News Epic Games Store
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That explanation holds up until you try to play 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.
Tim Epic, the hero of developers everywhere against the tyrannical Valve regime, threw those developers under the bus in a very heroic way.
Fortnite isn't a game. It's a metaverse.Fortnite also stutters like a motherfucker, so i guess Tim can't make games either
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?
Epic’s reward boost will eventually be like DFS sales - running for 360 days of the year.
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?
This desperation just shows that its going really bad for them.
Or the few people using their store are using the coupons to buy more games. I'll never support EGS, but for some people, a 20% discount is enough to do so.
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.
oof
It does seem like Fortnite is now the unc game and Roblox is the skibidi rizz (that hurt my soul to type).
Reminds me of when Steam was supposedly in trouble as Fortnite was where all the kids played and they would use grow up using EGS.
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
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
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.
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.
https://www.fortnite.com/news/fortnite-developers-will-soon-be-able-to-sell-in-game-items?lang=en-US
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.
Epic's Tim Sweeney: "We can build an economy that's bigger and better than the one in Roblox"
Epic Games boss on Roblox, monetization for Fortnite creators, training AI without permission and taking on Steam
www.thegamebusiness.com
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.
And they bought a bunch of studios to send to the Fortnite mines, and that’s been a roaring success.
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.
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.
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).
I feel like they gambled on their "creative mode" and thought they would become the next roblox, but seems like they lost that war and now they are stuck.
Fortnite and PUBG both have Sonic the Hedgehog collaborations. Fortnite got a car with a Sonic skin. PUBG got Sonic fighting Skibidi Toilet.
Apperantly Epic never checked game ownership, so pirates could download games with modded client.
Also Preloadds finally
Also Preloadds finally
Fortnite failed to reach 800k players yesterday. Their September average was 817k which is, by far, their worst month ever. They did get lucky with the Daft Punk event hitting 3.3 million, but it was short lived.
And the only reason Daft Punk hit 3.3m was the first hour had a free shoe giveaway. They were trying to force the peak.
Every platform combined (console, PC and mobile). The caveat is it's people on a game server and doesn't include those that are just in-client, so you can't compare it to Steam games which includes everyone that has a game open.
(His post is about Fortnite Crew being added to Game Pass).
Tim sure loves huffing his own farts. Paying an extra 50% sure is a future of gaming, but I don't know if it's "open and vibrant".
Epic should focus on making their engine perform well on hardware that exists in 2025.
They're giving away an early access game now. I imagine that'll go over well with the 3 people who bought it on EGS and the ones who picked it up on Steam.
Fortnite Skipped Pride This Year
It's the first year Epic skipped Rainbow Royale since introducing it in 2021.
www.gamespot.com
I wonder why.
Also Apple removed an ICE tracking app after being criticized by the Trump regime. This would usually be red meat for the champion of developers Tim Sweeney, but his Xitter account hasn't mentioned it at all.
But remember, it's just another launcher
That doesn't surprise me. I've read several devs gripe about the EGS backend on Reddit and Twitter.
So, Lex Fridman had David Hansson (DHH, creator of Ruby on rails) on his podcast and they talked about Tim Sweeney for a while. DHH was fawning over Tim (and Mark Rein). He spoke of them with reverence. Apparently the case against Apple cost Epic 100 million dollars and he said that nobody else could have done it. It needed to be done by a founder led, super rich company because no board or CEO of any other company would have ever approved moving ahead with the case. He said that his company had also considered this litigation and had been told by lawyers that it would cost 10 million dollars and he decided not to risk it. And in hindsight, that was a good move because the actual bill of 100 million would have ruined him and his company and the people who work there. He also expressed disappointment with Apple for being forced to make these changes instead of doing them voluntarily as that somehow reduced their... 'aura'? He was of the opinion that pissing off developers was the reason the Vision Pro failed (while failing to mention the effect that the modest $3500 price tag and the general failure of VR might have had). And of course, the standard refrain of Apple (or any other marketplace) does "not deserve 30% of my hard work".
Now I understand why developers push that idea. They want more money. But in the last 10 years, nobody has answered this question to my satisfaction; "Who gets to decide what cut a marketplace should take and why is it anybody other than the market creator?". Why do judges, regulators, developers or even customers think they get to have a say on this matter? These companies like Apple, Google, Valve and so on spend billions of dollars to build up their hardware and software ecosystem and spend years/decades building up trust with hundreds of millions or billions of users and then developers waltz in and think they deserve free, unrestricted access to that market. Why? I've never understood this.
In retrospect we're really lucky that the EGS failed in the PC gaming space. I remember when developers insisted that getting more money due a lower store cut would allow them to create better quality and lead to cheaper games for customers. Well, since the EGS came into existence, more games than ever have released unfinished, broken and filled with even more greedy monetization. And of course it didn't lead to any lower prices whatsoever. PC gamers saw through that bullshit immediately and the EGS ideology got exposed in an open marketplace for all to see. I almost think that Tim was hoping Valve would take some sort of retaliatory measures when EGS started poaching exclusives and then he would sue them in court for abusing their monopoly and leave the decision to uninformed judges. And that didn't come to pass because Valve just ignored him and still won. The only reason EGS has any traction at all right now is because they are still selling games at a loss 7 years later and of course the free games. If they stopped selling at a loss their revenues would tank to nothing and if they stopped giving freebies they might as well stop paying for the EGS domain name to save a bit of money.
Now I understand why developers push that idea. They want more money. But in the last 10 years, nobody has answered this question to my satisfaction; "Who gets to decide what cut a marketplace should take and why is it anybody other than the market creator?". Why do judges, regulators, developers or even customers think they get to have a say on this matter? These companies like Apple, Google, Valve and so on spend billions of dollars to build up their hardware and software ecosystem and spend years/decades building up trust with hundreds of millions or billions of users and then developers waltz in and think they deserve free, unrestricted access to that market. Why? I've never understood this.
In retrospect we're really lucky that the EGS failed in the PC gaming space. I remember when developers insisted that getting more money due a lower store cut would allow them to create better quality and lead to cheaper games for customers. Well, since the EGS came into existence, more games than ever have released unfinished, broken and filled with even more greedy monetization. And of course it didn't lead to any lower prices whatsoever. PC gamers saw through that bullshit immediately and the EGS ideology got exposed in an open marketplace for all to see. I almost think that Tim was hoping Valve would take some sort of retaliatory measures when EGS started poaching exclusives and then he would sue them in court for abusing their monopoly and leave the decision to uninformed judges. And that didn't come to pass because Valve just ignored him and still won. The only reason EGS has any traction at all right now is because they are still selling games at a loss 7 years later and of course the free games. If they stopped selling at a loss their revenues would tank to nothing and if they stopped giving freebies they might as well stop paying for the EGS domain name to save a bit of money.
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