News Epic Games Store

That explanation holds up until you try to a UE5 game on a £3500 PC and it runs like warmed up dogshit, so I suspect devs aren’t working to the high end either.

The tech just sucks ass.
Fortnite also stutters like a motherfucker, so i guess Tim can't make games either

:shrugblob:
 
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Epic will have run a 20% cash back for over half the year. Surely they'll beat last year's third party revenue numbers, right?
 
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Fortnite promoting a ripoff of a Roblox game made with AIslop. From what I read they gave it the royal treatment with social media posts, in game banners, notifications and mobile push nofications. But hey it hit 400k concurrent and the Roblox version peaks at >21 million so I get why they did it.
 
Fortnite's player numbers the past week have been downright miserable, barely peaking at over 1 million on weekdays and 1.6 million on weekends. You can't even say it's kids returning to school as this time last year it was peaking at 1.5 million on weekdays and 2.5 million on weekends.
 
Fortnite's player numbers the past week have been downright miserable, barely peaking at over 1 million on weekdays and 1.6 million on weekends. You can't even say it's kids returning to school as this time last year it was peaking at 1.5 million on weekdays and 2.5 million on weekends.

All the cool kids play Roblox now.
 
Fortnite's player numbers the past week have been downright miserable, barely peaking at over 1 million on weekdays and 1.6 million on weekends. You can't even say it's kids returning to school as this time last year it was peaking at 1.5 million on weekdays and 2.5 million on weekends.

Very happy to hear that.
 
Fortnite is a dying game. Yeah it has bursts of popularity when something of relevance gets absorbed into the cultural blender that is Fortnite, but ultimately the trend has been down.
 
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Maybe if instead of betting all on a limited pool of exclusives (of dubious quality too) Epic invested more in making sure the EGS got literally every single successful pc title in the last 5 years, maybe things would have been different
Why would anyone use the store where you can't play Elden Ring, Baldur's Gate 3, Atlus games, most Sega games, most Capcom games, Super Robot Wars? Like Concord launched on the EGS, but Helldivers 2 didn't! Imagine that
 
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I think there's a new EU guideline that requires game devs to allow that, but it's still a great thing. It would be even better if they didn't obfuscate the real price behind funny money, but one step at a time.

Going on a tangent, I know Mihoyo had a settlement with the US government about a year ago and they started giving price ranges to guarantee a gacha character. The prices range from like $2 to $475 which is wild. I'm always happy when companies are forced to lift the veil a bit on their shitty practices.
 

In December, developers will be able to sell items directly from their Fortnite islands, opening up new revenue potential, in addition to receiving engagement payouts from Fortnite item shop sales.

Developers will ordinarily earn 50% of the V-Bucks value from sales in their islands, but from December 2025 through the end of 2026, the rate will be 100%.

To determine the V-Bucks value in US dollars in a given month, we take all customer real-money spending to purchase V-Bucks (converted to US Dollars), subtract platform and store fees (ranging from 12% on Epic Games Store to 30% on current consoles), and divide it by the total V-Bucks spent by players. Fortnite's average platform and store fees are currently 26% (with specific fees ranging from 12% on the Epic Games Store to 30% on console platforms). So, 50% of V-Bucks value translates to ~37% of retail spending, and 100% of V-Bucks value translates to ~74%.

Sponsored Row in Discover​

In November, we’re adding a prominent Sponsored Row in Discover so that creators can choose to spend money to receive increased visibility for their islands. All creators will have transparent market data to bid for placement in the row and enter an auction to surface islands in the new Sponsored Row. All other rows in Discover will remain unchanged, continuing to provide organic visibility to islands.

Long-term, 50% of sponsorship revenue generated by Sponsored Row will go into the engagement payout pool, boosting the pool size for all creators. From launch through the end of 2026, this rate will be 100%.

Thank You​

Since UEFN launched, players have spent over 11.2 billion hours across 260,000 live creator-made islands, which has resulted in $722,000,000 paid out to date. We’ll continue investing in new tools that unlock more development possibilities for creators. Stay tuned for more details as we get closer to launching these updates.

Q. Why is Epic keeping the other 50% from in-game item sales and Sponsored Row?
A. This model will enable Epic to cover the costs of servicing the Fortnite ecosystem. The funds that don’t go back to creators contribute to server hosting costs, safety and moderation costs, R&D and other operating expenses. In recent years, Epic has been investing and operating the business at a loss.

tl;dr

Epic is allowing user-made items to be sold in Fortnite.
Epic is selling ad space in Fortnite.
Epic is still losing money.
 

“Fortnite is for players, first and foremost,” he tells us. “Players love the ability to buy outfits and then use them everywhere they go. They love the fact that Fortnite is a game where everybody has an equal chance. There's no pay-to-win. And there is no scenario in which spending a lot of money gives you a benefit over players who haven’t spent money.

“If you look at how Roblox monetization worked, when you're spending money in an experience, you're mostly buying items that only work there. You go play another mode or into another Roblox experience, and it doesn't work. That's something we are worried about as a concept.
If that becomes the way gaming works, there's going to be a lot of poor deals offered to customers.

“The idea that somebody built a better game, and now I'm going to go to that game and have to buy everything again… That's not what players want. And then you get into pay to win mechanics. You get into scenarios where there’s loot boxes or things that resemble loot boxes, and you are paying for a chance at something rather than buying some specific identifiable thing. Generally, we’ve rejected those forms of monetization for our own games. And we really think that we can build an economy that's better for players and that rewards creators more as a result of the increased player trust, and avoid falling into the pitfalls of the pay to win and the loot box mechanic games.”

 
Epic is still losing money.
I still don't understand how a company can lose money (for years) while running Fortnite. Wild.
I'm curious what they are actually losing money on these days. I don't think the EGS is throwing around moneybags anymore?
Stealth edit: Oh, they still give away tons of free games, right. Forgot cause I don't bother with that.
 
I still don't understand how a company can lose money (for years) while running Fortnite. Wild.
I'm curious what they are actually losing money on these days. I don't think the EGS is throwing around moneybags anymore?
Stealth edit: Oh, they still give away tons of free games, right. Forgot cause I don't bother with that.

They also do 20% Epic Rewards, against a 12% revenue cut, meaning they lose money when someone spends their reward funds. They still offer Epic first run at a 0% revenue cut for 1 year, that was suppose to wind down, but some stuff was renewed to push their mobile store, which is way behind on target numbers...

Fortnites numbers have been trending lower, and partly propped up by the user created modes. Long time users have been complaining more about bugs and too many modes spreading the player base thin and Epic auto piloting BR content. I suppose throwing monetization can reverse some of the trends, but how much longer can they run a deficit without results.
 
I still don't understand how a company can lose money (for years) while running Fortnite. Wild.
I'm curious what they are actually losing money on these days. I don't think the EGS is throwing around moneybags anymore?
Stealth edit: Oh, they still give away tons of free games, right. Forgot cause I don't bother with that.
Years of lawsuits against Apple and Google
EGS being a nonstop money pit. In addition to what ExistentialThought said, they're also charging 0% commission for the first $1 million for every game every year in perpetuity.
Giving away hundreds of millions of dollars to build up UEFN maps.
Speculation on my part, but spending tons of money on tools like Unreal Engine and EOS.

The free games are probably one of the least expensive thinks they do. One of those old documents from the Apple trial said they were only going to spend ~$20 million a year on free games from like 2023 onward.

Several months ago Tim was on the Lex Friedman podcast and he said Epic went from losing a billion a year in 2023 to several hundred million a year today. They have a healthy nest egg due Fortnite blowing up in 2018-19 so they can continue these endeavors for a long time.

And they bought a bunch of studios to send to the Fortnite mines, and that’s been a roaring success.
There have been rumors floating around that Fall Guys is entering maintenance mode and won't get new content outside of skins. A good chunk of Mediatonic was already sent to the Fortnite mines.
 
Doesn't Sweeney have any other shareholders to explain how he makes billions of dollars disappear, while owning one of the most successful games in the world? I mean, how can he continue doing this?
 
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Doesn't Sweeney have any other shareholders to explain how he makes billions of dollars disappear, while owning one of the most successful games in the world? I mean, how can he continue doing this?
He has a few big ticket stakeholders like Tencent, Disney and Sony, but Epic is technically a private company with a handful of private owners (Sweeney being majority stakeholder).