> I'm really not sure what companies should do about it
disassemble the intentionally addictive properties they built into their platforms to maximise engagement and revenue at the cost of the mental health of their users.
im not aware of any law that went through parliament that directly impacts installing apps. OSA has already hit and didn't impact app stores. Can you link me the relevant legislation or hansard debates?
sure. I don't think its a strong argument. You can control someone for a bit, but giving a 20 year old that much power and resource over this long an amount of time is far too loose a leash to constitute a robust plan. If we're going full tin foil then I think its more likely he's literally a robot than a front man for some shadowy cabal.
I disagree. I feel like earlier social networks hadn't yet huffed the "lean startup" gas and weren't obsessed with engagement and thus were not yet trying to hook their users into an engagement cycle like where we are today.
I feel like the Myspace/Friendster and early Facebook were nowhere near as harmful (albeit for addiction, those sites were still vulnerable to grooming) as where we are today.
> "We're spending significantly more than we're making, and we have to make major cuts to keep the company funded," he said.
Sorry, HOW?!?
How can a company like Epic games with one of the most successful gaming products of the last few decades be losing money with a product that is so mature? Almost every other games developer would love to be in their position on Fortnite but they've somehow turned that into a loss making proposition?!? I'm baffled.
They aren't losing money on Fortnite, they're losing money on vanity projects like the Epic Game Store where they spend tens of millions of dollars for exclusivity deals with developers, and give away free games to try to poach Steam users with an otherwise inferior product. Unfortunately it is their employees that are paying the price of leadership making it rain with their overflowing coffers they couldn't help but burn.
It's still funny to me that they would rather burn 9 figures in cash on these silly deals to try and 'trap' gamers on their platform instead of just... I don't know... making a better platform? The reason nobody competes with Steam is simply the sheer number of integration and platform features that make it easy to buy, play and share games with my friends. It's not that hard, stop trying to 'force' me to use your platform. Just make it a nice experience.
> The reason nobody competes with Steam is simply the sheer number of integration and platform features that make it easy to buy, play and share games with my friends.
I don't agree. The reason I personally prefer Steam is that all my existing games are on Steam so if I keep buying on Steam I don't have to make and maintain accounts on other stores, if I keep buying my games on Steam I can keep using Steam as my only game launcher, and all my friends are on Steam so games with Steam multiplayer integration are easier to play if I too play it through Steam.
The Epic Games Store client and game integration could be significantly better from a technical perspective in every possible way, and I would not be interested in moving to it. Steam is good enough and switching has a massive cost. I can't really imagine much that would make me use the Epic Games Store other than exclusivity or the promise of free games. Though I would be more likely to just not play a particular game if it's only available through the Epic Games Store.
Another big thing is trust. With any of these digital markets I'm not truly buying games, I'm purchasing a revocable license. That requires a certain amount of trust that the platform isn't going to screw me over.
Steam isn't perfect: they initially had to be forced to offer refunds, and their item economy enables barely disguised gambling. But by and large they have behaved very predictably and consumer-friendly. Sometimes by outright consumer-friendly policies like generous refunds or labeling games with AI assets. But usually by just not doing anything greedy. Or as the meme goes: "Gabe does nothing. wins."
I agree. No company is perfect, but if someone asked me to name the most consumer-friendly large tech company, I'd say Valve. And honestly, I can't think of a second one.
I'm normally firmly against piracy, because I believe it to be morally equivalent to theft and I want to fund the artists making stuff I enjoy. But if Valve shreds my purchases when Gabe dies or retires, I will hoist the black flag on those games and not feel an ounce of guilt. As the saying says: if buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.
But we'll see. I hope it doesn't come to that. That said, I'm trying to change my purchase habits over to GOG because even if Gabe's successor doesn't screw over the Steam customers, eventually someone will. With GOG there's no possibility of the games I pay for being taken away from me.
They have shown its a wildly successful model. They would be very crazy if they changed it, and it would make them vulnerable to Epic and the Windows store. It's more likely that your OS/ hardware will change in a way that isn't supported by an old game.
Unfortunately, "this is a wildly successful model that prints money for us with almost no upkeep required" has historically not been a bulletproof argument when new management comes in and wants to prove themselves. Human beings are not necessarily rational and the kinds of people that tend to rise to the top of large corporations don't necessarily have the best interests of customers or the business itself in mind.
That being said, I believe that Gabe is taking his "succession planning" seriously, so I'd be fairly optimistic for the next decade at least.
One thing to keep in mind is that Valve is fully private so Gabe can not just be replaced by some random person by a board of directors like in other companies.
He probably already has a will set up that details how ownership should be transferred.
It is, but I'm not sure why that's relevant? xdertz's point wasn't, "Valve is private and therefore it engages in ethical consumer practices"; the point was "Valve engages in relatively ethical practices and because it's private, the board can't replace Gabe with a CEO who would engage in more unethical practices".
Not sure if this is relevant, but I have read reports[1] that Tencent currently holds a 28% stake in Epic Games. So private, but with unknown levels of ownership.
I've rebought games on Steam I had on Epic for free, just because the platform is so terrible. As far as a metric goes, that's pretty clear.
It's definitely not about lock-in for me. It's everything from local streaming, to linux support, to cloud saving working properly, to 100s of other things that become apparent if you try to do anything other than launch a game in a bog standard way on a windows machine.
Same. Sometimes I will play a givewayway game on EGS and like it enough to e.g. buy the DLC. In that case I'll buy the game on Steam, just to buy the DLC there too.
I have the EGS with games on it me and my kids actively play. I don't resent EGS for exclusivity deals nor hold any other kind of grudge towards them. If a game I want comes out first on EGS, I'll buy it on EGS. I don't actively play with friends, so who is or is not on EGS to play with is barely a factor on my radar.
I still prefer to buy on Steam if I can, because using the EGS sucks in every way possible compared to using Steam. If I want to sit to rest I can do it on a cold and irregular rock, but if there's a bench right next to it, then I'll use the bench.
That said, you can do a lot worse than EGS. MS Store I'm looking at you. In the above metaphor, you'd like sitting on the wet and muddy ground.
The big one for me is linux support, followed by steam input remapping. Input remapping, turbo, combo / chord buttons is incredibly important for accessibility.
agreed, the epic games store is crappy enough that i will not use it even for free and/or exclusive games. I might have if it was marketed as a clean, unobtrusive experience, but we all know that will never happen.
It makes sense that those with huge libraries may never want to move. But there are many existing and future PC gamers who do not have particularly large libraries on Steam, who would likely be much easier to lure if Epic actually made their launcher worth it.
The ideal number of app stores I want installed on my computer is ZERO. I don't want to have to load a damn "store" just to obtain and run your game. I am willing to angrily live with ONE store on my computer, Steam, but no way in hell am I going to tolerate having to have an Epic Store and a Microsoft Store and an Activision Store and a goddamn Rockstar Store and an Ubi Store and a fucking Adobe store for Photoshop. I don't want to have to install store after store for each damn app developer on my computer, yet that's the way the industry seems to be headed.
I don't know why "zero" is ideal. That means going back to the old days where every single company would need their own launcher.
Having a separate company focus on distribution sounds more ideal.
Epic Games had an opportunity here to erode the app store margins through standardization, instead, they've become a copycat of what they resented with a slightly smaller cut.
Just install the damn game, ask if you want icons on the desktop as well as in the start menu.
OS handles it all for you.
Perhaps some multiplayer functionality and such makes sense to share cross-game, but I miss the bad old days of every game having a bunch of privately maintained servers and its own server browser list etc. You could eventually find a few servers that fit your playstyle and make online gamer friends that way.
The only benefit steam brings to the table as far as I can tell is making it easy to reinstall your library on a fresh PC.
Yea, that's another way games are terrible today. I don't want a launcher for my game. My OS is my launcher. I don't want a launcher, I don't want a store, I don't want a "helper," I don't want a tray icon, I don't want an updater. Why can't game companies just ship their game and that's it?
I mostly play games on a computer in my living room. It boots into Steam Big Picture, which I use to launch a game (or sometimes buy new games) using an xbox controller.
But other platforms really are rather pathetic in terms of feature set compared to Steam. Steam has a bajillion features, and it looks like other platforms aren't even trying to compete to provide a good user experience.
It's truly incredible how difficult business people make doing business.
Doing business is very simple, easy, and straightforward, but I suspect in a lot of cases the individual behavioral aspects of the executives get in the way of doing good business.
Direction and leadership is something that these companies never seem to get right.
Well, we might make it a nice experience until we've attracted enough of you people to have a network affect. And then it's a steady march of price increases, additional revenue streams (including selling your data!) and reduction in features because they were "too expensive to maintain"
Steam does. That's why they're the undefeated king.
This applies to everything. If you see a product category where users are legitimately unhappy; then enter it, build something actually good, you'll be the biggest and richest in no-time.
People hated steam when it launched but you needed it to play CS 1.6. It made installing mods easier. Then HL2 released, orange box, and they were able to get a critical mass as they provided platforms support for other games. Steam got better. It’s still not great but they have so much market share that basically any PC gamer already has it. Epic wants some of that money. The problem is nobody wants to install another store and they aren’t doing anything to improve gamer’s experience other than giving away games and having some exclusives. They’ll never hit the critical mass needed that way.
I still don't like Steam. I resent that I have to have this "Store" middle man on my computer just to have access to games. I want to pay a company for their product on their web site, download the installer, and install it on my operating system directly. I don't want this other layer that I'm dependent on, who could switch off my access to the things I "bought" whenever they want.
Steam has multiplayer integration so you don't have to connect by IP to play indie games, that is massive. So many people either don't have access to their router or don't have the skills to configure it to play multiplayer without steam without having a server middleman which most indie games wont have.
Then steam reviews are the most accurate reviews there are for how likely you are to be happy with the purchase. I am much more hesitant to spend money on a game where I can't see the steam reviews for, so there is basically no way I'll buy a game on epic store that doesn't exist on steam since I am basically buying it blind.
Looking at what many of your games do I think it is better option. I have zero doubt that there wouldn't be countless downloaders and accounts and poorly written startup menus for each game and each publisher both big and small.
Simply getting installer would not be option for most games.
I vaguely recall Half-Life 2's launch being pretty problematic.
I started using Steam in 2007 and it was fine. In 2006 there was still some residual animosity towards it but I think the tide had well and truly turned since the early days (and I think there were a handful of third party games on it by then too which I guess was something of a vote of confidence - a few were Source engine titles so they may have got a discount or kick-back from Valve, but not all were).
> People hated steam when it launched but you needed it to play CS 1.6.
I thought CSS was the first release on steam beta? I remember playing the crap out of it, then the actual steam release happened, and it somehow turned into a laggy buggy hunk of crap for months.
Not sure of the exact history but pretty sure Steam was launched as a beta in 2002, or maybe 2003. In September 2003 or so the database was wiped and Steam was launched, again with probably only Counter-Strike available.
Counter-Strike Source was launched some time in 2004 and then Half-Life 2 came along in November 2004.
I mean, people really didn't hate it. There was some grumbling about digital and not having a cd, but by and large people liked it as soon as they had broadband.
Steam has a lot of issues but there are too just lots of areas where better products don't win out over inferior products, that's just not how the world works for lots of reasons.
Updating games on HDDs on Steam takes ages; I often see the download complete but then wait another 30 minutes for their diff to complete; and that happens with 10-20 games every week when they have big updates (10GB+). Just for this one thing I would switch elsewhere.
If Valve started to routinely do Bad Things on Steam they'd be gone pretty quickly. Many would go to GoG, some just stop buying games. Bad Things do occasionally happen (bad things like those "oops, we don't actually have licenses for the music used in the game you bought" revokes), but Valve keeps succeeding in keeping it to a rather low background noise level. Competitors have two decades of being that good or better to catch up. You can't buy trust, you can just put money into not losing any of the trust that grew over time. When competitors have done that for two decades, Valve, unless they fail in the meantime, will have even more.
I heard the same thing for Discord last month, and reddit and Twitter a few years back. It kind of worked for Twitter due to be outstandiningly bad, but it still didn't "kill" Twitter in the colloquial sense.
I don't see it going down any differently with Steam. It may take a dent and open up a competitor, but it won't do a move so catastrophic that it losses its leader status from that alone.
Which of them are privately owned? In a publicly traded company, there's an inherent logic that people who believe that the company can get by with squeezing customers a little harder will end up with higher projections than those who think it's better to get by with a moderate approach. Price goes up with the bids from the squeezers and occasionally a moderate will sell until eventually the squeezers own an identity-defining fraction. Valve only is what it is because of the ownership structure, its closeness to being bootstrapped (I assume that in reality ownership is a little more complicated, but close enough)
We could also call those squeezers "optimists", and publicly traded implies ownership by the most optimistic (well, the most optimistic who have money to invest). Leading to behavior patterns that could be described as suicidally chasing the most unrealistic money making projections. (and founder majority stakes are surprisingly susceptible to falling in line with those optimists, because those owners still don't want to see their valuation going down, doubly so of they ever started borrowing against their stakes)
"pretty quickly" is a few years, not one month. Chrome dominated the browser market pretty quickly even though the richer bigger company microsoft already had most of the browser marketshare, and that was 3 years. Before those 3 years it seemed like nobody would be able to make a dent in microsofts monopoly, and then it was gone in just 3 years.
If steams fumbles as hard as microsoft did with internet explorer they too could be mostly gone in 3 years, replaced by a giant competitors product.
The Reddit blackout is coming on 3 years old now. The twitter kerfuffle is almost 4? I'm not holding my breath.
And yes, chrome is a great example. That came right on the legs of Microsoft losing an anti trust case. For something that seems so quaint in 2026. I miss when regulations had teeth.
> If you see a product category where users are legitimately unhappy; then enter it, build something actually good, you'll be the biggest and richest in no-time.
> It's not that hard, stop trying to 'force' me to use your platform. Just make it a nice experience.
I feel like this is good advice, and should still be a pillar of building a business: prioritize customer satisfaction, and your happy customers will become repeat customers. But I don't think it's enough. Epic tried to launch a store in 2018, 15 years after the launch of Steam. That's 15 years of customers buying their games on steam, building a friends list, and getting used to making Steam their PC gaming "home." How do you convince someone who might have hundreds of games tied to one online account, that it is in their interest to open a new online account with a new merchant and start over from scratch? Your experience can't just be nicer, it needs to have some level of appeal that convinces customers to peel themselves away from whatever platform is their current default.
I don't have a good answer for how to accomplish this. Epic tried it by paying devs for exclusives and freebies, litigation, and a PR campaign that Valve and Apple and Google were ripping people off. Their approach was hostile and didn't prioritize making a nice experience, and it seems to have failed. But I think these platforms are sticker than we give them credit for, and just making a nice experience isn't enough.
15 years is not some insane gap that you can't get around. The biggest issue is that the EGS is just an inferior experience compared to steam, that's simply it.
If Epic games really wanted to start eating away at steams market share, they would do one thing. Make EGS not shitty for the user
15 years is a humongous gap. Almost an entire generation. Do you expect to make a Facebook killer in 2022? A WOW killer in 2017? Make a DOTA killer right now?
There's so many people who aren't even your market, they are an "one game player". You can't target that realistically unless that one game shits the bed.
Roblox is in some ways there, I think Epic thought fortnite could have competed. IMO they made a strategic mistake in shackling their game-as-a-platform to Fortnite. I thought the music fortnite thing looked interesting, but I have negative interest in installing Fortnite.
Call it something else and make it literally the first thing you see on epicgames.com, have it work on mobile, and maybe things would be different today.
(Aside: Roblox wins because I can go from typing in roblox.com into my browser and be playing a game with a friend in under 20s)
Instagram was a Facebook killer until Facebook bought it.
Snapchat was a Facebook killer until Facebook bought a VPN service and tracked every user without consent then stole half its features
I guess you could say LoL is a DOTA killer since its significantly more popular now, although some of that is likely to do with the Russian/Ukraine war
Giving actual compelling reasons to get users on your platform is the only way and the best way and that isn't really a function of time. TeamSpeak, Ventrilo and Mumble got eaten up by Discord and also most game forums
One of the biggest issues with all these stores that are other than steam is that they suck in terms of UI/UX and they are HUGE resource hogs, I am more inclined to kill off the epic games launcher from running in the background because it taking up gigabytes of my system memory and that annoys me
Steams's UI is also meh and is also a resource hog. There's a good reason I don't keep any launcher running at startup.
>Giving actual compelling reasons to get users on your platform is the only way
And sometimes there is no compelling reason. People may only want 1 or 2 things and they bias towards what they are familiar with.i suspect that's why Twitter is still technically a market leader (despite falling apart behind the scenes).
I also think it's really funny that talk about offering a good platform then mention an example where the market leader just gobbles them up.
> How do you convince someone who might have hundreds of games tied to one online account, that it is in their interest to open a new online account with a new merchant and start over from scratch?
I haven't play a PC game in a long time, so don't have any experience with the modern game stores and playing downloadable games.
I understand that these stores are more than just places to buy games--they also include extensive social media aspects.
But surely you don't have to give up one store if you make another account on another store? If you are on Steam and have a large friends list there and want to try a game that is only on some other PC game store couldn't you send a message to your Steam friends saying you are going to try that other game and asking if anyone else wants to come play with you?
If you meet people in that new game and want to be online friends, just point them to your Steam account and say that's your main gaming social media site, or point them to some non-gaming social media if you actively use any and they aren't also on Steam.
Freebies and discounts helps get people in the door. Having an experience that people don't hate might keep them there.
I don't buy a lot of games, but when I do, I don't usually look at Epic. I'd rather buy on GOG or Steam. Steam is probably from inertia, but if Epic provided a better than Steam experience on the games I've gotten for free, than I might consider it. I don't really know what would qualify as better than steam though... maybe faster startup, less dumb prompts?
I don't even consider buying games on the Microsoft store though, so Epic has a leg up --- if it's sale season, I will look to see if Epic has a bigger sale than Steam.
Why does anyone need to make a store? Walmart and Target both exist. Generally, consumer choice and industry competition are considered good things that drive innovation and the nicer experiences we're talking about.
The litigation angle to legitmatize a mobile storefront was smart. Having a company able to offer premium mobile games with a proven track record could have had it stand out from Steam, or at least open on an untapped market.
But it seems that gamble slowed as the economy did. Worse yet, China and Korea have gotten much more attractive to get people into their casinos. Competition is stiffer than ever.
One of the more fascinating parts of the Xbox plan of attack for its new console is its apparent marriage of Xbox, Steam, and Epic among possibly others in a unified console experience. Having a true console like experience with a variety of PC game stores plugged in I think is a rare lane available for Xbox to try and do something other than reproduce Steam but worse, and I'm curious how it's going to go.
This being microsoft, my expectation UX wise is that similar to those Xbox ROG devices you'll have to drop to the windows desktop to install updates, and they'll probably also throw in some copilot to help you through the process. I don't think they have it in them to innovate here and make it pleasant in any meaningful way
Yeah, I agree. There are certainly engineers at Microsoft who are skilled/talented enough to do something cool. But it doesn't matter if the business people will just saddle them with bad requirements that drag the experience down.
My guess is it doesn't go well -- with Gamepass they've taught Xbox gamers not to buy games, and with Steam integration they've given Xbox gamers a competing place to buy games (where Microsoft will pay a percentage to steam!)
It'll probably turn a division of Microsoft that usually loses money into one that loses...more money.
Right and itch.io and much besides. However, these integrations are janky and not built in as first class console experiences. Not that they need to be necessarily, I think having the steam store is enough in many respects. But for me, the dream is being able to browse and install games from itch.io with the same convenience as steam itself. So there's at least notionally and unclaimed lane for providing that kind of experience. It's the only available Lane that I can think of for out-Steaming Steam.
You're not wrong, at this hour success is as much about picking up the pieces from one of the singularly worst disasters of brand confusion we've ever seen. Even this attempted recovery is a bid to get into the lane now owned by Steam.
The SteamOS is capable of getting out of the way, which is something Microsoft is pathologically incapable of designing Windows to do. And these days I think Linux and the Linux desktop are just objectively better than Windows, and the days where Windows embodied what it meant to have when anything goes PC are long gone.
So you're left with limited options. I think a first class console experience for a wide range of storefronts is the best bet to out-steam Steam but it assumes a degree of execution capability that I don't trust Microsoft to have.
As much as I love steam, some of this isn't even a high bar. I've always had issues with stuff loading slow or odd behavior on the steam store tab in the application. My understanding is it's because the store tab in the steam application is essentially a web browser, and it sorta works like ass.
I like having a huge library of games on epic-store but when I try to buy a game there - because they're having a sale - its a pain to find games. Steam's search isn't top-notch either, but its 1000x better than epic's.
For example. I search for "roguelike" and it brings up 1 single game (which is coming soon). There are few tags on games. No way to refine a search. In fact they have a category called "rogue-like" which has a lot of games, but somehow the search just misses them. There's no way to refine results by popularity or most sales.
I suspect this is all an intentional design philosophy of epic, a way to have a lot more control over what the user sees than steam, because its so bad it doesn't make any other sense.
Also for some reason their store takes a LOT longer to load than steam.
The game library UI is much worse. Pretty sure there's no easy way to mod games through the epic store or see dev updates or talk on a forum or submit bugs. Just so bad.
I can't help thinking the battle was lost before it even started, no matter how good the offering was because the PC and mobile platforms (where epic operate their store) have 99.9% already decided who owns them. The way I see it Epic wanted to copy what Counter-strike and HL2 was to Steam, but using Fortnite to push their store for a fresh generation of gamers. The problem is they couldn't replace or exist alongside the incumbents while trying to bring in more than a trivial amount of income. The only way I can see the outcome being different is if they were in the position Valve were in around 25 years ago with a fresh or poorly served market or something other than video games, few remember Stardock Desktop as a place they got their games.
Epic games goes out of their way to be hostile to Linux users. I'm at the point where I just ignore windows only games. And I'm the exact type of person they'd want to convert cause I tell all my friends about my gaming experiences. They could even take proton and use it in their store.
This is basically my opinion as well. There are enough games that run on Linux that I don't have time to play them all, so if the game is windows only I skip it.
The steam chat app is kind of terrible and there was a Linux UI bug that caused UI lag a few years ago. Epic Games just can't replicate the goodwill.
They could totally carve their niche if they focused in making their store better.
Could it surpass Steam? Probably not. But you don't need to surpass Steam to have a viable, profitable store. GoG is the alternative that proves the rule - it is smaller, but they have their niche offering.
EGS is shit, and relied on exclusives (which everyone typically hates, especially on PC).
IIRC GoG has a pretty poor history in actually turning a profit with the exception of when CD Projekt release on of their own games, and even then they do the vast majority of their business on steam or the console stores. If GoG was a decent money-spinner then CP projekt wouldn't have split if off. Even a niche has a cost to operate, and that's with GoG being a pretty plain service on top of game downloads.
Steam is actually not that good as an application. It’s slow, it’s full of ads, the UI is complex …
But they are the Amazon of gaming : it’s a no brainer to buy games because you know you won’t get issues being reimbursed if it’s needed. Also SteamOS/Proton/Steam Deck are nice.
And EPIC managed to do worse than that.
I do feel GOG Galaxy could become a threat to Steam someday if they added official Linux support and a full screen version but last time I tried it it was pretty buggy.
I think sweeny is an awful person overall. The lawsuit against apple and google is a net positive for consumers though. Having someone as big as Epic stand up to these digital silos is a good thing.
Assume for one moment that they were all great people over there.
I suspect that they would STILL be in the same boat that they are in. You see a silo where I see a service provider.
Does apple make money on doing what they do.. You bet.
But the lesson here is that they make that money because of scale, and without it replacing payment processing, fraud management, and the customer service you need with it is a HARD problem. Epic needs more than Fortnite to justify running all that on their own or it's going to turn into a black hole: because payment processing for "digital goods" is a nightmare.
I suspect that both apple and googles extension into payments at point of sale, has contractual ties to their App Store payment processing. Something Epic will always lack.
The real pain in the ass here is the incumbent card processors, and their fee structures.
I suspect that the industry is going to need to go back and re-visit micro transactions in the coming years.
I think he's still at heart a developer. That's why all his initiatives that aren't Fortnite are so developer friendly.
But he still is a CEO. So there will naturally be some evils he seeps into to make the company (and himself) richer. He still has his own interests, but my second hand experience is that even these layoffs are relatively respectful compared to most of the industry.
I recognize that CEO side. But it's a real shame many people mostly turned on him in order to defend Steam. Steam sure isn't a saint either.
Not only does Epic refuse to make their game store any better, Tim Sweeney will continue to whine about how Steam's 30% cut is way too much. Surely if it's too much, Epic Games should be able to provide the same service for their cut? But no, they continue selling a moped while saying how all of the motorcycle manufacturers are ripping you off.
And lets not forget Tim Sweeney's dishonest representation. Sure, Steam can take a 30% cut, but they also offer a lot of avenues to avoid that. With Steam, a publisher can get a ton of activation codes and sell those activation codes on their site and not get hit with the 30% cut. No fee on in-game transactions, and as you build a user base for your games, Steam also lowers the 30%.
Network effects disagree, sadly. You don't get market share from the leader by simply "being better". There's way better netowkrs than Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit out there. But some habits are as harder to break than they were to form.
I don't disagree with what you're saying. But for technical platforms it needs to be a combination of both. Discord is the perfect example of this, plenty of people I know of were completely fine with their Mumble/Teamspeak/Ventrilo setups, and in a lot of cases some of those were better than what Discord was offering for individual features, but the overall feature set and platform ease-of-use that Discord was offering drew in a large initial user base which then created the network effect you describe. A lot of my friends feel 'locked in' to Discord now and with their age verification roll out fiasco a lot of people want to leave, but there isn't a single offering that matches Discord's platform features and integrations. There definitely needs to be an incentive to leave sometimes and break away from that network effect, but if there's no actual competition then obviously yeah you're always going to be stuck.
Let me make a disclaimer, I don't if it is true as CEO speech truthfulness seems to be made by ai.
But once I saw the interview with the guy from epic or someone big there, I don't remember and they said the money for developers was from marketing campaigns which makes sense to me. They said that they wanted to make a better experience so the developers themselves would try to help being people to the platform but that never happened.
It seems that the technology behind the epic store is, epically broken, pun intended. I've read somewhere that they tried to decouple chunks of the store and restart but the thing was so poorly done that it would be more expensive than just let it fade away and at some point they had a new epic store 2 created from scratch but to develop it to the end would be too expensive.
As a swe myself, maybe they were trying to scale to steam level before being steam? I don't know.
My last experience trying to use epic was trying to buy a game. But being greeted by a store login, then a loader of a store then a initial store that tried very hard to sell me call of duty and EA stuff. I found whatever I was trying to buy but I couldn't due to some bug in the payment.
And never again. Not for any particular reason. I just didn't spend more time there.
And now, with these layoffs what are they going to do? Are they revoke all the licenses for the games they gave and sold?
I don't care about my Steam profile. I do care about the convenience of having all games in a single "launcher" and seamless Linux compatibility through Proton.
A big reason it feels like nobody competes with steam is that if you want to sell your game on steam it can't be cheaper elsewhere. So any other store can't compete on price.
If you don't sell your game on steam you are missing 90% of the market. So as long as Valve continue to make steam good enough, nobody has an incentive to switch.
It's an abusive monopoly. Steam take 30% of revenue from developers and Epic take 12%, but the prices can't be 18% cheaper for the consumer without giving up 90% of the market!
Are you seriously blaming Steam for game developers setting the price of their games the same on all platforms? They're the ones pocketing that 18% difference by the way and that 18% difference is literally the selling point that is supposed to lure in game developers to the epic games store. There has never been a promise of cheaper games.
The "most favored nation" pricing you're complaining about being abusive refers to Steam key sales on third party platforms and that pricing exists for a blatantly obvious reason. How much of a percentage does Valve get from that sale? 0%. Absolutely nothing. The developer generated keys are free and Valve will still pay the distribution costs (storefront, downloads, multiplayer, etc) for you. If it was possible to sell a Steam key cheaper on another platform, then nobody would buy Steam keys from the Steam store anymore, which means their revenue would tank to zero, which in turn means they would have to cancel free steam key generation, duh. Valve is being extremely accommodating here and you're twisting it into its opposite, which is pretty disgusting.
The problem is the Steam Distribution Agreement isn't public so I don't have a way to prove if this is true or false.
At the same time there are articles like this https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2g1md0l23o on the bbc claiming a tribunal ruled a case can continue against Valve for "forcing game publishers to sign up to conditions which prevents them from selling their titles earlier or for less on rival platforms".
> Unfortunately it is their employees that are paying the price of leadership making it rain [...]
Epic's employees reaped the gains while it rained in the form of paychecks. While it sucks that people are losing their jobs, those individuals received (much of) the upside of this investment and their jobs never would have existed in the first place had the investment not been made. Their paychecks are not being clawed back. Shareholders (including executives who are largely paid via out-of-the money options) are bearing the costs. Consumers also benefit from increased competitive pressure on Valve and subsidized game prices.
Would it be "better" if Epic had not invested in the Epic Game Store and paid a dividend or conducted a share buyback?
For what it’s worth, Epic is a private company and employee upside has been capped in the sense that compensation has been mostly cash (and not Netflix tier cash). Exposure to equity may been a better way to share in upside and ensure some buy-in.
IMO investing in a marketplace was fine, but hemorrhaging money for 7 years on non-performant software + free game bundles is probably not defensible from an executive standpoint.
In my experience the buy-in you get from employee stock programs scales inversely with the head count. I worked for a huge company that gave out stock options. Nobody was really motivated by the stocks, because the company was so large your individual contribution meant exactly nothing unless you were at least a VP. A vesting bonus of some kind would have done just as much.
In my experience, the Epic Games Store downloads faster, installs more efficiently, and launches games faster than Steam. The social features I actually use (i.e., add a friend, join them in a game) work fine. I'm not aware of any features Steam has that EGS lacks that I actually use frequently (Valve's VR, streaming tech, and Proton are great, but I don't use those frequently). It's not just me, many indie game developers are also big fans of EGS (most recent example that comes to mind are Jeff Kaplan's remarks during his 10 hour stream a week or two ago). Gamers' vehement defense of what is effectively a monopoly continues to confuse me.
Nearly every time I add the free EGS games to my cart the checkout fails. I frequently have to restart the EGS client for checkout to work (and even then it fails often).
I launched EGS just now to time some comparisons and it's a black rectangle on my screen with no GUI (probably self-updating). I had to kill the process and restart it.
The Look and Feel for the EGS client just feels slow. Not that Steam is always amazing in this regard either but it's way better than EGS. Go to your EGS library and click between "favorites" and "all games". Switching from favorites to all games takes me ~4 seconds, every time (if you have any meaningful number of games).
The search/sort is slow. Steam's feels instant.
The library list has a ton of wasted space. In terms of vertical space, the Steam library lists three games for every game EGS lists.
The EGS social features compared to Steam are downright anemic (and Steam is pretty bad compared to something like Discord). You can't even set an avatar in EGS. Even EA's Store app (whatever they call Origin now) lets you do that.
One thing that steam does better than any other place is create an incredible store experience to sell games on. I don't think any other game distributor has an algorithm as good as theirs, and all the integrations and hookups that come with it. For example, Nintendo's shop page for each game is sparse in detail and lacks so much information buyers have access to in that game's Steam page counterpart. The store search and other store views display games far more efficiently than nintendo's search and store views, making it much easier to find what you're looking for in fewer clicks and fewer minutes.
if you have the time, try to find a game on nintendo vs on steam. Don't google for the pages, go to their base shop page and start from there. Try to avoid directly searching the title, instead search for keywords as if you're a gamer trying to recall a game suggestion you heard from a friend like 2 weeks ago. You'll notice the plethora of differences that combined puts steam on a whole other level of sales and content distribution if you go about it like that
They could at the very least just package it up to run with Wine, but Sweeney is stubbornly set in his linux hating ways. I could use their store through the Heroic launcher, as I do with GoG, but I won't because fuck you Tim.
If we're being realistic from a business standpoint: Linux is at best, 3% market share. A very passionate 3%, but 3%. Using resources to support such a niche sector is a hard sell.
3% of millions of people is a massive number of people. Given how easy recent work on wine has made porting from windows, it's really hard to defend not having a linux version, from a business standpoint.
I'd hope this community of all places would understand that "just integrate X with Y" is never as simple as "just". It's still something a team needs to do, and the gain is minimal unless Epic is also going to try and make their own console-esque device. That's the incentive for Steam.
Going by the Steam hardware survey, 3/4 of Linux users were not using Steam Decks when they got polled. So I’m not sure if a console-esque device is actually required. A large part of the reason why Linux usage is growing, is probably that it mostly just works these days
Yes, it's not the most optimal business decision as a software company to invest in hardware. The clear move is to either grease Microsoft's palms, or let then outright acquire Steam (or Valve as a whole). Valve not doing that is either in part ideological, or part very long term thinking on the best financial path later, instead of now.
But at the same time: while the ends was "be independent from Microsoft", their means at first was very Microsoft esque. Partner up with hardware vendors, make some Pcs with Steam built in, and brand it as such. Didn't work. Their goal had to be to roll their own hardware because that's what was needed to get the ball rolling (as well as a form factor that accompanied a desktop instead of competed against).
The problem for an also-ran app store is that you need every user you can find.
Linux support may not be a huge deal in the overall market (although it's growing due to the steam os devices) but it's just one more element to Steam's moat.
It's a glorified wrapper around curl, wine and a webview, a few interns could knock this out in a few months. For "3% market share" (growing every day, thanks to Valve) its a no brainer, but Sweeney has no brain.
How is steam a monopoly? People would be excited for EGS just like they are for GoG, except EGS has a track record of anticonsumer behavior.
I fear for valve in a post gaben world, and they certainly aren't blameless. They also aren't a monopoly. Hell, steamOS is the opposite of a locked ecosystem.
It has 90% marketshare and has been shown to use its monopoly uncompetitively to force price parity on devs. Textbook definition.
>People would be excited for EGS just like they are for GoG,
People "like" GOG. I woildnt say they are "excited for it". The revenue of GOG these years don't reflect the supposed enthusiasm.
>EGS has a track record of anticonsumer behavior.
Anticonsumer isn't anti competitive. Especially not as a new player in the game. They can't brute force this stuff with money like a trillion dollar company could.
> Hell, steamOS is the opposite of a locked ecosystem.
I'll believe that when they release a full distro with all the feature the Steam Deck enjoys.
> Gamers' vehement defense of what is effectively a monopoly continues to confuse me.
It is a monopoly but that can be a good thing sometimes. Steam is really good! Is it 30% cut good? Maybe not but I do think Valve has managed to keep Steam good for a very long time and if they lose their monopoly they're going to have a strong incentive to fuck things up.
Another example is WhatsApp. Sure, sucks for Google and Apple that WhatsApp have a watertight monopoly in most of Europe (and probably much of the rest of the world; I haven't checked). But it's pretty great for actually users. We've had at least a decade of totally free messaging that everyone has with no ads and e2e encryption.
Meta are just about starting to fuck it up but it's been a pretty great run.
People are generally okay with monopolies as long as they feel they're benefiting from the monopoly instead of being taken advantage of.
Epic garnered a lot of ill will with all the early exclusives. If I have part 1 and part 2 of some franchise on Steam, and then part 3 comes out as an Epic exclusive, it's going to irritate me.
In my experience, the Epic downloader would frequently lead to degraded performance and/or system instability when I'd leave it running; I've never noticed such problems at all with the Steam client.
That's a weird way of saying "lack of competition". As others have mentioned, why should Epic Games bother supporting Linux?
Considering that I'm gaming on Linux, the number of competitors is pretty small and close to zero, I'm not sure why I should be forced to switch operating systems to support the "better platform".
I say this as someone who's been running Vortex/Skyrim modding on Linux years before there was official support for it and I'm kind of shocked honestly to hear that people are cheering for something I did so long ago (5 years to be precise) I hardly remember the time doing it.
I try out the Launcher every couple years to see if it's improved. I just installed and logged in for the first time since 2023.
Looks like they have finally fixed lag and freeze jank that occured on every action, blocked scrolling, and etc.
Unfortunately just clicking on the "Featured Discounts" items on the store home page.. 3-4+(more like 4-5+ on further testing) FULL seconds of blank until the game details load. An ecommerce site where the items take 3-4 seconds to display!? I flipped over to Steam and everything in the store loads "instantly".
Sigh, I'll check back in 2028.
Edit: It boggles the mind and defies reason that they can't get a handle on table-stakes UX after all this time, energy, and hundreds of millions of dollars sunk into it. Nepotism; gotta be, yeah?
The major feature that EGS lacks and which makes it appealing to indies and repulsive to gamers is user reviews. User reviews are a major influence on consumer choice; and Steam even shows recent vs long term, which signals if a recent change was received well or not.
User reviews, guides, discussions, workshop and shared screenshots and videos: bold social features that are an incredible source of agony for mediocre and bad indie games.
A truly fascinating part is that feature and quality-wise EGS is still, after years of development, miles behind Steam.
Epic likely has talented devs and clearly invests a lot of money into all of this, but it took them years to finally implement a cart. It's not the end of the world to not have one, but not if you are a digital store!
It doesn't even have (or at least didn't the last time I checked) a review system. Steam isn't just a store anymore- it's closer to a social network with communities, discussions, mod workshop (which makes it stupid easy to install mods if a game supports this).
With forums dying and reddit turning into whatever it is turning into, Steam forums is IT for a lot of gamers.
If I see a game on sale the first thing I turn to is a review section- more often than not it's enough to gauge whether I'll buy this thing or not. And it's a nice place to ask whenever something in the game bugs our or doesn't work, or to just vent.
EGS is (or least was) really damn slow to start (never mind to launch an actual game). Linux support is non-existent.
Sure, it is extremely difficult to tackle a leader when a headstart is this large, and when people already have massive libraries of their own on Steam, but it's been what- 7 years of development? Epic had a clean slate, no compatibility to worry about and all the features their main competitor had, mapped out to copy- and they didn't even try to reach feature-parity.
Giving out free games only takes you so far when people lack the necessities to stay at your platform
The exclusivity deals they struck early on are an albatross that still drags them down. I think the audience would have been much more receptive to deals like Alan Wake 2, where that money spigot got turned into something totally unique that wouldn't have existed without that capital investment.
Among other vanity projects, they hired Simon Peyton Jones, long the most prominent developer of Haskell, to build "Verse", Tim Sweeney's hobby language [1].
I'm sure SPJ isn't that expensive, but still, it's pretty far from Epic's "core mission."
That's not how I see it at all. Steam has some abusive policies like not allowing your game to be on other platforms for a cheaper price. They take 30 percent cut. Compare that to epic takes nothing on first million revenue and then 12 percent.
Epic are trying to break into what is nearly a monopoly.
Epic lost billions of dollars when they were kicked out of the App Store and Google Play and they were out for a long time. Only now Fortnite is coming back to mobile.
Exactly. Their holy war on the App Stores blunted Fortnite’s momentum at its apogee.
On one hand, I admire their chutzpah. The App Store model has weighed down the entire software industry and has prevented entire categories of new products from growing out of infancy due to anticompetitive practices. Everyone, Apple and Google included, would actually be better off without the App Stores in their present form, and I’d love to see them weakened or eliminated.
But on the other hand, Epic actually accomplished very little in their war, and nowhere near what being unavailable on mobile platforms for years cost them.
Additionally, their refusal to go after Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch never made any sense to anyone except for those with a financial interest in those arrangements. The rest of us were just confused — the console App Stores are the exact same model as the mobile App Stores.
I suspect Epic’s actual reason for not going after the consoles was a bit of realpolitik or cowardice depending on how you look at it. They couldn’t afford to be locked out of the mobile and console stores at the same time, so they invented some tortured rationale for why they could pay the console vendors their 30% but not the mobile vendors. But, this muddied their message and they came up mostly empty handed in the end, and here we are today.
there’s a huge component to gamers that they are emotional and resistant to change. gamers hated steam when it came out. and now the backlash against epic store is huge. they haven’t done a good job fixing the perception of epic store the way steam did
I certainly still hold a grudge against tim sweeney for saying piracy made them not release stuff on pc and after a while going back to releasing on pc while whining about valve fees and then launching epic games with similar fees and way worse service for the developers...
As I understand it, epic charges less but also offers less services that a developer can need like the gamehub and steam's 30% i think is tiered and reduces with sales volume? I'm not sure, though, don't take my word for it.
1. Those features aren't a la carte, so the share matters if you're not utilizing those extra services. You're basically paying for the audience.
2. Valve does have tiered shares, but it's based on publisher sales. And it's extremely high. I have to check again, but I believe the threshold was 25m yearly revenue for 25% and 50m for 20%.
Innsome ways it's more frustrating. It's basically a tax cut for the rich.
If you are a large game, they will not provide you an appreciable portion of your sales as keys. Sales made this way also likely hurt your organic distribution.
Re: value propositions: Steam's 30% reduces to 25% after $10M made, and 20% after $50M.
> there’s a huge component to gamers that they are emotional and resistant to change.
This is just wrong. You portray people as being irrational / "emotional", but Steam was actively bad when it first launched. The fact that people changed their opinions on it when it later became actually good is not emotional, that's in fact exactly rational.
The Epic Game Store doesn't need to fix "perception", they need to fix their actual product instead of trying to take shortcuts to gaining users by burning hundreds of millions of dollars per year on exclusivity deals, which are extremely anti-consumer, and will obviously result in rational backlash against somebody blowing money to attempt to force people to use their product for access to a completely unrelated product.
Exactly. Steam an launch was some other program you had to have running on your machine, that was buggy, taking up resources when most people were barely running most games (people upgraded computers to play Half Life 2!), and had no point.
Steam with thousands of games, that regularly has (or had) massively deep sales that let you get games for cheap, barely uses resources (most players are not struggling now to run games), and run very smooth. Is a very different beat. Valve earned trust.
Without commenting on any other part of this exciting console war, I don't know if this is true. Steam on my machine still always consumes nonzero CPU when minimized, possibly because it opens to the busy animation/video-filled front page then its WebView doesn't detect minimization. It's funny how Steam never comes up in the "stop making WebView/Electron apps" discussion when they were the original sinner (yes I know they were using IE originally).
You are correct. Steam was actively bad at launch when it only had Valve games on it. And they fixed the platform and then started allowing other devs to put their games on it.
EGS is currently bad and trying to position themselves as a Steam alternative when they simply are not even close to the same quality.
It's hilarious how I must have like 80 games there, with zero intention of ever installing Epic, or even playing those games. Yet I must "claim" them... just in case. I bet the majority of users do that hahaha
Interestingly, I don't even think that the Epic Game Store was a vanity project. It was probably a good idea, they had a successful product and could build up their store out of it. Basically what Valve did originally.
But instead of focusing, you know, in making their story desirable to use, they focused on shit like exclusives. And for that, they should fail.
I prefer GoG over Steam, even while I am super grateful for Steam making gaming on Linux possible. And GoG didn't need to rely on exclusives for this.
How do they win with exclusives? The strategy is nonsense.
For Sony, I get it. I want to play Demon Souls, I buy a PS5, now I own a PS5 I'm gonna buy more games for it.
But for EGS this doesn't make sense. It costs me nothing to install both stores on my PC. I buy Alan Wake 2 on EGS, great, that doesn't make me any more likely to buy the next game I want there. Nothing about the platform is sticky or requires a sunk cost.
Unless they're making enough money on the exclusive games to justify the deals on their own (which, given this announcement, seems unlikely) I don't see how they or you think it could work.
> It costs me nothing to install both stores on my PC.
But you wouldn't bother unless you have a reason to. I put off buying games I wanted to for months because I'd've had to install a new store. No-one is going to install a store for nothing.
> I buy Alan Wake 2 on EGS, great, that doesn't make me any more likely to buy the next game I want there.
Now every time you launch Alan Wake 2 they get a chance to sell you another game. If you see a game you like, why wouldn't you buy it on EGS now that you've installed it and know it works? They've got your email address now and can send you recommendations or tell you when there's a sale on.
Sure, it's still going to be an uphill struggle. But if they can't get you to install the store then they can't even start.
It's called a network effect. At some point, you use it because you use it. And without any killer feature, you have no reason to move. It's not "wrong", but it explains why "just do better than Steam" does not work.
No, I am sadly human. Heck, these days I'm sloppier with my typing specifically to avoid such accusations.
You asked why and I answered with the real reason. It's not that deep. People don't leave because people don't leave. If that's not a satisfying answer, I agree. But reality can be irrational.
Historically, exclusives have been the only way to get an edge in. And it only takes one system seller to pull it off.
Or at least, that's how it worked 20 years ago. Thing is, games got so diverse, as well as the rise of "forever games" that there's fee actual "systrlem sellers" these days. It's really just GTA that comes to mind now.
I'd love steam to have some competition. epic isn't it though. Epic sucks up your personal data to sell to advertisers and "marketing partners", the client itself is trash, it's just one more middle man to get in your way (https://old.reddit.com/r/EpicGamesPC/comments/zc5ri3/playing...) at inconvenient times.
A good competitor would not come from a game publisher. It wouldn't collect any more data than it needs and wouldn't use your data for marketing or sell it to anyone else. It also wouldn't be able to remove your ability to access and play the games you've already purchased for any reason.
Bad products/services that are more trouble than they are worth do not magically become good because they might compete in some ways with something else.
GoG is the closest thing to a steam competitor right now and even in that case I have zero incentive to install their client.
Competition is good, the EGS is bad and anti-consumer.
Two anti-consumer products is probably better than one, but I also hate Epic as a company, so I would just prefer for Steam to win. At least I like half-life.
> Unfortunately it is their employees that are paying the price of leadership
Neoliberalism at its finest. The world moving towards conservatism has left us with this model: The working class takes the hit of each crisis from small to big.
> ”Sorry, HOW?!?
How can a company like Epic games … be losing money with a product that is so mature?”
I’ve been playing Fortnite a bit lately, after my nieces got me into it.
One thing is that although the player counts are high (always hundreds of thousands of players online, just in the main Battle Royale game), the average revenue per player can’t be that high.
For one thing, once you’ve bought the $10 battle pass once, you only need to average maybe 1 or 2 games per day to earn enough vbucks to buy the next season’s battle pass with vbucks. So if you stay active you can pay once then play the game free forever and still get access to a huge amount of free cosmetics. And much of the player base is kids who are just begging their parents/uncles to buy them stuff in the game rather than spend money themselves because they don’t have credit cards to link to their Epic accounts.
Compare this to something like Hearthstone which is similarly mature. They have a similar battle pass but there’s also a strong incentive to pay real $ for extra card packs and cosmetics. And there are clearly plenty of adult whales buying this stuff. For example, there’s a new mythic Deathwing skin on a gacha wheel that costs, on average, about $200 (!!) to get. It’s only been out a few days and I’ve run into multiple players who have it.
Hearthstone battle pass isn't really comparable to Fortnite cosmetics. Hearthstone is pay 2 win where the majority of new cards are better than old ones.
> you only need to average maybe 1 or 2 games per day to earn enough vbucks to buy the next season’s battle pass with vbucks. So if you stay active you can pay once then play the game free forever and still get access to a huge amount of free cosmetics. And much of the player base is kids who are just begging their parents/uncles to buy them stuff in the game rather than spend money themselves because they don’t have credit cards
I lack the vocabulary to describe how fucking shit this is. Poor kids that have been sold into this versus the games we had that didn’t outright exploit.
Kinda shame on you for contributing in to this. It’s gross.
Honestly, Fortnite is run pretty responsibly. It's not bad at all compared to some of the other nonsense that's out there. Everything in the store is straightforward and fair. No gacha/gambling mechanics, no “pay to win”, no insanely priced super rare items.
I think big media companies are just structurally unable to stop trying to double their revenue. They just keep pushing out more products and over-extend at the same time everyone is losing interest in them. That's how you end up with say the MCU producing at quadruple the old pace and the movies making less than ever. At some point there's just nowhere to go.
They could have loads of money and still would need to tighten their belt once usage drops. I could have 100ks in my savings accounts but if my hours / salary was reduced at work, I would still reduce my spending. It's just being smart.
>"We've had challenges delivering consistent Fortnite magic," Sweeney said, adding "market conditions today are the most extreme" since the early days of the company founded in 1991.
Probably the closest way to say "we're in a recession and gaming isn't resistant to this one" I've heard yet. But it makes sense: a "free" service that entices with cosmetics is easy to cut when parent money gets tight.
And if kids lose interest they will move to another game. Or more likely, TikTok and its medium. Just increasing the dopamine.
Wonder how developers working on profitable parts feel about it. I’ve been at an employer who burned their cash on vanity projects and hubris and turned around to people working on the bread and butter profitable parts and said “sorry hard times hit, no bonuses this year, we have to tighten our belts”. It's when I left.
That's pretty much every tech company these days. People wrongly claim they "over hired", but in reality these companies were trying to open up a half dozen new initiatives all at once. I worked at Unity and you'd be surprised what aspects were worked on (publicly, so I can pull it up if interested " that you probably never heard of.
Those all shuttered as companies went into maintenance mode. I'm sure Epic has similar reactions. I remember them going pretty hard on cinema and architecture, but those have been quieter over the years.
So I guess they are finding out that running an app store isn't very profitable and dare I say suggests that the percentage Apple charges was not unjustified?
Seriously? Are you seriously making this argument?
Are you seriously comparing running a PC app store vs App Store? One is the most open platform and the other has only one (1, uno, sole, single) app store.
My nephew was deep into Fornite for years - now at 15 he (and his friends) moved on to GTA V. Imagine what a treasure trove of gaming you can discover as a teenager today, looking back at a pool of 15-20years of great games.
I started playing in my late 40s, but it got stale pretty quickly. Epic keeps changing things to try to keep it fresh, but they change the wrong things: usually making the game harder and more frustrating for casual players, in order to cater to pros and streamers. When I started playing, I could win a few matches if I got lucky. Three chapters / 15+ seasons later, I get spanked within 5 minutes of joining a match by people who live and breathe the game. I stopped playing because it's just not very fun for someone who just logs on once a week to play for a half an hour or so.
Tbf, "just make the next Roblox" is kind of an insane business proposition. Roblox has enjoyed unprecedented success at engaging the same age range for 20 years. Most games that are anywhere near that old have for the most part followed their playerbase as they aged. Runescape is a great example, where enough of their playerbase in 2013 were the same people who were playing 2007 that they demanded a reversion.
Roblox, in contrast, has been extremely popular with 7-16 year olds for 20 years. They're funneling in new players faster than old players age out. It's pretty wild.
My personal theory is that Roblox largely stepped into the amateur game dev hole that Flash left.
> I don’t think this is necessarily what is happening.
This is exactly what happened with my niece, my nephew, and all of their friends.
Which isn't to say they've outgrown all of the games they played when they were younger. They still play minecraft, stardew valley, kirby, mario, etc. I don't know why, but they all bounced off of Fortnite after they hit a certain age. I wonder why.
I think these type of shooter games have significant competition. So you have games and genres that peak for times and then slowly or quickly get replaced. And entry to this is hard. You get lot of failures and few successes.
Counter-Strike might be a exception. It seems to keep older players well while still getting enough new ones. And also have enough gacha mechanics to make lot of money...
Right. I think one way to think of your relationship to customers is you grow up with them. Trying to be intergenerational can be really hard because you have to keep winning over a new generation for the first time.
They are paying creators a lot. $220 million in 2023. [1]
That combined with trying to undercut Steam on royalties, the 2025 softening of their cash cow, the Apple legal wars, a number of R&D bets, giving away free games, and an absolutely MASSIVE marketing budget...it can go fast.
> Almost every other games developer would love to be in their position on Fortnite
I seriously hope that isn't true because Fortnite is a showcase of nearly everything wrong with modern gaming. It's an ad platform/casino that prays on children and is designed to make them feel like shit by pumping them full of anxiety/FOMO over their various passes, gambling, and vbucks balance. I think the only good thing you can say for Fortnite is that it's not often pay to win (although there have been skins that gave players advantages over others) and it isn't run on child labor like roblox is. If Fortnite is actually losing players that's great news.
I hope that most games developers would be ashamed to release a game like Fortnite and that the ads and predatory casino mechanics are something they'd choose to avoid in their own games.
> "We're spending significantly more than we're making, and we have to make major cuts to keep the company funded," he said.
The chances this is accurate are extremely small. This is either anticipating AI coding goals, the CFO proved they were overloaded on developers, or they're just cutting to hit quarterly numbers.
I'd be sad if "quarterly numbers" is a reason for a privately held company with 40% controlling stake still held by Sweeney to lay off 1K folks.
As an indie dev, I generally like the guy's stance on shifting the PC gaming industry's support and financial incentive structures, so I'd be a bit surprised if he just did mass layoffs like Embracer and co.
That said, the article implies things that aren't necessarily canon: "cut jobs as Fortnite engagement falls" doesn't mean "cutting people because Fortnite is flagging". It's much more likely because the Epic Game Store struggles to push enough volume to recover the cost of developer acquisition on the platform.
It might be a case where they're projecting costs and a pessimistic Fortnite market a few years out. I doubt this something you do after the money is gone. You'd look ahead and see your runway in a down market is way too short and cut costs.
You can't just bet the farm on dropping a new $5B/year game.
Cosmetics suck. It's all the same rehashed "urban style" characters with the same design again and again. I don't want to buy those. I've bought some video game characters like Geralt, but that's it. They can do historical figures, old movie characters, national costumes and songs, maybe something military etc., but they don't. And I don't want to buy battle passes recently, they are boring and stupid, all those items from them only clutter the inventory that you have to clean manually.
I suspect they've been behaving like google in using a stable golden goose to fund moon shots, but unfortunately for them now that golden goose is rather sick and no longer making so many golden eggs.
Epic Games does way more than just purely making games.
They also have their own Steam competitor (Epic Games Store) and, more importantly, they develop and support Unreal Engine used by tons of other game dev companies.
If you want an apples to apples comparison (i.e., other big live-service game companies) in terms of the employee count, you got:
Mihoyo (Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail) - ~5,000-6,000
What about Valve itself? They have ~350 employees. They make Steam, SteamOS, Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, the Source engine, and run four actively successful live service games: CS2, Dota2, TF2, Deadlock.
Last I've heard Valve makes use of a lot of contractors however. So the number of people working on their projects is a bit higher than their employee count suggests. Anyone's guess how many though.
I know they're sponsoring a bunch of ARM and Linux projects as well.
The small size of Valve is simultaneously mind boggling but also not, given its very intentional independence. I would have to imagine that they must contract out or have partners at least for their hardware relationships if not for their massively multiplayer online games. At just 350 people that's enough annual revenue to make everyone there a millionaire several times over. Simultaneously plausible but mind boggling.
They contract out all the time, they've admitted to it in lots of interviews. So I think through the amount of contracting they're able to keep their core hires down.
Yeah but Valve is not publicly traded, so that comparison is of course totally unfair! /s
Having skilled and happy employees that aren't constantly changing and do not spend all of their time on ways to fuck over customers and chase trends is simply impossible. Releasing a piece of hardware and leaving it open for customers to do with what they want? Linux? Not hiring people the second line goes up and then immediately firing them when line stagnates? Preposterous.
The game store doesn't need a lot of employees. A few years ago it was reported that Valve only needed about 70 employees to run Steam while it generated billions of dollars in Steam fees (30% per game). It's basically free money for Valve. I bet the situation is similar for the AppStore and Google Play.
Though Unreal Engine does indeed need quite a few developers. Additionally, using UE is much cheaper (5% on games exceeding 1 milion USD gross revenue) than using Steam (30% on every game). So they not only need more developers than Valve, they also earn less money.
Steam doesn’t really attempt to gatekeep submitted content the same way that Apple or Google do so I would expect those companies to have much larger teams supporting, in mostly non-development roles. Steam support has also historically been kind of a joke (not sure if it’s improved in the last 5 years) though I don’t know if Google/Apple provide a better experience
Don't make games, but Unity does operate worldwide and has a LOT of supports for ads (their main money maker, unless something recent happened).
That globalization is a big reason many tech companies swell. When you need a team to work in and around every region's laws and regulations, you get big quickly.
But also, unity has slimmed down and scaled down on a lot of initiatives.
Games with micro transactions are one of the most profitable things that you can do today and fortnight being fortnight. There are tiny mobile companies being sold for billions and making massive profits with predatory mtx transactions. Gatcha games are doing extremely well, and fortnight is no exception.
Valve is making a killing over CS gambling and MTX as well, so not a good example. Steam is obviously making more but even CS itself would have made Valve a very successful and profitable company. Pretty much all of these build on predatory practices though.
If we are talking about games without MTX, yes that’s a very rough business.
They're also paying out hundreds of millions to map "creators", the majority of which are pumping out low effort game modes like Steal The Brainrot. I can't help but feel this isn't helping their situation at all. Then again, Steal The Brainrot often surpasses the actual Fortnite game modes in player count, so maybe it is worth it. It doesn't seem like a sign of good health for Fortnite overall, though.
Ok, but Fortnite is a massively popular success, even as its popularity slips. Fortnite's run so far could have sustained Epic for years, even without other revenue they get from things like Unreal Engine. Games as a whole may be a risky venture, but we're talking about Epic here; the mystery is not how to succeed in games, but how a company that had an earth-shattering run of success in games is now in such a position.
It absolutely is a profitable industry, maybe not as profitable as todays greedy shareholders would like it to be. Just look at the CD Projekt that releases 1 game per 10 years and still makes a fortune through Netflix colabs and selling merch.
I agree with your sentiment, but I also don't know if CD Projekt is a great example because its not their original IP. I am sure the games saw a boast in sales from awareness given by the TV show. But I am assuming Andrzej Sapkowski is probably the one who gets most of the money from licensing from Netflix. Although I will say, I don't 100% know all the details for the Netflix deals. And due to lawsuits and what not, exactly what Andrzej has the ability to sell rights to isn't very easy to find out with quick searches.
Edit: Ah, maybe CD Projekt does own the rights completely? They may have bought the right completely from Andrzej? So Andrzej may not have been the primary party selling the rights? Or maybe not? Andrzej may have retained film/tv rights and not sold those to CD Projekt.
The person I was replying to is asserting that the winners of the metaphorical lottery are not in profitable employment, so you aren't making the point you think you're making.
Well, you goto be good nowadays, you compete against the whole worlds dreamy eyed teeangers wanting to make "their"game. A wellfunded, pig-trough-slop-mill ala hollywood can not compete against that when it comes to fun, art and experiences. They fled into gambling, but gamers actively ostracize lootboxers nowadays.
Gamers love, love, love lootboxes. Can't get enough of them. There are many lootbox games with 10-100s of millions of players. The Reddit/HN vocal minority who hate lootboxes (myself included) probably represent <5%, if that.
They made products that were effectively only targeted at the gaming audience, and when they pivoted, they were rewarded substantially, as the wider market recognizes how small the niche they used to be in was compared to where they are now.
You have literally no fucking clue what you're talking about. The games industry is ~200 billion dollars per year. Film is 30, music is 60. Not only are games the largest entertainment sector, nothing else is even close.
A hardware company pivoting to the AI bubble has literally nothing to do with the profitability of software.
This is the worst take I've seen in a while on HN. Nvidia doesn't make games, and for its case, they can either sell the same die as a gaming GPU for $2,000, or as a server GPU for >$30,000, the math is simple and obvious, which is why the stock jumps.
Epic doesn't have anything else besides the gaming market. And the gaming market is huge, it's more than music and movies combined, so please just stop spilling bullshit.
Right now even Valve realizes that Steam will literally run out of steam. This is why they have been trying to become more like Nintendo and selling their own hardware (with varying success) .
Developers chase the user base. If and when the users choose Linux developers will target Linux.
Proton as a project let's valve hedge on the heir apparent OS without upfront developer cost. If the Linux player base grows, developers will follow and valve is poised to remain dominant.
Because of Oracle v Google, supporting applications running in the Win32 userspace isn't necessarily leaving yourself open to threats of Microsoft meddling.
There's tons and tons of older software that people still want to run that might never be ported to Linux. And that's fine, because there's no problem with building compatibility layers to make it work. Microsoft can't do anything about that.
I believe they have proved that very few games are actually Windows games. The few remaining are mostly those which require Windows kernel drivers to run or connect to online services.
Hmm, citation needed on that one imo. Consensus is that their hardware strategy is in service of selling more games. Hardware revenues for Steam Deck are proportionally tiny; Frame and Machine aren’t going to meaningfully change that.
Record and wait. Justice is slow but has the power of the nation state. Once the leadership of this current government is gone and nobody is around to protect the offenders then its time to swoop in with the records and the justice system.
This is why its risky to join corrupt political movements led by old men, because they will use you to break the law, then die and you'll be on the hook. Much like the people who worked for the Soviets in the Baltics post war as young staffers, who administered the forced deportations and were eventually prosecuted ~50 years later for genocide or crimes against humanity.
i.e. everyone working for ICE today should be agitating for a pardon, given how racial profiling and warrentless raids are probably rather illegal in the long run.
> Record and wait. Justice is slow but has the power of the nation state.
this is pretty much how things will unfold in USA. Everything that has to happen will happen but very slowly. There is all the evidence supporting that.
transparency as well. WinForm really struggles with the idea of stacking elements on top of one another where there is an arbitrary amount of transparency or tricky shapes. Its just not worth the hassle compared to WPF.
reply