Epic Games Admits In Court That Its PC Store Still Isn't Profitable
The company behind Fortnite is currently in a legal fight against Google over in-app fees
It's absolutely terrible, if it wasn't for the free games no one would use it at all.
I am waiting for the day that they hide our "free"-library behind a subscription.
They sure aren't making money from me. Thanks for the free games I guess.
I have hundreds of free games on it.
I just object to digital only games in principle, unless at a huge discount.
Even my Steam account is like a thousand games from bundles.
The good news is that most free games were DRM free!
They had GTA V for free at some point
Free games were a great way to "get us there" but not a great way to monetize us. They haven't come up with that. I've bought exactly 3 games on Epic, two that I price-camped because they were too expensive. The free games didn't influence my decision.
The third was a free game where they had the best price around on a "more complete edition". (Pathfinder Kingmaker). I feel like they could've done more of that if they wanted to monetize the free.
But what all these game stores need is to change the rules. GoG tried by making their Galaxy app pretty good at importing others' apps. I feel like someone (Epic? lol) could go all-in supporting and helping maintain an open-source game management app like Playnite, so people who use that app would put Epic on the same tier as Steam, and then Epic would just have to win on an even playing field.
And if Epic provided a "find your price in all services" extension to an app like Playnite, and then just made sure to be $1 cheaper on everything, they'd dominate the market.
Or they could just continue doing what they're doing and keep losing money.
The user interface looks and feels like it was designed by the 17-year-old "gifted" nephew of the CTO as a gig to make a little money before going to Uni.
Blowing up millions per years because you couldn't be arsed to hire a senior UX/UI expert and a proper experience team to make that website is the very definition of stupid.
For those of you that don't play rocket league, it is a prime example of just how badly epic is willing to fuck up a game for a dollar. Literally Mr. Crabs.
This December 5th, they are removing player to player trading from RL. Why would they alienate such a core faction of their player base?
Fortnite.
Apparently, that game is getting a racing mode and they want you to be able to drive your rocket league car in Fortnite. Apparently, the only possible way to make this happen is to eliminate player trading.
Now, every single high value item like alpha boost ($5-7k) or a white hate ($???k) is worthless. Now, if there is a particular item you really want, you can wait for rng to drop it, or nrg for it to show up in the shop where you can expect to pay a minimum of x10 credit it would have cost you on the trading market.
I expect a class action lawsuit. They locked player to player trading behind a purchase of credits. They made hundreds of thousands of players pay for a feature and are now removing that feature in a blindly idiotic money grab.
FUCK EPIC GAMES.
I play RL daily but had no idea about any of this (don't trade nor particularly care about items).
I mean they made the app using a fucking game engine. Who knows what stupid idea they will come up with next.
Makes me think of the old saying (so applicable in IT, and I say this as also a mea culpa for what I do sometimes) that "When all you have is a big bloody hammer, everything looks like a nail"
The epic game store feels like a rushed, impulse move by some boomer manager.
Id be more inclined to use the launcher if it was more like steams. The epic launcher feels more like a store than a library of my games.
Exactly.
The only time I ever look at the store tab in Steam is when there's a sale on.
Otherwise, all I ever see and use is my library.
Steam has been improved over decades, epic has to play catch-up
That is true for all the community driven stuff like forums and mods, but laying the groundwork and including basic features would've been easier when starting from scratch.
Even the first versions of steam that came with hl2 back in the day were more usable than epic's trash launcher.
Steam is a laggy ass launcher that is infected with Google malware.
Even if you choose to not load up the store it is still taking up a gig of you RAM.
The same way you don't have to view the store on Steam, you don't have to view the store on Epic or any other launcher they are all seperate.
Steam has the worst UI of most launchers and thier games page is basically an extention of thier store page. Literally 80% of a games page is devoted to bullshit and DLC and thing people want like achievements gets a 5% little block off to the side.
Steam has the worst UI of all the launchers? You're saying it's worse than Epic, UPlay, Microsoft Store/Xbox, Origin/EA app, Bethesda, Battle.net?
If you're on a VPN, it reloads about every minute, meaning you can't even scroll through your game library, or read the summary or watch a video for a game you're considering buying. Their shoddy, clueless coding literally makes it impossible to shop in their store without disconnecting from my VPN, which is not happening.
Still not usable
Don’t they hook telemetry into their downloads? Maybe like… stop doing that? Why would anyone purchase an objectively worse product for the same price?
But it's free and-or exclusive. I'm honestly terrified of how much money they have from Fortnite+UE they can buy their consumers into surrendering, and failing at it.
To me, Epic Games store is nothing. They have no official Linux support while Steam does. And also games purchased on Steam works on Steam Deck too!
Good! Let's keep it that way
Objectively, for such a third party store, their prices are just too expensively normal. If they dropped them instead of giving and paying for free copies of games to people who've shat on their store, they'd probably be in a better position.
The only thing I use EGS for is Unreal, having the marketplace built in is pretty nice, but how Unity does it is still better.
Here's what it's like being their neighbor lol https://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2023/11/03/epic-games-cary-hq-will-it-ever-happen.html
Redditors are going to have foam in their mouth over this.
Personally I bought games on EGS and then always ran them without any issues with Heroic, the FOSS GOG/EGS launcher that also works on steam deck. I got better deals on epic than steam in recent years (especially back when they did coupons) and the devs got a better cut as well. It's a shame to hear they're not even breaking even, I think even GOG is at least self-sustaining.
That's the thing, Devs usually don't get a better cut, publishers do. So unless their publisher isn't hoarding all the money (lmao) or they self-publish their games, Devs don't even get to smell that extra cut.
