News Epic Games Store

[fantomena]

So EGS on my laptop is fucked. My gaming desktop is in my apartment where I live (in the city where I work), Im currently at home with my parents for christmas vacation, only took my work laptop with me and have used that to play some Steam games (Eastward, Monster Train and Ender Lillies). I decided to open EGS up for once and see if Grindstone runs on it (promo code, pretty much the only game I ever play on EGS). But I cannot open EGS. Meaning, I use the exe, but the launcher never "starts", I uninstalled it, downloaded the installer, but the installer only tells me to repair or uninstall, none of them works.

EGS is like, it's there, but not there.

Thanks, Timmy, for literally making it impossible to use EGS (play Grindstone) on my laptop.

 

[gabbo]

So EGS on my laptop is fucked. My gaming desktop is in my apartment where I live (in the city where I work), Im currently at home with my parents for christmas vacation, only took my work laptop with me and have used that to play some Steam games (Eastward, Monster Train and Ender Lillies). I decided to open EGS up for once and see if Grindstone runs on it (promo code, pretty much the only game I ever play on EGS). But I cannot open EGS. Meaning, I use the exe, but the launcher never "starts", I uninstalled it, downloaded the installer, but the installer only tells me to repair or uninstall, none of them works.

EGS is like, it's there, but not there.

Thanks, Timmy, for literally making it impossible to use EGS (play Grindstone) on my laptop.

It's not blocked by any group policy or antivirus settings due to it being a work laptop is it?

 

[fantomena]

It's not blocked by any group policy or antivirus settings due to it being a work laptop is it?

Nope.

 

[gabbo]

Nope.

Oh well nuts to EGS then i guess

 

[Ge0force]

It seems r/pcgaming has added some kind of automoderator in EGS related threads that auto-hides comments. Only comments that are positive about Epic are manually restored by the mods.

I had a discussion with the mods about this. Seems they decided to do the auto-delete stuff to prevent downvoting EGS related topics and comments. In my opinion, censorship of all EGS criticism is even worse, but whatever. I'm pretty sure this won't change people's opinion about EGS and will only make more people angry.

 

[Phoenix RISING]

I had a discussion with the mods about this. Seems they decided to do the auto-delete stuff to prevent downvoting EGS related topics and comments. In my opinion, censorship of all EGS criticism is even worse, but whatever. I'm pretty sure this won't change people's opinion about EGS and will only make more people angry.

WTF? What is the purpose of auto-deleting criticism of EGS? Why is EGS proteted?

 

[TioChuck]

Epic has alot of money.

 

[C-Dub]

Epic does indeed have a lot of money. Does that mean they are actively bribing Reddit moderators?

An ill-informed moderating decision does not equal bribing forum mods. I don’t think it’s a good look to imply that sort of thing without any receipts.

As someone who has moderated communities before, it’s not hard to imagine that they want to eliminate toxic discussions from their community and discussions about EGS are pretty much setting topics on fire.

It’s one thing to discuss EGS, what they’re doing and the impacts of that. It’s another to driveby shitpost on a topic just because someone wants to talk about a game they own on EGS, exclusive or not. I can see why a moderator would want to avoid that kind of discussion.

But these moderating decisions do seem rather ham-fisted.

 

[prudis]

Example:
I guess every method to raise EGS reputation is good enough nowadays

reading through that thread anc checking few of the "fucksteam" replies ... seems like cryptobros are the new breed of "Epic can do no wrong" folks along the usual "but mah free games"

and yeah from the quick look at the removed ... lots of "proEpic shitposts" got restored and lots of valid criticism didnt
If anything its definitely suspicious

 

[Ge0force]

Epic does indeed have a lot of money. Does that mean they are actively bribing Reddit moderators?

I'm not sure. There's an automated message in EGS related threads asking people not to downvote these threads, but it's still happening. According to the mods, this is done by people from other subreddits like fuckepic. But when actually reading the comments in EGS related threads, it's clear that the majority of the PC gaming Reddit doesn't like EGS.

So this MAY be nothing more than an effort to discourage people from other subreddits posting and downvoting on r/pcgaming. But this censorship is definitely not the right way to achieve this. I'm also not sure why the mods even care about these downvotes.

Edit: in the past hour, I've seen several threads on r/pcgaming about the deleted comments. All of these threads have been deleted withing minutes. There's definitely something fishy going on.

 

[crimsonheadGCN]

The mods of /r/PCGaming are not able to do anything about downvoting EGS topics and they are only offering a suggestion. Reddit Admins are the only ones that will do something about it and that's only if another person/community is directing others to do it.

 

[prudis]

 

[FunnyJay]

Merry Christmas and thank you for my favorite games launcher.

 

[DrShrapnel]

Oh, so that high margin goes towards features like gift cards, Tim?

 

[gabbo]

Oh, so that high margin goes towards features like gift cards, Tim?

Tim is well aware of where Valve's 30% cut goes, and how it isnt always 30%, but he'd rather gaslight and play dumb than admit again that his math isnt sustainable

 

[madjoki]

Which missing feature is not Valve's fault, somehow?

 

[Deku]

Which missing feature is not Valve's fault, somehow?

Does it really need to be a cross-store inventory?

 

[Le Pertti]

Of course, cross platform and cross store inventory is fantastic on paper but I have zero trust that Tim is going to do it in a way that is good for me.

 

[beep boop]

I’m sure Valve would also be glad to host Fortnite, for example, if it wasn’t locked too EGS

 

[Morten88]

Its crazy how desperate Epic have become with these giveaways, sadly i think this will just lead to even more timed exclusives, cause their store stays failing...

 

[ExistentialThought]

Its crazy how desperate Epic have become with these giveaways, sadly i think this will just lead to even more timed exclusives, cause their store stays failing...

According to the leaked documents, they were targeting reduced promotional spend and exclusives while increasing their publishing side with acquisitions thrown into the mix. Time will tell if this is still the plan.

I never would have believed 3 years ago they would still be running these promotions, including coupons where they pretty much lose money on any purchases over a low threshold. Though I think they only shifted this direction since their timed exclusives proved to be more costly and less beneficial so keeping those dollars on promotional spend is probably more fruitful. I still think it is a strategy that will take many more years to produce results and may never lead to them making money from the store itself, which aligns with their leaked documents.

___
Quasi-unrelated:
I know Steam tried their own coupons, but my super-duper guess is customers shifted their spending to match the promotion rather than spend independently of a promotion, which likely means some folks spend more and some folks spend less. The fact that they have not brought back coupons makes me wonder if more people spent less and why we have not seen their return. Epic has ran more sales without coupons, but likely sees more sales with coupons than not and loses more as a result. It makes me wonder if they can ever really resolve this without having to sandbag sales for a few months/years, but they likely cannot afford that either.

 

[Morten88]

According to the leaked documents, they were targeting reduced promotional spend and exclusives while increasing their publishing side with acquisitions thrown into the mix. Time will tell if this is still the plan.

I hope thats the plan, cause i really hate those timed exclusives, but it seems like they are changing plans all the time.

 

[Arc]

Since the year is effectively over, does anyone want to make some guesses for their 2021 infograph? Try to guess:
-Total number of accounts
-Monthly active users
-Third party revenue

There's no reward other than the sense of self satisfaction that you can guess better than your peers. I'm personally guessing:

-200 million accounts
-70 million MAU
-$475 million third party revenue

I know that they were only at 58 million MAUs in August, but from my limited knowledge, it seems like the new Fortnite chapter was massively successful which would boost their numbers. Additionally their third party exclusives were higher profile in 2021 compared to 2020 as they included games like Kingdom Hearts, Hitman 3 and Final Fantasy 7 Remake. Also they were able to release more launches concurrent with Steam for games like Battlefield 2042 and Back 4 Blood.

 

[TioChuck]

I expect little to change until all the appeals from the v Apple trial ends, they probably gonna turn down the exclusives and free games rate until then, because of the publishing stuff, but when the door closes on the possibility of EGS on mobile and consoles, Epic will kill EGS.

 

[ExistentialThought]

Since the year is effectively over, does anyone want to make some guesses for their 2021 infograph? Try to guess:
-Total number of accounts
-Monthly active users
-Third party revenue

There's no reward other than the sense of self satisfaction that you can guess better than your peers. I'm personally guessing:

-200 million accounts
-70 million MAU
-$475 million third party revenue

Those all seem like pretty reasonable guesses. I would have guessed a tinge lower third party revenue until this last coupon sale, like $420MM, but bringing back unlimited coupons and having an actual cart will probably drive that way up. Anything less than that will be an abject failure though given the number of simultaneous releases.

I expect little to change until all the appeals from the v Apple trial ends, they probably gonna turn down the exclusives and free games rate until then, because of the publishing stuff, but when the door closes on the possibility of EGS on mobile and consoles, Epic will kill EGS.

I do not see them killing off EGS in any but the most extreme scenario, though the documents did suggest any hires should be capable of working on things outside of the store, which indicates their priorities. I think in the event they continue to lose court cases and their metaverse ambitions fail. They would still keep the store operational for their published deals and they would stop promtional spend.

 

[Morten88]

Since the year is effectively over, does anyone want to make some guesses for their 2021 infograph? Try to guess:
-Total number of accounts
-Monthly active users
-Third party revenue

There's no reward other than the sense of self satisfaction that you can guess better than your peers. I'm personally guessing:

-200 million accounts
-70 million MAU
-$475 million third party revenue

I think you are probably on point with this guess, but if they arent going to do their 2021 infograph, then i can only think that it was way lower than your guess.

Do we know what steams third party revenue was in the last couple of years? I think the last time we heard about it was in 2017 where they had about $4.3 billion in game sales.

 

[ExistentialThought]

I think you are probably on point with this guess, but if they arent going to do their 2021 infograph, then i can only think that it was way lower than your guess.

Do we know what steams third party revenue was in the last couple of years? I think the last time we heard about it was in 2017 where they had about $4.3 billion in game sales.

To my knowledge, nothing has been shared. My guess is probably somewhere around double that since the MAU has doubled which is a terrible guess haha. Even then it is not clear how much they make from their own endeavours like DOTA2/CSGO/Index/etc.

Here are some other gaming company numbers that folks posted around that are likely guesses as well, not sure on the source

 

[meschio94]

When your competitor launch a revolutionary platform, the best way to compete is to sabotage them:

Enable new Proton (Steam Deck/Linux) support for EAC :: Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Helmgart Keep - General Discussions

So we have looked in to this. It's far more complex than first suspected -- EAC has two versions. Non-EOS and EOS (Epic Online Services). Most games historically use Non-EOS EAC. It's the one Vermintide 2 uses as well. Epic only added Proton support for the EOS version of EAC. Therefor in order to implement proton support for Vermintide 2, a huge amount of reworking of the EAC implementation would be required, which may also require all players to authenticate with Epic Online Services as well -- perhaps even logging in to the Epic environment (to be confirmed, however).

So the "just a few clicks" statement made in the original announcement wasn't entirely accurate, and would only apply to titles using the EOS version of EAC, which simply hasn't been many games aside from either pretty new ones, and likely predominantly Epic exclusive titles.

We are still looking at what is or isn't going to be possible, but it's not as easy as it was made out to be -- far from it in fact.

There may be other solutions or workarounds, but ripping out the old EAC and rewriting everything to implement "NuEAC" and potentially asking our entire playerbase to connect through and sign through EOS for an honestly tiny market share that was (and would remain) unsupported from the get go might be a deal breaker.

Time will tell.

If the developers try to do the extra work, epic get important data from users and maybe in future, they can require an epic account to play!

is a win/win situation for epic.

 

[gabbo]

When your competitor launch a revolutionary platform, the best way to compete is to sabotage them:

Enable new Proton (Steam Deck/Linux) support for EAC :: Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Helmgart Keep - General Discussions



If the developers try to do the extra work, epic get important data from users and maybe in future, they can require an epic account to play!

is a win/win situation for epic.

Is EAC even that effective a service or is it more about being 'easy'?

 

[prudis]

SQUARE ENIX Support Centre

 

[Le Pertti]

They should rename "Epic Games Store" to "Early Access Store".

 

[Arc]

I, too, hate it when companies rip off others.

 

[Lashley]

ahahahahaah

 

[C-Dub]

I, too, hate it when companies rip off others.

Complete lack of self awareness. And the real chef kiss moment is he sent it from Twitter for iPhone.

 

[madjoki]

It's amazing Epic let the Games Store get this bad while holding up "curation" as the major competitive advantage against competing stores on PC.

Street Striker Coming Soon - Epic Games Store

Street Striker is coming soon to the Epic Games Store. Please check for availability and add to your Wishlist

www.epicgames.com

Car Tuning Simulator | Download and Buy Today - Epic Games Store

Download and play Car Tuning Simulator at the Epic Games Store. Check for platform availability and price!

www.epicgames.com

Deadly Flight Coming Soon - Epic Games Store

Deadly Flight is coming soon to the Epic Games Store. Please check for availability and add to your Wishlist

www.epicgames.com

He Will Shoot | Download and Buy Today - Epic Games Store

Download and play He Will Shoot at the Epic Games Store. Check for platform availability and price!

www.epicgames.com

True Hate | Download and Buy Today - Epic Games Store

Download and play True Hate at the Epic Games Store. Check for platform availability and price!

www.epicgames.com

Edit: Actually didn't notice before posting, but two of those got pulled, but still show up on search though.
And listed as "Coming Soon" on titles here.

 

[gabbo]

I, too, hate it when companies rip off others.

Can I get a caption on this? Twitter embeds don't seem to be working for me

 

[ExistentialThought]

It's amazing Epic let the Games Store get this bad while holding up "curation" as the major competitive advantage against competing stores on PC.

I knew they were only saying things to round out their PR campaign when they promised human curation, and that somehow those reviewers will just know bad games when they see them. Nothing more tangible given or a deeper understanding shared, acting like that was the secret sauce missing from Steam. Like they might as well have just said, "That thing you do not like, well what if I told you I won't do it, would you like me then?"

Folks continue to think curation is as simple as throwing more money and people at a problem when there is much more nuance. Games can and will straddle lines bringing subjectivity into the mix. Unless you take an extreme stance of blocking games from unknown/unproven developers or something to that effect, then you will always be accepting a bit of fuzziness when it comes to "bad games" and allowing those onto a platform.

 

[Arc]

Can I get a caption on this? Twitter embeds don't seem to be working for me

 

[gabbo]

Thank you. I see the reality Tim is trying to force into existence is still laughable.

 

[madjoki]

That asset flipper (Boom Games) got curated to front page

 

[beep boop]

Another one for the Tim criticizing Tim bucket.

 

[Arc]

The "Games On Sale" carousel randomly displays whatever games are currently discounted and will change out every once in awhile. You can refresh the page a few times and a new list will appear. Still pretty funny though.

 

[fantomena]

Not only didn't The Anacrusis not release on EGS the same time as Steam, but they put in the wrong Twitter link.

The Anacrusis Coming Soon - Epic Games Store

The Anacrusis is coming soon to the Epic Games Store. Please check for availability and add to your Wishlist

www.epicgames.com

 

[Bonfires Down]

Since the year is effectively over, does anyone want to make some guesses for their 2021 infograph? Try to guess:
-Total number of accounts
-Monthly active users
-Third party revenue

There's no reward other than the sense of self satisfaction that you can guess better than your peers. I'm personally guessing:

-200 million accounts
-70 million MAU
-$475 million third party revenue

I know that they were only at 58 million MAUs in August, but from my limited knowledge, it seems like the new Fortnite chapter was massively successful which would boost their numbers. Additionally their third party exclusives were higher profile in 2021 compared to 2020 as they included games like Kingdom Hearts, Hitman 3 and Final Fantasy 7 Remake. Also they were able to release more launches concurrent with Steam for games like Battlefield 2042 and Back 4 Blood.

I didn't expect people here to be this bullish on EGS, but I think you are in the ballpark. Those numbers would be impressive as that's an 80% increase in third party revenue, though of course it comes at a high cost for Epic. I'm definitely thinking that 2019 numbers were inflated because Borderlands 3 answered for so much of the revenue in 2019, and 2020 numbers would have looked much better without it.

MAUs might have been 58M in August but it always grows during the holidays so 70M is by no means too high of a guess.

While indies are still not doing too hot on the store, my impression is that AAA titles tend to do fine. GoW just hit #1 despite being available on Steam and FFVII also hit #1 despite being overpriced and released during the holiday sale.

They also got some major F2P titles this year in Genshin Impact, Valorant, LoL etc. Genshin in particular always seems to hang around near the top of the top sellers list. And they had major giveaways in Battlefront 2, Rage 2, Alien Isolation, Control, Dead By Daylight, Prey, Tomb Raider.

 

[Ge0force]

While indies are still not doing too hot on the store, my impression is that AAA titles tend to do fine. GoW just hit #1 despite being available on Steam and FFVII also hit #1 despite being overpriced and released during the holiday sale.

The problem is that we have no idea what "fine" is. We have no clue how many sales a game needs to have to hit the #1 spot on EGS. The fact that devs aren't allowed to share sales numbers unless they exceed expectations doesn't help either. We only know from the Epic vs Apple case that the majority of exclusive games sells significantly less than projected, up to 90% less for indie games.

It's very likely that GoW sold many times more on Steam than it did on EGS. Is that "fine" for Epic and Sony? We don't know that either...

 

[bobnowhere]

The vast majorioty of sales are also subsidised with vouchers. It's clear the endgame was to get everyone to agree to lower their % take so Epic could make more money on mobile and console. Now that that has failed they are just throwing shit at walls to see what sticks. Buying devs, vertically integrating, publishing etc...

 

[Bonfires Down]

The problem is that we have no idea what "fine" is. We have no clue how many sales a game needs to have to hit the #1 spot on EGS. The fact that devs aren't allowed to share sales numbers unless they exceed expectations doesn't help either. We only know from the Epic vs Apple case that the majority of exclusive games sells significantly less than projected, up to 90% less for indie games.

It's very likely that GoW sold many times more on Steam than it did on EGS. Is that "fine" for Epic and Sony? We don't know that either...

What I'm mainly looking at is whether EGS games also available on Steam can stack up at all to those that are exclusive. And I think they can as a big AAA release like God of War will often top the chart.

I'm not saying that the sales of GoW are anywhere close to the Steam sales. I'm assuming Tim didn't expect that either after just a few years or he was in for a rude awakening. But neither is it the case that games also available on Steam don't sell at all on EGS.

 

[fantomena]

Stop. Caring. About. The. EGS. Top. Seller. Chart.

Since the moment I observed Shenmue 3 on top for 2 weeks, I knew it was bullshit.

Look at the list right now and tell me that Epic is not only having the list as a promo thing (hey guys, we bought exclusivity for this game, it's on top of the list because we wanna promote it).

 

[Ge0force]

I'm not saying that the sales of GoW are anywhere close to the Steam sales. I'm assuming Tim didn't expect that either after just a few years or he was in for a rude awakening.

His expectation was probably that Sony would abandon Steam for EGS' higher cut like Ubisoft did. Luckily for us that didn't happen.

No doubt GoW sold a bunch of copies on EGS, but I would be surprised if it was more than 5% of total sales. After more than 3 years, there's still no reason to buy a game on EGS over Steam, unless Epic plays Santa with €10 coupons. I'm pretty sure the absolute majority of sales on EGS happens with these coupons.

 

[C-Dub]

His expectation was probably that Sony would abandon Steam for EGS' higher cut like Ubisoft did. Luckily for us that didn't happen.

No doubt GoW sold a bunch of copies on EGS, but I would be surprised if it was more than 5% of total sales. After more than 3 years, there's still no reason to buy a game on EGS over Steam, unless Epic plays Santa with €10 coupons. I'm pretty sure the absolute majority of sales on EGS happens with these coupons.

Yeah, basically this. If a game sells well on EGS, Epic is probably eating shit on it.

I’m strong of the opinion that if FFVIIR had strong sales, those stopped once the coupon vanished.