News Epic Games Store
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Buying exclusivity for GTA 6 is the Hail Mary. And considering at this point EGS is less of a business and more of a statement, I think he pays whatever Rockstar asks.
The $10 coupon was better for anything up to $30, but the 33% coupon is better for anything more expensive than that.
The Uber way
Undercut all of competition, drive them out of business then just enshittify and suck money out of people left with no choice.
They are spot on on the enshittify part, rest... well...
I think Epic thought 88/12 would be legitimately disruptive, and then free games and coupons would do the rest.
As far as misreading the market goes, it’s a Stadia-level blunder. The only reason it’s still going is because Sweeney’s ego is too large.
I wonder when this all comes crashing down, will Epic offer Steam or GOG keys for all those games that people are set to otherwise lose?
Or will they do a mass refund like Google did when Stadia imploded?
As far as misreading the market goes, it’s a Stadia-level blunder. The only reason it’s still going is because Sweeney’s ego is too large.
I wonder when this all comes crashing down, will Epic offer Steam or GOG keys for all those games that people are set to otherwise lose?
Or will they do a mass refund like Google did when Stadia imploded?
The thing about uber (and other "disruptive" companies) is that it offered something that was better (at least on the surface), the EGS didn't (and still doesn't) offer anything better/different.
More than disruptive, I think Tim really though that "would be enough". The same could be said about the first batch of exclusives: Timmy believe those would have all be must haves for the shop and then everyone would have followed because of the 88%
Now I will admit predicting trends is never easy, but they really missed the mark in so many ways. Almost all games they got ended up being "nothing special" (I'm not talking about quality) while Steam got actual sensations (10k reviews on average). Look at Axiom Verge 2: that game came and went while others like Blasphemous and Hollow Knight racked sales and notoriety (and that's just an example, look at Ashen against other soulslike on Steam, Phoenix Point against other X-com likes on Steam and you can go on and go on). Similarly (and I posted this tons of times on the other forum) missing every Bamco game (especially Elden Ring) and every Capcom game, and most Sega and SE games too (despite having EGS exclusives) causes simply too much damage
I'll say this now and forever: the early EGS made a massive mistake in ignoring asian developers. They are the biggest change Steam had in the last 5 years. Big japanese publishers are all in on Steam, indie doujin developers are starting to translate inhouse and release on Steam day one, a new age of chinese devs continues to find succes on Steam. I'm not saying the west isn't on Steam but those were a true paradimg shift no one expected (especially not Epic). And epic missed them all. And it's not like they get every western game either since just to name a few Microsoft doesn't bother with them, EA doesn't bother etc
And now it's too late. The damage is done. Why would you even bother to release your game also on EGS if no one buys it?
EGS will never completely go away. At the absolute worst they'll cut all expenses and put it in maintenance mode. At the same time I don't think that day will come any time soon, if ever.
Game Pass is more disruptive than EGS. Instead of trying to build Steam, but worse, they saw an area Valve hasn't covered and pounced on it. AFAIK they're experiencing good growth on PC and being a competitor to Steam while not being hostile.
hmm. Good thing I don't use it, or I'd have some issues.
Epic and WB are skipping the foreplay and jumping ahead to summer 2025.
Creating a Free Account now to claim the game NOW
Just Kidding
I would rather pirate it than create an Epic account and claim it for free. It's not worth the hassle.
This right here, pretty much maintenance mode is EGS's fate.
The only part I don't agree with is "if ever" as I think this outcome will come sooner rather than later
As soon as all the litigation between Epic, Apple and Google ends, EGS is gonna go bye bye on way or another.
I assume the ongoing legal fees due to these court proceedings are going to be absolutely massive, likely in the millions if this goes on for years and years. I think with some of these cases I have even seen hundreds of millions. Top law firms charge like bandits in the US. So once they stop burning money on cases they'll lose anyway, it might even help the EGS. Not in any meaningful way, just that Epic could focus on burning its money on keeping the EGS going, instead of both the pointless court cases and EGS.
They've been fighting their legal battles for over 3 years at this point. The Apple case might wrap up by the end of the year if the Supreme Court rejects the appeal, but the Google case is going to take several more years to run through the appeals process. Epic's legal bill for this endeavor has to be in the tens of millions of dollars, if not more.
Nothing a few more rounds of layoffs won't fix
I don’t know how much lawyers cost, but I suspect years of litigation against Google and Apple probably requires more than tens of millions of dollars. I’d add at least another digit on to that.
I remember back when it all started that people were saying that they got some top of the line lawyers with ties to US government (and for some reason that meant it was an easy win or something). I don't think that kind of lawyer comes cheap.
The funny thing is, it wouldn't actually be that expensive to refund everything considering most of what the accounts are free games and super discounted ones with coupons + sales. They'd lose less money doing that now than dragging the corpse along for another few years.
Epic First Run is a bit over a month old. Here's the first wave of games:
It's mostly low effort trash, but it would be pretty funny if a AAA game popped up there alongside it. One thing that Epic mentioned in their pitch is that First Run games would receive more promotion, but that hasn't happened outside of a tag on the search page.
It's mostly low effort trash, but it would be pretty funny if a AAA game popped up there alongside it. One thing that Epic mentioned in their pitch is that First Run games would receive more promotion, but that hasn't happened outside of a tag on the search page.
They received so much goodwill with the OG update and threw a bunch of it away with the IARC update. I get they're paranoid about receiving another massive fine but the decisions about which skins are kid friendly and which aren't makes little sense. Skins with guns not being kid friendly? Sure. Kratos being kid friendly? uhh, okay.
They should just be clear Fortnite is only for teens and up. Parents will ultimately decide for their family what games their kids can access, but Epic trying to target younger kids via creative is overstepping their bounds. Fortnite has too much crossover between modes and hooks to keep folks in their ecosystem and this is only going to get stronger with the metaverse plans they have. And really, kids should be left out of this ideology. In fairness, I would extend this to Roblox too. Kids should be allowed to explore a variety of age appropriate games (e.g., no MTX, loot boxes, FOMO events/items, etc.) and not have games targeting them that try to be their be-all and end-all game.
____
Edit: Also, I am really shocked they did not have a few curated games lined up for the Epic first run. I really would have guessed they would have tried to seed a few legit games to sell the program as otherwise you wind up with that exact list of games, a mix of NFT/blockchain games, student/hobbyist projects, asset flips, and very small indies.
Tim Sweeney took the stand today in the Google trial. Much of the testimony was recycled from the Apple trial, but here are a few new tidbits I noticed:
There's more at The Verge, but I'm not pasting over everything.
There's more at The Verge, but I'm not pasting over everything.
Even with the layoffs Epic is still loosing money as per Tim under oath today.
Can’t say I’m surprised but at some point you got to give up on stupid money loosing parts of your business unless you want to go out of business.
Can’t say I’m surprised but at some point you got to give up on stupid money loosing parts of your business unless you want to go out of business.
Losing money while operating one of the biggest live-service games in the world and making the engine seemingly half the industry builds upon.
What a genius businessman.
What a genius businessman.
Don't worry, he'll make more money selling every game at a loss during black friday .
That's how it works right?, right?
That's how it works right?, right?
Would not surprise me if they delayed to implement the achievement changes and other EOS SDK changes and it became not a priority.
Most publishers didn't bother discounting their games for the Black Friday event. Instead of running a normal sale, Epic is now spending a ton of money on coupons and rebates for discounts that range from moderately better than Steam to outright worse.
No wonder this store is losing money. Good lord.
I wonder how much this has to do with them not hurting their “historically low” price that Is There Any Deal keeps track of.
No one wants to discount their game and then have Epic lop another 33% off and have that recorded forever.
Also why bother discounting your game and making less money off of it when Epic will just discount it for you and eat the cost?
Sonic Frontiers is 40% off on EGS and 60% off on Steam so they end up being around the same price with the coupon lol. Its still cheaper to get it on Steam in my country.
Oh yeah, for sure, but some of these developers have discounted on EGS before, even when Epic has been throwing around coupons.
Remember when CDPR lowered the discounted price of The Witcher 3 on EGS by a few cents to avoid it being couponed? They clearly didn’t want the coupon affecting future sales. I think more publishers have cottoned on that Epic’s insane discounts are setting unrealistic expectations, especially when the historically lowest price gets recorded.
Edit: then again, it looks like Is There Any Deal isn’t recording Epic coupons as a discount anymore (I checked Alan Wake 2), so maybe it’s not that?
Apple’s gaming problem
Apple has a conundrum right now. To keep growing, they need to capture more revenue from their consumers, and gamers are a great audience…
Platforms only matter if they can deliver sales, so understandably, developers are skeptical of Apple’s efforts. [...] Without a critical mass of gamers, developers will never see it as a viable platform and will not bother porting their titles. [...] This way, Apple would likely miss out on lucrative App Store revenue cut from Mac games in the near future, as it would all go to Valve. However, it would ensure its viability as a gaming platform and could help Apple earn money from players in other ways. It’s very hard to monetize an audience that doesn’t use your products.
ITAD is not the only game in town, gg.deals records historical low with the voucher
Buy cheap Alan Wake 2 CD Key 🏷️ Best Price
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I also think not wanting to discount is partially caused by this
in any case, it's hilarious, Epic's black friday deal is utterly pathetic
Also hilarious, that this is the sentence he highlighted on his blog given his record at EGS
I think he’s hit on some actually good points, but he should know how difficult what he’s asking for is, since Epic employed exactly the same strategy (and I get that’s what you were alluding to in your post).Apple’s gaming problem
Apple has a conundrum right now. To keep growing, they need to capture more revenue from their consumers, and gamers are a great audience…galyonk.in
Platforms only matter if they can deliver sales, so understandably, developers are skeptical of Apple’s efforts. [...] Without a critical mass of gamers, developers will never see it as a viable platform and will not bother porting their titles. [...] This way, Apple would likely miss out on lucrative App Store revenue cut from Mac games in the near future, as it would all go to Valve. However, it would ensure its viability as a gaming platform and could help Apple earn money from players in other ways. It’s very hard to monetize an audience that doesn’t use your products.
But I think he’s not looking at the woods from the trees. Apple is going for vertically integrated ecosystem, and what they’re doing is the early days of that.
Sergei is saying “look at Mac” while Apple is saying “we want a situation where you buy your game on one device and it works across the whole product lineup” and their current courting of singular games and developers is to flesh out that value proposition before they go big.
They’re basically doing what Epic didn’t, which is experimenting, speaking to developers and trying to grow their ecosystem organically, rather than just buying their way into a market with moneyhats. The fact that Sergei thinks they’re following Epic’s failed playbook is kind of shortsighted on his part and goes a long way to explaining why EGS failed.
makes you think if apple "Apple" isnt a secret code for the platform he was fired from
Looks like Ubi and Epic smoothed things out. It only appeared on their backend November 14 which makes me think it was going to skip EGS at some point, but both companies reached some sort of agreement. It's also not tagged as Epic First Run so Sweeney probably had to spend some V-Bucks to score it.
No new agreement, for some reason most companies are putting their games on EGS quite close to the release date without any prior indication that it is coming, I have been observing this for some time to the point I have published some data without mentioning EGS just to see it poping up all thr sudden on release day.
Ubisoft will keep this method for some reason, first Ubi connect + EGS (so they can maximize Ubiconnect) later Steam once the dust has settled so they get some new player wave but no as big that can shadow their own platform.
So no, I highly doubt there's any paid content nowadays.
While not nearly as spicy as the Apple trial, there are some new nuggets of info here and there. It's also focused primarily on the mobile market while the Apple trial had a lot more leaks related to the console and PC market.
AFAIK the hearings end early next week and, as it is a jury trial, there will probably be a verdict soon after. Just as a layman who have been reading summaries, Google comes off as a bad actor much more than Apple. Apple is very much "what you see is what you get" while Google was doing constant wheeling and dealing to keep its position. If there is one piece of evidence that is especially damning it's Google and Spotify cutting a secret deal where Spotify effectively gets to use the Google Play platform without paying Google any fees which is pretty much what Epic wants.
I won't say Epic will win the case, but they have a better chance than in the Apple trial.
Okay, so Spotify made a deal, companies make deals all the time, does Sony having deal A with publisher B mean they also have to give the same deal to C? They have a relationship with Capcom or someone who has a LOT of sway in the industry and brings hits like Street Fighter and Monster Hunter which can affect the whole platform's trajectory so that means they have to treat every other publisher the same as Capcom when not every other publisher has something equally valuable like exclusivity or timed exclusivity of such titles to offer in return? It can certainly make other companies demand or request a different deal with threats of leaving the store and maybe Google will cave and give in to some, if not for 0 fee then for better personalized terms and a different relationship to the mass market's default agreement, but can the court actually force them to make specific deals of any sort with specific or all other companies? As for actual shady things they've been doing, it's one thing to reprimand them for those things, maybe even find them guilty of doing something illegal they can be fined/demand a change in business over and stuff and another to give Epic what they want surely. If the Spotify deal somehow means Epic has to get the same deal then everybody has to get it too and Google's revenue from the store goes from whatever it is now to 0 overnight? Unlikely surely?
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It looks like Epic changed their mind and are now adding a coupon for Holiday sale:
I wonder how badly the Black Friday sale bombed?
I wonder how badly the Black Friday sale bombed?
They've been doing coupons for four years straight, but they'll be profitable next year.
-25% coupon on 12% margin, along with payment fees and 5% rewards
I'm not very good at math, but it seems like this wouldn't make any profit.
I'm not very good at math, but it seems like this wouldn't make any profit.
Don't worry, Tim doesn't seem to be either
Don't worry, they will just fire another few hundred devs to finance that.
Considering hardly any games went on sale and there was next to no buzz beyond cheap Alan Wake 2, I am guessing it fizzled and they still need to meet their YOY numbers.
Also, I know they have been trying to start their sales before Steam and end them around the same time, but christ...a month long sale after you just had like a two week sale. I feel like they have sales over half the year now.
They will never be profitable and they know it, this is just YOLO