News Epic Games Store

Arc

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Elden Ring might be coming to EGS at some point. :detectiveblob:

Freebies helped them juice the numbers to persuade sony, lego and disney to waste vast amounts of cash on their roblox wannabe
Speaking of their Roblox wannabe


Their metaverse numbers are downright grim considering the massive investment.

This is a good article that directly compares Roblox to Fortnite in the context of the metaverse. The gist is the Fortnite audience primarily cares about Fortnite the shooting game and not non-shooting game modes that only have the Fortnite branding. In comparison, Roblox has been able to diversify its gameplay experiences and is seen as a sandbox and more of a social hangout place. I've never actually played Roblox, but I think it's basically Garry's Mod but amped up to 11.
 

crimsonheadGCN

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A user of /r/EpicGamesPC posted a thread about Shapez 2 being on EGS and the developer replied to a person saying that it's sad that the first one is on EGS but not the second:


The problem is that it's a big amount of extra effort to also update the game on EGS constantly, as well as adding integration for the EGS SDK to support things like achievements, workshop etc.

Maybe after 1.0 :)
There will still be people claiming that it's easy though.
 

Arc

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Star Wars Outlaws is currently 98th on the EGS most played charts. I get the feeling the analysts were right about it underperforming.

Still expecting AC Shadows to do big numbers.

A user of /r/EpicGamesPC posted a thread about Shapez 2 being on EGS and the developer replied to a person saying that it's sad that the first one is on EGS but not the second:

There will still be people claiming that it's easy though.
I've read more than a handful of posts from indie devs complaining about Epic's backend. I think the shapez is a solo dev project so it makes sense to focus on the biggest platform first then expand later.

Epic has workshop support? 🤔
They've had workshop support since 2020 but only two games use it: Troy Total War and Mechwarrior 5. FWIW Steam Workshop isn't used a ton nowadays and most games are on Nexus or mod.io.
 
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Star Wars Outlaws is currently 98th on the EGS most played charts. I get the feeling the analysts were right about it underperforming.
I find it interesting that both licensed games did "bad" for ubisoft. And knowing disney terms numbers that could be considered okay might leave a lot to be desired. But it's hard to say much without hard numbers

Still expecting AC Shadows to do big numbers.
AC is one of those series that always does well The tourism simulator nature of the series certainly helps a lot.
 
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Ge0force

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I find it interesting that both licensed games did "bad" for ubisoft. And knowing disney terms numbers that could be considered okay might leave a lot to be desired. But it's hard to say much without hard numbers
I'm not surprised that outlaws didn't sell well. The preview gameplay vids looked really bad. Also many gamers are rejecting €80 games, especially from a publisher that does deep sales a few months after release. Last but not least it's not on Steam.
 

Arc

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I think Star Wars has been on a downward trend the past several years as well. I know the EA Jedi games were big, but IIRC a lot of those TV shows haven't done well since Rise of Skywalker. I'm not a Star Wars geek so I could be spouting BS. :shrugblob:

I find it interesting that both licensed games did "bad" for ubisoft. And knowing disney terms numbers that could be considered okay might leave a lot to be desired. But it's hard to say much without hard numbers


AC is one of those series that always does well The tourism simulator nature of the series certainly helps a lot.
Avatar had 1.9 million players in ~2 months which is respectable but the if the Disney licensing fee is anything like Insomniac's for Spider-Man it probably isn't that great in the grand scheme of things.

Also I think Shadows looks good. I'm probably just going to get it on Uplay early next year when I get my new PC since the PS5 version only runs at 30 FPS.
 

Paul

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Avatar had 1.9 million players in ~2 months which is respectable but the if the Disney licensing fee is anything like Insomniac's for Spider-Man it probably isn't that great in the grand scheme of things.
That is super low number for that game's budget and pretty much certainly means that it financially bombed.

Outlaws is probably gonna bomb too, not on steam and available for 20 bucks for rent, why would anyone buy it full price? On PC at least.

For what it's worth, I am playing it and enjoying it - for me it is lot better than Division 1, 2 or Avatar, so it is best Massive game since World in Conflict.
 
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CommodoreKong

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That is super low number for that game's budget and pretty much certainly means that it financially bombed.

Outlaws is probably gonna bomb too, not on steam and available for 20 bucks for rent, why would anyone buy it full price? On PC at least.

For what it's worth, I am playing it and enjoying it - for me it is lot better than Division 1, 2 or Avatar, so it is best Massive game since World in Conflict.
Yeah given how big Ubisoft games typically have hundreds of not thousands of developers I'm guessing Ubi was none too happy with 1.9 million "players" in 2 months, especially since the game probably had high licensing fees while their original franchises don't.
 
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Alexandros

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2018: EA is releasing games on Origin, Activision on Battlenet, Ubi on uPlay etc. EGS is created to bring more competition to Steam and usher in the multi-store future.

2024: Everyone is releasing day one on Steam.

Tim Sweeney:

 

ExistentialThought

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With Ubisoft returning to day 1 releases, there has to be an impact to the bottom line of EGS.

Really curious how the mobile store is going in the EU. Feels like it came and went with no real discussion past the first week and the Fortnite tie-in which only resulted in folks trying to find ways to get the EU items without either living in the EU or installing the store.

We talked about it before, but I bet the future of EGS is riding on the mobile initiative. Not to say they will close up shop if it fails, but I cannot imagine any more resources being spent if mobile fails.
 

Parsnip

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And to add to that, as has been said by me and others, making any kind of dent in the iOS mobile space with their store seems like complete lunacy. People who buy Apple's stuff are generally in that ecosystem and more importantly don't mind being in that ecosystem. Don't think EGS or Fortnite is going to change that. Moreover, one of the reasons Tim Epic was fine in getting Fortnite pulled from iOS was that Fortnite's main revenue comes from consoles. I think the court documents showed it was like 10% of people, 7% of revenue on iOS before all the stuff went down.

Gaming on mobile is just a different beast entirely and unless Tim Epic gets a complete exclusive on some super popular gacha for the Western market, it's hard to imagine a situation where EGS mobile matters at all.
 

ExistentialThought

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Epic's larger point about having a way to be whitelisted, is not entirely without merit. Especially given that Samsung and Google have their own stores.

I think the compromise from the hardware side is going to be less figuring out how to whitelist and more renaming the alerts, asking users at setup, and asking users again at the first attempt of unknown install. Basically reduce friction, but still have it default to off until the user selects otherwise.

From the software side, I have all the doubts that a whitelist could ever work. Google will probably argue if Epic made its own hardware that would be one path. Otherwise, there is risk on the side of Google and Samsung to sign off on third parties unless they are signing off at every single update and if something goes wrong there, how culpable are they? They would still have to use scary language of install at your own risk.

At any rate cellphones should have this feature AND have it on by default or at least recommended on by default. Epic is really risking good safety standards.

I know there are a ton of counter arguments here, like if this was an computer OS doing this, but to some extent they already do ask and warn the user of risky installs.
 

Arc

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In a roundtable interview with journalists, though, Sweeney admits he doesn’t yet have proof that Google and Samsung colluded — he’s hoping that comes out in the legal discovery process, like so very many embarrassing things did in Epic v. Google. He also admits he didn’t actually ask Samsung if the company would freely make the Epic Games Store an “authorized source.”
Sounds like he's just making stuff up.

Like with Sweeney’s previous lawsuits, he claims that’s because he’s fighting on behalf of all app developers, not just Epic.
:rolleyes:

“If we’d fought Epic v. Apple and Epic v. Google solely on the basis of Epic getting special privileges, perhaps settlement discussions with Apple and Google might have been fruitful,” says Sweeney. “But if we did that, we’d be selling out all developers.”
Oh wait, you tried that before.

He says the Epic Games Store has now reached 10 million mobile installs, against a “totally achievable” 100 million target by the end of the year. He characterizes that as “traction but not an enormous amount.”
That's ~6 weeks since its launch. 100 million by EoY probably isn't happening.
 

ExistentialThought

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That's ~6 weeks since its launch. 100 million by EoY probably isn't happening.
Wow, yeah little chance to hit 100m by end of the year, or even middle of next year, unless they have some big third party push.

10m is worse than I assumed, but probably
better than any reasonable worst case estimation. Also I would be curious how many of those 10m only downloaded to get the Fortnite skin and nothing more.
 

Arc

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Epic is offering better terms for developers who build games with Unreal Engine and list them on the Epic Games Store.

As part of the new “Launch Everywhere with Epic” program, Epic is reducing the royalty rate for games built with Unreal Engine from 5 percent to 3.5 percent — however, those games will have to be available on the Epic Games Store on launch day. The program kicks in on January 1st, 2025 for eligible games published on the Epic Games Store beginning that year.

With this move, Epic seems to be trying yet another way to encourage developers to list games on its store, including its newly launched stores on Android and iOS. Epic says that the royalty reduction will be in place for every platform and store where a developer lists their games — that means consoles, too. So, if a developer has a big multiplatform hit that’s made with Unreal Engine, they could pocket a lot of additional money by not having to pay as much in Unreal Engine royalties.
For the love of god please publish on our store.

Edit:


When Steve Allison was talking about the new program, he had to say "including Steam" and you can tell he did not want to say that lol.
 
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Arc

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Guessing that 70 million also includes mobile users. I can already tell they're gonna roll both platforms together in their year in review and it's going to bug me.

Also the 110 million Fortnite MAU was probably during December. You might be able to do a bit of number crunching to see their MAUs for other months. In December 2023, Fortnite had an average of 3.1 million CCU while in September 2023 they had an average of 1.3 million CCU. Assuming the CCUs line up with the MAUs (which they probably don't), September's number would be ~56% lower than the peak which means September might have had ~48 million MAUs last month. I'll be frank and say those numbers seem too low and I'd expect them to hover around 60-70 million MAU for a quiet month (i.e. no new season or chapter launches).

My methodology is probably wack and I expect their numbers this holiday to be even higher because the chapter 2 throwback will likely be bigger because that's when Fortnite was the game.

woof, that is a desperate plea and an admission that the Epic first run failed.
Now on Epic underwhelmed too, and that program is supposed to stop at the end of the year.
 

CommodoreKong

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IGN has no chill. :sweaty-blob:
So my company has an office in Raleigh North Carolina and one of my coworkers knew someone that was laid off from Epic. He apparently had some information about the layoffs but he didn't want to go into too many details with me. From what he told me it seems like at least some of the layoffs were related to not needing as many support staff in the office due to work from home but I couldn't get much more than that.
 
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