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How do they plan to make money
Tim Sweeney’s Epic Games Store Is Still Losing Money After Five Years
I have bad news for you. Epic is extending its tendrils into everything.
Remember when games had free demos?
I have to agree here. While Steam is not without its flaws, at least games are playable while Steam is running. My limited experience with Epic is as follows:
I've purchased Battlefied games on Origin, but only Freebies on Epic.
I remember when they came on a CD in the back of a magazine. It is probably just nostalgia, but PC gaming was more fun back then.
Welcome to modern internet where parasocial negativity, gas lighting, and trolling are king. Get used to it. There is no safe haven.
Valve hired the developers of those games and paid for their development. Portal was a student project that looks nothing like the Portal we know. Team Fortress was a Quake mod that looked like this. You think that's the same as Epic buying Rocket League and then taking Linux support away?
For me it's simply that Epic's platform just is lacking in features, still feels very bare bones after all these years. I buy on GoG first these days because if they go out of business/are sold off I'll still be able to own/play all my games. I'm surprised we don't have more exclusives now like AW2.
Nothing better than obtaining a "physical copy", which contains naught but a steam code in a box!
The fundamental problem is that Epic has no attraction to their store. The reason EGS was launched was because of Fortnite, and wanted to capitalize on that games popularity to sell other games. This is why Microsoft has been buying studios left and right, because they thought Halo was enough to attract gamers to Xbox, because Sony for the past couple of decades had stepped up their game library and has a lot of good unique games. Epic did the same thing, except by buying existing games which they then took away from Steam. Not only that but because they don't support Linux, those games had to drop Linux support. To give you an idea, Minecraft is not exclusive to Xbox or Windows. You can happily play Minecraft on Playstation, Nintendo, Apple, and even Linux. I know I keep mentioning Linux but it currently has more of a presence on Steam than Mac does. Probably mostly due to the Steam Deck, which again is something Valve developed and made really cheap compared to anything else on the market. It's really innovative to make something that has the form factor of a Switch and then put an entire PC in it. Not even a locked down PC, but an open PC where you can install Windows and even emulators.
The only reason a lot of those games have higher numbers than Counterstrike is because they aren't PC exclusive.
They put games on Steam because they weren't selling well off Steam. Same reason why Activision/Blizzard started putting their games on Steam.
Lets hope he lives for a long time. He isn't exactly old at the current age of 61, but he is chunky and that's a concern.
If Gaben dies then Steam is either bought up or becomes a publicly traded company. Either way, nothing good.
Yes but Counter Strike is just one of many games that Valve owns that is popular. Team Fortress 2 has 70,000 concurrent players. Dota 2 has 644,000. While Fortnite has currently less than a million, which is about the same as Counter Strike 2. I don't know when Fortnite had 6 million concurrent players, but that's not right now. Despite these games are very old and only owned by Valve, they are proven to still retain players.
The thing I don't get here is that it's not like Epic doesn't have the resources to build out EGS correctly.
My dislike for Epic started long ago when ole cliffy buttfuckski started bad mouthing pc gamers as a whole. That and the fact that their attempts at making new UT's have been nothing but lame half-assed attempts. No doubt the people who work on the engine stuff are very intelligent and talented, but other than that as a development studio I feel like they're has-beens. Fortnite? - no comment other than lol. That shit looks like the absolute dumbest game I've ever seen.
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Yes, thank you. I've been writing about this for several years on these boards and everyone seems to think Valve is doing highway robbery when Steam basically gave devs the largest slice of the pie that they've ever gotten ever. And if it's so easy to make a store front that's better for less, then each of these devs should simply be able to do that. So far none have come even close to reaching parity with Steam.
The fact that so many games have their own launcher and store proves otherwise. It's a well established tactic for mid sized developers to sell on their own store for a year or so getting 100% of the profits, then come to Steam later for the extra exposure at a cost of the 30% cut.
I think to prove your point, you'd have to show the profitability of those individual launchers vs those same titles sold on Steam. I don't think they'll paint the picture you want them to paint.
Here’s what annoys me most about EGS, they brag about having the lowest fees and the best rates for developers to publish there. Why are the prices identical to Valves?
