News Epic Games Store

Paul

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Will any games actually be on sale, or will the coupon mean that once again no publishers will bother?
 

Arc

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I'm sure it'll have the normal discounts plus the coupon, but as crimsonheadGCN said, the Black Friday sale was likely a massive failure. They probably lost a ton of business to Steam. I get the feeling they want to ween off coupons, but really can't as their initial plans were no coupon for the winter sale. I guess that's the downside of conditioning your userbase to wait for massive discounts.
 

Arc

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Just for comparison, Call of Duty has 100 million MAU, Minecraft has 120 million and Roblox has over 200 million.

My personal guess is the PC version is between 10-20% of the total userbase which means FN PC could be between half and a hair under CS2 which dropped from ~30 million MAU in October to ~24 million in November. (CS2 hasn't been too great for Valve, but they'll recover eventually).

The live event tomorrow will be massive and easily push >10 million concurrent. At the same time, gotta wonder how many of those 100 million stick around after the nostalgia map ends.
 

Arc

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I appreciate their honesty.

[Hidden content]
Most of those are already on the store. The new ones are Last Month's Top Sellers, Top New Releases, Most Popular Free to Play, and New Releases: Add Ons.

Also, going on a tangent, I still can't figure out why Most Played and Most Popular are two separate things. The only thing I can think of is Most Played is a ranking of the most gameplay hours in the past day while Most Popular are something like unique users.
 

C-Dub

Makoto Niijima Fan Club President
Dec 23, 2018
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EGS First Run games have even less of a consumer incentive to buy on Epic, because the developer isn’t locked into any exclusivity. They can release on Steam at any moment and Epic just waives the deal going forward.

So, you know, don’t buy it and it’ll come to Steam sooner.
 

Arc

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:sweaty-blob:

I watched a stream. It was kinda cool, but shorter than I thought it would be.


EGS First Run games have even less of a consumer incentive to buy on Epic, because the developer isn’t locked into any exclusivity. They can release on Steam at any moment and Epic just waives the deal going forward.

So, you know, don’t buy it and it’ll come to Steam sooner.
I do like how a lot of the speculation for Epic First Run was that the big boys would sign up (I was among that group!) and it has turned out to be bottom of the barrel trash instead. If any major game is going to be🥚then Epic will have to pay for it.
 
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C-Dub

Makoto Niijima Fan Club President
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I do like how a lot of the speculation for Epic First Run was that the big boys would sign up (I was among that group!) and it has turned out to be bottom of the barrel trash instead. If any major game is going to be🥚then Epic will have to pay for it.
I saw right through it after reading the terms.

No moneyhat, no EGS exclusivity for most developers. First run offloads 100% of the risk of exclusivity to developers.
 

Arc

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Psyonix and Harmonix were already sent to the Fortnite mines with Rocket Racing and Fortnite Festival. Fall Guys updates have slowed to a crawl so I wouldn't be surprised if what's left of Mediatonic was being forced to create totally-not-Fall-Guys within Fortnite for that stupid metaverse.
 

TioChuck

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Dec 31, 2018
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My first thought is they're missing their revenue target by a mile and are trying to pump it up before the end of the year.
Funny thing is, they are trying to increase revenue on paper only, they are losing money every time someone uses the coupon, my guess is that they want to show big 3rd party revenue numbers, even if is not the whole truth.
 
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C-Dub

Makoto Niijima Fan Club President
Dec 23, 2018
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Third parties aren’t stupid and know that Epic is juicing the numbers with a coupon.

All this has a Hail Mary vibe to it.
 
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Arc

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Funny thing is, they are trying to increase revenue on paper only, they are losing money every time someone uses the coupon, my guess is that they want to show big 3rd party revenue numbers, even if is not the whole truth.
That's true, but showing declining revenue numbers for their year in review post would be a bad look. Still, throwing away bags of money after laying off hundreds of people is pretty skeevy.

I'm curious what their revenue numbers will be this year. As far as we know, Fortnite was down pretty hard until season OG hit and then it exploded again like in its heyday.

There haven't been any massive exclusives this year. Dead Island 2 and Alan Wake 2 were the highest profile exclusives I can think of, and neither of them are a major needle mover. On the other hand, they did have some big games including Hogwarts Legacy and Honkai Star Rail (however I've read that HSR has cannibalized the Genshin Impact audience to some degree). They also opened the floodgates which allowed a lot more games on the platform. I'm expecting an overall increase, but couldn't guess how much.

Third parties aren’t stupid and know that Epic is juicing the numbers with a coupon.

All this has a Hail Mary vibe to it.
Publishers might decide to roll with it as apparently there is some policy on EGS where you can't discount games more than once every 30 days and publishers might have skipped the Black Friday event to wait on the holiday sale. However it absolutely comes off as desperate.
 
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C-Dub

Makoto Niijima Fan Club President
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For those of you with Amazon Prime and no aversion to EGS freebies, Deathloop for EGS is free on Prime.

My partner cancelled our Prime because it’s shit and we want to use Amazon less, but not a bad freebie otherwise.
 
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Arc

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The Jurassic Park game could be🥚as it's being developed by Saber and there was a vague PC logo. It's also based on an old movie IP which Epic loves.

There were a number of games that were both Steam and EGS, but that's whatever.


This is coming to Steam next year. It was formerly on standalone client and EGS.
 

DrShrapnel

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Oct 14, 2021
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Is there even going to be much of a “Holiday Sale”? I noticed when Epic did the 33% coupon for their Black Friday Sale, the majority of publishers left their game at full price, or adjusted their sale price to be higher than other storefronts.
 
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CommodoreKong

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Jun 15, 2019
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My first thought is they're missing their revenue target by a mile and are trying to pump it up before the end of the year.
Yeah I wouldn’t be surprised if third party spending numbers were just dire this year on EGS and this is a way to try and pump them up before the end of the year.
 
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STHX

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Sep 20, 2021
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What happens when FFXVI and FFVIIRebirth ps exclusivity runs out will paint a clear picture on how the EGS is doing
 

C-Dub

Makoto Niijima Fan Club President
Dec 23, 2018
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What happens when FFXVI and FFVIIRebirth ps exclusivity runs out will paint a clear picture on how the EGS is doing
Not necessarily. The deal(s) might've been signed a long ass time ago.

Epic could be dining out for years on exclusivity deals signed while they were still paying for them.

Regardless of what exclusives they have going forward, store's dead. Epic's rank and file knows it, publishers know it, indies know it. I think the only person in denial is Tim Sweeney, and deep down even he probably knows it's toast.
 
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ExistentialThought

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Feb 29, 2020
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The whole point of the store was to challenge the revenue split going to the metaverse era. Its has not changed anything after all these years, but Epic needed to move ahead with their metaverse plans and before the stickiness of Fortnite wore off to the next new hotness.

Epic painted a nice picture about fighting for the little indies, and being generous, indies could benefit from a lower revenue split. Really Epic wants to do exactly with what they are doing with Fortnite right now and does not want to be hindered by platform fees. If you have to share revenue with both a platform holder and in-game content creator, suddenly you have less of a piece of the pie for yourself.

Epic worried about this and concocted the store as a front for challenging the revenue share. The success of the store and the launch of new game modes on the Fortnite platform was meant to be a clear progression to achieving their goals. With the store still floundering and changing nothing, I think Epic will continue to keep the store as a means of pulling folks into their Fortnite metaverse through loss leading (and a what-if scenario where it grows popular), but how much more they pour into it, is likely going to continue to shrink (They signed a few other deals ages ago that may or may not still be active, but who knows).

I think what will be more telling is how much Epic continues its publishing strategy. The publishing strategy always felt a knee-jerk reaction to criticisms of money-hatting AND the possibility of increasing profit margins compared to the loss leading rev share of the store (100% until recoup then 50% versus 12%). Alan Wake 2 was clearly well received, but it has not necessarily translated to sells that we are aware of.
 
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Arc

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Psyonix and Harmonix were already sent to the Fortnite mines with Rocket Racing and Fortnite Festival. Fall Guys updates have slowed to a crawl so I wouldn't be surprised if what's left of Mediatonic was being forced to create totally-not-Fall-Guys within Fortnite for that stupid metaverse.


Close enough.

Also the songs in Fortnite Festival are $5 each. :sweaty-blob:

They used to be $2 each in Rock Band.
 

Arc

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Two things killed Google's case:

1) They deleted chat logs which may or may not have implied they destroyed evidence.
2) They had a secret deal with Spotify where they would effectively pay a 0% commission.

I was casually following the case and even a layman like myself knew Google had a good chance of losing. Also the Google trial had a jury decision while the Apple one had a judge ruling. Regardless, it's still going to be in the appeals process for awhile anyway.

The fact Google was found guilty while Apple wasn't is pretty funny. The Supreme Court's decision if they take up the Apple case should be delivered either late December or early January.
 
Reason: Deleted duplicate sentence.
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C-Dub

Makoto Niijima Fan Club President
Dec 23, 2018
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Epic always had a stronger case against Google than they did against Apple.

It’s clear that Google used their clout to prevent competing stores appearing built in on Android phones and colluded with third parties on sweetheart deals.

We all knew Google were scumbags. Good on Epic, I guess.
 
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