to simply pay people to avoid Steam - firstly giving customers $10 coupons but then moving to the nuclear option and literally paying developers and publishers to stay away. This second one was the other part of that math problem which they could sort of obliquely control, ie how many potential customers would buy a game no matter where it was sold if they had limited options. This changes from game to game but the shorthand napkin math says it needs to be “nearly fucking all of them” for it to start making sense to avoid Steam, and that’s why Epic had to start cutting checks.

(While very likely not true, I’d like to think that the amount of money Epic paid a dev is directly proportional to how many people were around that could solve a linear programming or optimization problem, because it confirms that indie devs are dumb-dumbs and most were lucky to get six digits, with the exception of the Subnautica people who somehow made off with $1.4 million)

But that generated backlash, and when coupled with EGS’s seeming indifference toward customer-focused features, it turned sentiment around EGS from ambivalence to actively malignant. So Epic is now sitting on tens of billions of dollars of Fortnite revenue and a store people fucking hate. What to do? Well, if you’re that loaded it couldn’t hurt to sue your competitors and try to have the government get them out of the way by stating that even though you’ll be doing the exact same thing as them, your diddled numbers are inherently more fair and less illegal than theirs.

This is all to say, Epic are acting like assholes because Fortnite lets them, and short of burning down the online marketplace industry they’ll never make that Fortnite money again and have to go back to making rocks look really good on the PlayStation forever.
 

Ravielsk

Magister
Joined
Feb 20, 2021
Messages
1,514
In principle, putting that wealth toward a new game store could have made sense for Epic, but Epic took their fuck you money and actually decided to say fuck you to many financially and personally invested people with it. The main problem is that the market is saturated and people aren’t going to change where they buy games or apps on a whim. I imagine Epic studied this and realized that most customers will not be leaving Steam without a compelling reason, so they attacked from a different angle: trying to get devs and publishers to abandon Steam. But as I’ve mentioned before, diddling the numbers of your cut vs. Steam’s or Apple’s is still just leaving you with a math problem that any competent college student could figure out, and no number favors Epic when Steam and Apple are already so deeply established.

The minor good news for Epic was that many indie devs and nearly all games journalists indeed are significantly more retarded than a competent college student, so they just saw “12%” and breathlessly told us how Epic was ending capitalism in the game industry and took the bait. The bad news was that the smart money was still on just releasing your shit on any store that will take it, and especially Steam. So Epic’s next option was to simply pay people to avoid Steam - firstly giving customers $10 coupons but then moving to the nuclear option and literally paying developers and publishers to stay away. This second one was the other part of that math problem which they could sort of obliquely control, ie how many potential customers would buy a game no matter where it was sold if they had limited options. This changes from game to game but the shorthand napkin math says it needs to be “nearly fucking all of them” for it to start making sense to avoid Steam, and that’s why Epic had to start cutting checks.

I would actually argue that Epic probably did very little market research because then they would never try the approach they did. For one when you analyze how people responded to Origin and Uplay it should have immediately become obvious that exclusivity and gated content are dead ends. Not only is it bad PR but it implodes your own expenses as while you are not giving a direct cut to steam you still have to pay for servers and maintenance staff, so if you hit a rough spot it can become less profitable than just dealing with a 20% cut(as became evident recently with EA and Origin only games migrating back to steam). On top of that Uplay and Origin actually sported their own libraries of popular titles and yet it still amounted to them barely being accepted.

I think that Epic simply overestimated the demographic power of Fortnite and forgot that the bulk of their "fandom" is composed of kids under the age of 12. Which is great for selling 10$ skins but not games. They probably operated under the assumption that since so many people already have the epic launcher to play fortnite then switching to it as a all purpose gaming client will be the next logical step towards convenience. Toss in some nice PR about low cuts and free games and voilà steam uprooted. Problem was that the people who make steam relevant are not the same as those 12 year olds that make Fortnite relevant.

If Epic did their homework they would have studied the success of GoG and steam, both of which initially focused themselves on previously unversed section of the market before branching out and becoming big. Steam was propeled in no small part by capturing the eastern European markets that were previously dominated by pirates by simply offering prices that actually reflected the local wages(for perspective imagine as if a regular game costed around 120$ and then someone came in and started selling them for 20$). Gog targeted old games and a DRM free model. Epic instead targeted... what exactly? Peoples concern about the well being of problem-glasses indie developers? Not exactly a great sales pitch if you want people to jump onto your platform.
 

J1M

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2008
Messages
14,616
Epic had all sorts of market data from Valve's APIs. Steamspy is operated by one of their employees.
 
Joined
May 6, 2009
Messages
1,875,968
Location
Glass Fields, Ruins of Old Iran
Epic summer sale started now. Up until August 5. (edit: no coupons)

Additionally, Defense Grid Awakening and Verdun - Western Front are free until july 29.

https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/sales-and-specials/summer-sale

https://gg.deals/deals/epic-games-store-deals/

Also, the free event character for Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms reminds me of Alfie.

egs-summerdeal-breaker-1280x956-5de841d7ea28.png
 
Last edited:
Joined
May 6, 2009
Messages
1,875,968
Location
Glass Fields, Ruins of Old Iran
They called it something else.

https://www.gamewatcher.com/news/epic-games-store-sale-2020-schedule

Epic Games Store Sale 2021 Schedule


  • Epic Games Store Spring Sale 2021 - March 25 - April 8

  • Epic Games Store Mega Sale 2021 - May 20 - June 17

  • Epic Games Store Summer Sale 2021 - July 22 - August 5

  • Epic Games Store Halloween Sale 2021 - October 21 - November 4

  • Epic Games Store Black Friday Sale 2021 - November 26 - December 3

  • Epic Games Store + The Game Awards Flash Sale 2021 - Early or mid December

  • Epic Games Store Holiday Sale 2021 - December 16 - January 6, 2022
 

hajro

Arbiter
Joined
Nov 22, 2015
Messages
592

Nikanuur

Arbiter
Patron
Joined
Mar 1, 2021
Messages
1,484
Location
Ngranek
I've deleted my Epic acc a year ago even with some AAA games. Chinese spyware with a haughty CEO and a stupid idea about how exlusivity is good for its sheeps players.
 

Mazisky

Magister
Joined
Mar 8, 2015
Messages
2,082
Location
Rome, IT
I've deleted my Epic acc a year ago even with some AAA games. Chinese spyware with a haughty CEO and a stupid idea about how exlusivity is good for its sheeps players.

Hate on Epic is not trend anymore, didn't they update you?

Here is an updated list of the lastest hate trends:

-Blizzard
-White men

Good luck
 

Silentstorm

Learned
Joined
Apr 29, 2019
Messages
885
Wait, what happened to Blizzard, last i heard they released an awful Warcraft 3 remaster and i think some BS with online gaming...let me check...wow, i really do not check gaming news that much, wow, that is a bad look, and it's not some accusation from one employee, it's literally the result of a two year investigation with some employees confirming it, holy crap, this is the least ambiguous "Developer genuinely is a pervert harasser" kind of entity i think i have ever seen in gaming.

Oh well, not that i care much, it's been years since i played any Blizzard game and wasn't paying much attention to them anyways.
 

Ravielsk

Magister
Joined
Feb 20, 2021
Messages
1,514
How's the shopping cart coming along?

Fuck me, I just checked it. They still dont have one, they only announced that its coming this year, at some point. Holy shit and here I thought they already had this smoothed over. Hell, according to trello they dont even have a trending tab, achievements or profiles.

FFS, indie gala launcher is positively giving them a run for their money. Absolute clown show.

https://trello.com/b/GXLc34hk/epic-games-store-roadmap
 

Tyrr

Liturgist
Joined
Jun 25, 2020
Messages
2,257
How's the shopping cart coming along?

Fuck me, I just checked it. They still dont have one, they only announced that its coming this year, at some point. Holy shit and here I thought they already had this smoothed over. Hell, according to trello they dont even have a trending tab, achievements or profiles.

FFS, indie gala launcher is positively giving them a run for their money. Absolute clown show.

https://trello.com/b/GXLc34hk/epic-games-store-roadmap
Even the web shop I made as a college project had a shopping cart.
 

Norfleet

Moderator
Joined
Jun 3, 2005
Messages
12,250
Why would they need a "shopping cart"? Real shopping carts are for women and homeless people. Men go, get what they came for, and then LEAVE.
 

lycanwarrior

Scholar
Joined
Jan 1, 2021
Messages
1,169
I've deleted my Epic acc a year ago even with some AAA games. Chinese spyware with a haughty CEO and a stupid idea about how exlusivity is good for its sheeps players.

Hate on Epic is not trend anymore, didn't they update you?

Here is an updated list of the lastest hate trends:

-Blizzard
-White men

Good luck

Where's the dedicated thread for the Activision/Blizzard???!

:flamesaw:
 

Dexter

Arcane
Joined
Mar 31, 2011
Messages
15,655

E730rViVEAE-_CU

E732I30VkAA4VV7


The only potentially profitable games are apparently Satisfactory and Dauntless. They supposedly lost $24.5 million with their Sales Guarantee Buyout on The Division 2, a whopping $22.2 million on Metro Exodus, $14 million on World War Z, close to $9 million on Hades and Ashen and $5 million on The Outer Wilds and Sinking City.

Full docs: https://app.box.com/s/6b9wmjvr582c95uzma1136exumk6p989/file/839618320097
 
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fantadomat

Arcane
Edgy Vatnik Wumao
Joined
Jun 2, 2017
Messages
37,083
Location
Bulgaria
Shame that there is no outer farts from cucksidian.

It seems that metro sold less than a million lol.

Also interested to see how much the nu borderlands sell.
 

mediocrepoet

Philosoraptor in Residence
Patron
Joined
Sep 30, 2009
Messages
11,468
Location
Combatfag: Gold box / Pathfinder
Codex 2012 Codex+ Now Streaming! MCA Project: Eternity Divinity: Original Sin 2
I think the problem with EGS is that people seem to have shifted from outright hatred of it to mild disinterest.

In a sense EGS is good for gamers since they subsidize the post release phase of a game for between 1 month to 1 year, which you are free to buy the EGS "Early Access" version, or wait and get the actual release later with all of its patches and DLCs at a lower price. It's like charity for gamers, giving back the Fortnite bucks to the community.
 

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