News Epic Games Store

C-Dub

Makoto Niijima Fan Club President
Dec 23, 2018
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In any other year, EGS and Stadia would've been Fail of the Year 2019. Alas, the industry debased itself so badly in the last 12 months that they're barely a footnote.
 

Eferis

MetaMember
Nov 12, 2018
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I thought about it a little more and it looks even worse now. IF they had no exclusivity deals and no free games deals and no maintenance costs, they'd keep 30m of those revenues, 23 of which spent on coupons.

But, since they do have exclusivity deals, free games deals and maintenance costs... I'm sure they lost an awful amount of money.

I'm definitely not happy about it.

not at all

go Tarkov!
 

beep boop

MetaMember
Dec 6, 2018
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Didn't epic rename their fortnite social media accounts to epicgames on twitter (and/or other social media)?
Amusing they thought it relevant to put that on the infographic.
 
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Arsene

On a break
Apr 17, 2019
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Didn't epic rename their fortnite social media accounts to epicgames on twitter (and/or other social media)?
Amusing they thought it relevant to put that on the infographic.
No. @FortniteGame is still their fortnite account, EpicGames is their EGS account.
 

Kyougar

No reviews, no Buy
Nov 2, 2018
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Another thought on "60% better than forecasted"
Did they really tell that number to the devs and pubs? What was their pitch? "the store will be basically dead, we expect 50 Million in sales spread over 200 games across 12 months."
 

Swenhir

Spaceships!
Apr 18, 2019
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Well, that was a PR release that was, as expected, repeated by the chorus somehow endeared with EGS for reasons I can't possibly fathom.

What I wonder, like many others, is how much was lost through exclusivity deals and all. Being in the red was their expectation for the first few years but I still wonder what the mood at Tencent-Epic really is.

Edit : it turns out, it's even worse than I imagined. Their revenue is about 30 mil on games other than Fortnite. That amount does not take into account the moneyhats, the discounts, the free games or any of their expenses. They are in all likelihood massively in the red.

Which is good.
 
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Wok

Wok
Oct 30, 2018
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Shenmue 3 is 30% off on EGS.



With Epic's coupon, the price is down to 25€, which makes the total discount 50%.



You can see the review score on the store page, which is a nice enhancement of the store.

 
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Wildebeet

First Stage Hero
Dec 5, 2018
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Kind of a hot take, but from that infographic thing ... correct me if I'm wrong here, but it looks like the 108 million customers* are spending an average of $2.32 per third party game? In other words, not many of them are buying anything but Fortnite and Rocket League? That's rough.

*(like, real paying people - "customers" or just accounts to get free games?)

Speaking of free games, of the 73 free games, people are redeeming an average of 2 games per "customer", even though they're free. Also kinda dire.


Anyway let's have another hot take: At this rate GOG, with Cyberpunk coming out next year and Galaxy 2.0 just out, not to mention already having a functional client and store, is going to be way bigger than EGS in 2020. I'd love to see GOG release a similar graphic. Where's the hype for GOG?
 
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yuraya

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May 4, 2019
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Epic being a private company its really surprising they allowed those numbers to public. Or haven't shut them down assuming they are fake.

Because they aren't good at all. The lengths they went to just to get people to spend only 250 million. Yikes....a lot of that is also just Borderlands 3 and WWZ.

Sweeney continues to be the biggest fool for pushing the 12% bullshit. The industry being worth 100+ billion dollars and growing so much year over year...you go in with no desire to profit whatsoever. And this is gonna be the difference between having a great long term store vs having some basic ass client whose account #s you inflate by giving away free games. Honestly can't even fault him for those tweets from a few pages ago where he says they don't have enough engineers to add shopping carts, achievements, etc. They are not making much $$$ at all to go on a hiring spree. Microsoft probably made more money off PC gamepass the 2nd half of the year than what Epic brought in all year through 3rd party sales. For MS it must cost much less to moneyhat subscription games vs what Epic is doing in giving away games straight up. Most being drm free too lol smh.
 

Kyougar

No reviews, no Buy
Nov 2, 2018
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Epic being a private company its really surprising they allowed those numbers to public. Or haven't shut them down assuming they are fake.

Because they aren't good at all. The lengths they went to just to get people to spend only 250 million. Yikes....a lot of that is also just Borderlands 3 and WWZ.

Sweeney continues to be the biggest fool for pushing the 12% bullshit. The industry being worth 100+ billion dollars and growing so much year over year...you go in with no desire to profit whatsoever. And this is gonna be the difference between having a great long term store vs having some basic ass client whose account #s you inflate by giving away free games. Honestly can't even fault him for those tweets from a few pages ago where he says they don't have enough engineers to add shopping carts, achievements, etc. They are not making much $$$ at all to go on a hiring spree. Microsoft probably made more money off PC gamepass the 2nd half of the year than what Epic brought in all year through 3rd party sales. For MS it must cost much less to moneyhat subscription games vs what Epic is doing in giving away games straight up. Most being drm free too lol smh.

Just look at the console fanboys congratulating Epic on the success, and the Media will also tout it as a success without any critical thinking or reporting. You just need to shout from the roofs that your Product/whatever is a success to get the cognition that it is a success. The stupid people will only remember "success" and "60% more than forecasted" (which itself is a bullshit number that can't be verified and would be highly unlikely be used in the past by epic to sell their store to pubs and devs, those are abysmal forecast numbers)

I see it as a desperate attempt to get the boat on course, it is currently drifting into the abyss. They have nothing to lose.
 

AHA-Lambda

MetaMember
Oct 9, 2018
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The numbers may not be great but we don't know how many of the 108m are actually paying non-Fortnite customers to really give an accurate average.
Even then Epic seem to be very happy with it so sadly I just can't see the EGS going away, or slowing down their bullshit, any time soon :(
 

Kyougar

No reviews, no Buy
Nov 2, 2018
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The numbers may not be great but we don't know how many of the 108m are actually paying non-Fortnite customers to really give an accurate average.
Even then Epic seem to be very happy with it so sadly I just can't see the EGS going away, or slowing down their bullshit, any time soon :(
It doesn't really matter if 108 million people pay $2,35 or 1 person paid 251 million Dollars. The overall sales are bad, like really bad.
 
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Eferis

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Nov 12, 2018
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Even then Epic seem to be very happy with it
Nah. No company will ever tell you they're not happy with their results. You see companies shout "we're doing great! Please keep investing in our product!" and go bankrupt the very next day all the time.

Those numbers are terrible and they know it. Since I believe they're not complete morons when it comes to business decisions I guess they already knew they were not going to make a lot of money from the first year as a new store. I believe 2020 is what will actually define the future of the EGS. If they keep doing this kind of numbers this year, they'll tear it down.
 

yuraya

MetaMember
May 4, 2019
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The numbers may not be great but we don't know how many of the 108m are actually paying non-Fortnite customers to really give an accurate average.
Even then Epic seem to be very happy with it so sadly I just can't see the EGS going away, or slowing down their bullshit, any time soon :(
I think the only path they have to real success is to finally start competing with Valve. Which means they have to start doing the things Valve is doing.

Start adding features like achievements etc. Open the floodgates and start letting every dev on to the platform. Sweeney might also have to swallow his pride and bump that 12% to like 20% or even higher. Its clear now that if you exclude Fortnite from these numbers they are heavily working in the red. Its a shit business strategy.

Gonna be interesting to see their approach now. What big exclusives will they even moneyhat now? Because a lot of their stuff last year is about to start releasing on Steam and Valve will feed on that 30%. And all those lectures Sweeney has done about store cuts will go to waste because in the end Valve will still have their way.
 
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Swenhir

Spaceships!
Apr 18, 2019
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Epic was not supposed to make a profit in 2019. They are in it for the long haul, and it might take a few years before any profit can be made with their store.
That is true, but that doesn't invalidate the fact that they are in a very bad financial position with regards to their store. For now, while they claim that this was planned, all we have in front of us is a pretty steep deficit which is just fine by me given their tactics.
 

Kyougar

No reviews, no Buy
Nov 2, 2018
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Epic was not supposed to make a profit in 2019. They are in it for the long haul, and it might take a few years before any profit can be made with their store.
There is a difference between being a little in the red and massively in the red.
And I don't see any strategy from them that implies they are in it for the long haul. They are stumbling from one experiment to another, from one broken promise to another, from one changed feature to another.
 
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fantomena

MetaMember
Dec 17, 2018
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Thinking about these numbers, I have without a doubt singlehandedly payed the salary for a Valve employee for at least 1 month.

Im dumb. Does it say that Blands 3 has almost sold 2 mill and Control 244k?

Isn't that low? Blands 2 was a mega seller on Steam
 

C-Dub

Makoto Niijima Fan Club President
Dec 23, 2018
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This is like 90 to 95% of the 251 Million revenue.
Yup. Good for the indies who went exclusive - now they have free money from Epic and can sell their game on Steam a year later (see: Hades). I think, frankly, that's the best outcome of these deals for good games whose developers felt like they needed to take the exclusivity cash as their previous title was a flop or they needed financial help getting it over the line.

It's just a shame there's some garbage in there that will also now have free money because some curator at Epic thought it looked good.

I wonder what conversations are like behind the scenes about how games sell on Epic. I'm sure indies are telling their peers not to go EGS exclusive without a good deal, however, since most of them probably have data proving their games sell like shit.
 
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LittleDinamit

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Dec 23, 2019
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As far as I know the Xbox Companion App on Windows 10 don't differentiate between an original from a pirated game, I'm curios to know if playtracker account for that.
Sometimes it does stick it into a different appID, but mostly it does not and you would be correct. We control for that by correlating that database with our other databases (Steam, XBOX, Origin).
 

lashman

Dead & Forgotten
Sep 5, 2018
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Call me biased but I find it very hard to believe the goose game sold 150k. Even with all the memeing that can't be anywhere near to the truth.
well they said it sold over 1m in total ....

i'm sure LittleDinamit can tell you more about the basis for that number
 

MJunioR

MetaMember
Mar 13, 2019
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Call me biased but I find it very hard to believe the goose game sold 150k. Even with all the memeing that can't be anywhere near to the truth.
Dunno, feels pretty right for me. 150K on EGS, 300K on PS4 + XO, the rest on Switch, seems pretty realistic.

As far as I know the Xbox Companion App on Windows 10 don't differentiate between an original from a pirated game, I'm curios to know if playtracker account for that.
I have been wondering that too.
 
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Swenhir

Spaceships!
Apr 18, 2019
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I don't know if the data is correct, but if you look for Amazon's profit, you find this kind of stuff:


Absolutely, but how exactly does it apply to EGS? It seems to me the argument you are implicitely making is that loss can be part of a long-term, winning strategy, I'll agree with you but loss alone is no indicator of anything. What we are seeing of Epic's finances doesn't look good and I doubt Amazon's strategy applies to Epic. Loss-leading was one aspect of their strategy.

I would also like to point out that Amazon is, while successful, responsible for pretty terrible things. Epic has single-handedly done more to harm kickstarter than any other company out there and the impact of exclusivity tactics on the PC, especially with Epic at its helm, would be disastrous. I can only hope Epic will know abject failure here, which these reports seem to indicate to me.
 

PC-tan

Low Tier Weeb
Jan 19, 2019
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Call me biased but I find it very hard to believe the goose game sold 150k. Even with all the memeing that can't be anywhere near to the truth.
Well I mean there are a number of games on Steam that have sold over 100k alone and never got any form of major press talk. Some examples include stuff like Luna Night and the Superland game (I don't recall the name of it but you are a small person in a kids sand box and it's a fps game).




The Epic reviews are just limited to critics right and not actual user reviews (I normally never go on Epic other than to claim the free games, hey Epic may change one day and become something decent, and if that happens I will have free games).



So 2 million for their top game, and if that was without any VG promo code, that is not terrible seeing how that is still a lot of people, so at most they seem to be able to get 2 million people to buy their games compared to people just waiting.



How is stuff going with Autochess, I use to get a lot of ads for that game on YouTube but have not heard much about it. I do hear a lot about Underlords but that's only because of the what's new thing on Steam, overall the LoL Team Tactics seems to be the much more popular out of the three.



So if one is an indie dev they should just take the deal, and if people ask about the deal, just be upfront tell them that you needed the money and that you also plan to release on other store fronts as well and still leave some good will. Those Ublits devs burned some bridges. And I don't think that many other devs caused issues other than them.

Once the exclusivity is over just sell on Steam and GOG and make some more money.
 
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Cordelia

MetaMember
Jun 10, 2019
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The numbers looks very great but when you break it down it doesn't seems that great.

And EGS use Opencritic now? Yikes, that one is really bad for PC score because it aggregate scores from all platform not just PC.
 

Arsene

On a break
Apr 17, 2019
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