> "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.
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'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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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%.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> ”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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
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.
>"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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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) .
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.
Epic's 2019 P&L was published as part of Epic v. Apple. According to that:
* Fortnight revenue was $5.5B in 2018 and $3.8B in 2019
* Employee counts in those years: 1063 and 1932
* Average "People" cost per employee: $141K, $142K (CPI adjusted is $182K in 2026).
* Average "Production & Hosting" cost per employee: $189K, $150K (CPI $248K, $194K)
* Platform royalty expenses were 25% of total game revenue
* Slightly under half their Operating Expenses were people
* Fortnight was >90% of revenue
I have a strong guess that "People" costs doesn't include all salaries, and that many employees are categorized under "Production & Hosting", although I expect that also includes other costs. I'll guess 75% is people, which makes total CPI adjusted average cost per employee somewhere around $320K-$370K, but I'll say $320K.
This means 5000 employees cost around $1.6B and cutting 1000 saved around $320M/year in addition to $500M of other costs.
Most estimates of Fortnight revenue claim it's roughly flat or falling between 2020 and 2025 fluctuating between $3B and $6B.
Unless Unreal Engine or EGS revenue took off, it's kind of weird to quadruple headcount while keeping revenue basically flat or falling. If fortnight only makes $2B next year, then they would be underwater on just royalties and salaries.
Not long ago I was looking at my favorite games of decades past. Unreal Tournament figured very prominently, made of course by Epic. So I wondered: why did they stop making Unreal games? I looked at their game chronology. On one hand, they made Gears of War, an Xbox exclusive that never interested me. And the other one? Oh, right: Fortnite. That's where Unreal Tournament went. They made tons of money for sure. But no company, including Epic, has made a competitive FPS + CTF game as solid as UT, UT2003, or UT2004 since that era
They had Unreal Tournament 4 in development around 2018 but it never gained much traction in the pre-alpha phase. Once Fortnite blew up they seemed to just focus on that and their app store.
Halo Infinite is the closest I've gotten to the UT feeling nowadays. Simple arena, equal playing field, drop in drop out, tools-not-loadouts design. It's a shame how a variable and strong design gets put off into the corner to wither.
I wanted to play UT2004 for some nostalgia recently. Turns out even though I own it on the Epic game store, I can't play it because Epic removed it from the Epic game store.
I think the problem is also that there are many FPS multiplayer CTF games even if they are not all great, they all compete for attention in a crowded market. Destiny, Call of Duty and all their variants.
>The folks impacted by the layoffs will receive a severance package that includes at least four months of base pay, with more based on tenure. We’re also extending Epic-paid healthcare coverage.
>For example, in the U.S., they’ll receive paid coverage for 6 months. We’ll also accelerate their stock options vesting through January 2027 and extend equity exercise options for up to two years.
Speaking personally, the move to unreal engine 5 ruined the feel of the game. Somehow it had a very unique and polished gameplay loop that was as addicting as CS and the unreal 5 launch changed it, at least for the hardware I was running
There are three other submissions in the queue and likely more on this.
I know someone in Epic and they told me that its no secret inside Epic that Roblox is killing them. Why? He told me a story where a neighbors kid came by and wanted to play Roblox but he told the kid he didn't have Roblox. The child replied "It's easy! I'll show you!" and this 8 year old sat at his PC, downloaded a few MB client, signs in, selects a game and is playing within minutes. The game was a brain dead platform jumping game where you jump to the top of a tower. No enemies. No items. No anything. Just get to the top. Yay. At one point the kid fell down and the game offered to move him back to where he was for $3. Yup a fucking game hit a kid up for hard cash. The people who makes these games are child predators. Scum really.
Epics problem is Unreal can't be easily deployed like Roblox. You want to play Lego star-wars? You need to first download the base Lego game of 30GB then the 20GB Star Wars pack. A Roblox user just downloads a small client, signs in and is ready to play a stupid simple game that isn't 50+ GB. Unfortunately most of those games are not games but attention stealers that entice users to spend real money on NOTHING.
Shame that everything has been boiled down to an attention and money milking scam.
The difference is that Roblox has a thousand "attention stealers" which have enough gameplay and multiplayer fun to keep an eight year old entertained for a long time. Fortnite is just the same recycled concept over and over, with an interface that is difficult for a child on a console. There are a number of Roblox games that are genuinely well-designed and fun, don't let the graphics fool you.
(Also, eight year olds don't have $3 in Robux unless someone buys it for them, so blame the parents as well)
No, Epic's problem is that they saw Roblox's success and went "we deserve that too because we say so, let's go all-in on this market that is already dominated by an established player!"
Roblox isn't killing Epic, Epic is killing itself by desperately trying to steal Roblox's players when they have no reason to stop playing Roblox. Even if they released a 50MB Fortnite client that streams low quality assets like Roblox, it would be no different because those kids would simply keep playing what everyone else is already playing. Tim Sweeney making another tweet about his metaverse or whatever isn't going to change that.
The Valve comparison is apt. The difference is Valve built Steam as infrastructure first, then quietly stepped back from games. Epic did it backwards — they built the game first, then tried to force the infrastructure (EGS) into existence with money. Much harder to do it that way.
Valve built more games than Epic in the past 10 years. Epic essentially only released Robo Recall and Fortnite + extra content, plus a spinoff of Rocket League which was an acquisition. Valve released a couple of duds (Artifact, Dota Underlords) but also some good games: Half-Life: Alyx, Counter-Strike 2, and Deadlock. They also did "The Lab" and "Aperture Desk Job" which, while not full games, were quite good as demos for their hardware.
I remember when Steam was just something I had to crack to play HL2 as a broke uni student. In the intervening decades I’ve shelled out for over 500 games on Gabe’s little experiment. Wild.
Not a single comment mentioning UEFN? Epic's failed attempt at copying Roblox?
Epic has been pissing money away paying "creators" to churn out slop "red versus blue" modes/maps for Epic's meta-verse.
A lot of these maps are effectively hello world applications. Like the lowest of low quality. You add in a few weapon spawns, a few prefab buildings, and you're done. Time to get yourself a few thousand a month.
Fortnite is 9 years old this year. Epic brought in biblical amounts of money from just this one property over this time. Where and how did they spend this money?
For context, they recently increased the prices of the game's cosmetics significantly to, and I quote, "help pay the bills" [1].
Apparently, that wasn't enough, and the billions of dollars in revenue the game makes every year are simply too little to keep the lights on. So now they're laying off over a thousand people and cutting several official gamemodes, so they can continue paying hundreds of millions to the creators of AI slop modes like Steal the Brainrot [2].
It's becoming increasingly clear that Epic Games is a dysfunctional company that simply stumbled onto a golden goose by sheer luck, and now that the goose can't lay eggs any faster to keep the line going up, they're panicking.
Epic was very lucky with Fortnite. Originally they showed the game at GDC as more of a mining, resource collection and building game. Frankly it looked boring.
Changing that to a shooter with the Battle Royale mechanic was a $10 billion win. They have managed it pretty well, but it seems they just over extended without innovating to attract and retain players.
> "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.
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.
> Just make it a nice experience.
Haven’t you been paying attention? That’s not how we do things in business anymore…
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.
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.
Steam was first to market and it took forever for competitors to form.
It being a good service is secondary.
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
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.
I can run Epic and GoG games in Steamdeck. All Steam had to do is not block them.
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.
It does use Chromium.
Any web browser can seem slow vs a native app, though.
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.
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.
I think you’re massively underestimating the network effects in play. Steam has an enormous moat.
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.
> 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.
[delayed]
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.
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
> Your experience can't just be nicer,
No but it has to be at least nicer and they didn't manage that.
Why did they need to make a store? Seems like there was no need for it...
Maybe they saw the 30% cut Apple and Google were taking on their app stores and wanted in on the action?
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.
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%.
The irony here should be lost on no one.
The the lawsuit with apple:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Apple
The massive set of fines...
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/...
> Just make it a nice experience.
That might get in the way of greed and hubris.
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.
> 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?
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.
I'll stop there. I could rant for much longer.
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.
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
EGS doesn't even have a Linux version.
Steam is always going to be my first choice because Linux support is better. If I buy on Steam I know it's going to work.
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.
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.
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.
If this were true than Epic would have eaten Steam's lunch.
or network effects are keeping people on a worse platform?
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?
> 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.
Why would Apple care if WhatsApp has a monopoly? They don’t make money from iMessage
That must be why they're so happy to open up iMessage to Android in the US!
Network effects on iMessage mean people buy iPhones
Gamers complain about layoffs, but the largest invisible cause behind them is Steam’s 30% cut, which nobody acknowledges.
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.
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...
> similar fees
No? Epic charges 12% (with the first $1m free) vs. Valve’s frankly extortionate (i.e. industry standard) 30%.
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.
Steam will also provide publishers with free activation keys that they can sell direct to customer without the 30% charge.
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.
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.
bingo. At least they didn't use AI as the "excuse" for the layoffs though ...
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
Everybody says this. It's so weird.
How on earth will epic win without exclusives? It's like launching some Facebook competitor "but you get two profile pictures". Noone would switch.
All these geeks singing steam and lamenting competition. Competition bad for me mkay, steam good.
/me shakes head
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.
This is definitely wrong, Steam’s stickiness is a massive selling point.
What part? Finish your thought.
Steam is sticky (social features, network effects, etc) and EGS is not, so EGS exclusives do not work. What part of this is "definitely wrong"?
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.
> ”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.
The epic store with its giveaways and exclusivity deals is probably burning money.
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.
They explicitly stated this as a reason during their last layoff cycle.
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?
No percentage will make it profitable when they are giving away the games.
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.
And which one of them are we reading about laying off employees while admitting they are spending more than they are bringing in?
The one that doesn't have a monopoly on the market.
This. You need to fire your CFO immediately if you don't have billions of dollars in cash after the run you just had on Fortnite.
They should've setup an endowment fund, could've been self sustainable by now.
Kids who play video games grow up, and get off Fortnite, and you have to convince the next generation to sign up.
And anyways, the population who plays these kind of live service shooters is relatively constant imo, and there are new games on the block nowadays.
Actually what's an anomaly is how long Fortnite continued to be popular.
I don’t think this is necessarily what is happening.
Roblox predates Fortnite by a decade and is only getting more popular over time
> 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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is no longer "producing at quadruple the old pace". That peaked around 2022.
Epic is funny like that. They arent a publicly traded company and yet they act like one.
Epic is 40% owned by Chinese conglomerate Tencent, which is publicly traded.
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.
>"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.
They have ~5000 employees.
Most game companies are a tiny fraction of that size. Even most AAA games are made by teams of hundreds. Not teams of thousands.
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
Riot Games (League of Legends, Valorant) - 4,500
Roblox - 3,500
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.
It's well-known that most of the work on SteamOS is done by vendors on behalf of Valve (both individual kernel authors and agencies like Igalia).
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.
Epic games store is likely a main culprit as they really have not succeeded while spending tons for free games
Mihoyo literally prints money with predatory gacha
Riot has had several layoffs in recent years
Roblox loses tons of money every year
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
You know what contractors are?!
The biggest competitor to Unreal engine, Unity, once had ~8000 employees. And Unity doesn't even make games.
(Not saying this is justified, of course. I think Unity is pretty much doomed.)
All the lawsuits they are doing
Fortnite is almost 10 years old, I'd be interested to see the average age of the playerbase. People have less time for games when they get older.
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.
My 11 year old son plays Fortnite almost daily. He plays other games too but Fortnite is what he plays with his friends online.
Because games is simply not a particularly profitable industry. There's a reason why Valve moved on from making games to being a digital landlord.
I'm gonna need someone smarter than me to show me the numbers on that. Fornite by itself is insanely profitable.
That's like saying playing baseball must be profitable because of how much money A-Rod made. The returns are skewed.
A game can be massively popular but many many games fail to hit the mark. Many do not see success and many do not even ship.
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.
Just because it's popular, doesn't mean it's financially successful. Take a look at YouTube. They lost money hand over fist for decades.
Fortnite alone is estimated to produce more than five billion USD in annual revenue every year since 2018
Every year the licensing fees add up as they add more collaborations, while revenue is not rising to match.
They didn't need to do any of that by the way.
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.
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.
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.
It is full of street performers, some manage to strike a deal with a label, and tour the world once.
Afterwards depends on how they manage to keep surfing the success wave.
Basically.
Fortnite is exactly the guy who tour the world once and twice and thrice.
Indeed, pity are all the others that haven't.
Is it games overall or specific genres? I always regard games that have stores and strong at UA as something else.
It’s a power law distribution.
Games are an obscenely, absurdly profitable industry. Particularly the successful ones.
Lottery is obscenely, absurdly profitable employment. Particularly for the ones who win it.
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 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.
Steam works on the top 2 most played games on Steam right now.
It's the leading entertainment industry, beating tv/film/music. If you can't find profit there then you're not doing your job.
If you think Epic Games is unique in doing layoffs this year, I don't think you're paying particularly close attention to the games industry.
Did I say that? I'm just attacking your thesis that games aren't profitable.
Discretionary spending is the first victim in a recession.
Citation needed.
Look at NVidia's stock price during the period when they announced a pivot away from gaming.
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.
Is the gaming market huge or is it 1/15th as valuable as an alternative for investors? Even if the answer is both, what's the net effect of this?
Nvidia doesn't make games, this is one of the worst takes I've ever seen on this site.
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.
Because of basic economics. The opportunity size of AI for NVidia is unlike anything we have ever seen. Of course they pivoted.
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.
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) .
Valve wants a boat that is independent of microsoft. Not to go down with that Tit.A.I.nic seems like a smart move.
Exactly, and they've not been quiet about it. It's why Steam works on Mac and Linux and they work so hard on being independent of all of those.
Hardly when their business depends on running Windows games on top of Proton.
Independence of paying Windows licenses or Microsoft store taxes, sure.
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.
Sure, if the goal is like doing retrogaming with Windows games as if it was WinUAE.
The point is that Proton puts them in a win win position. If Windows stays popular, they're fine. If Windows tanks, they're fine.
If Windows tanks their fountain runs dry.
What is the scenario where windows becomes so unpopular, computer games stop being made entirely instead of another OS filling that gap?
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.
Really, where are those Linux builds?
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.
Epic's 2019 P&L was published as part of Epic v. Apple. According to that:
* Fortnight revenue was $5.5B in 2018 and $3.8B in 2019
* Employee counts in those years: 1063 and 1932
* Average "People" cost per employee: $141K, $142K (CPI adjusted is $182K in 2026).
* Average "Production & Hosting" cost per employee: $189K, $150K (CPI $248K, $194K)
* Platform royalty expenses were 25% of total game revenue
* Slightly under half their Operating Expenses were people
* Fortnight was >90% of revenue
I have a strong guess that "People" costs doesn't include all salaries, and that many employees are categorized under "Production & Hosting", although I expect that also includes other costs. I'll guess 75% is people, which makes total CPI adjusted average cost per employee somewhere around $320K-$370K, but I'll say $320K.
This means 5000 employees cost around $1.6B and cutting 1000 saved around $320M/year in addition to $500M of other costs.
Most estimates of Fortnight revenue claim it's roughly flat or falling between 2020 and 2025 fluctuating between $3B and $6B.
Unless Unreal Engine or EGS revenue took off, it's kind of weird to quadruple headcount while keeping revenue basically flat or falling. If fortnight only makes $2B next year, then they would be underwater on just royalties and salaries.
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/20696836/epic-apple-t...
Epic gave away 662 Million free games in 2025 alone. They pay the game devs for each copy they give away. They've been doing this for 8+ years.
https://insider-gaming.com/epic-games-store-give-away-662-mi...
In addition they've payed other game devs for Epic Game Store exclusivity so games would be available for 1 year before being released on Steam.
The whole company has been mismanaged into the side of a mountain.
I still don't know which is stupider: this, or Unity buying Weta.
Not long ago I was looking at my favorite games of decades past. Unreal Tournament figured very prominently, made of course by Epic. So I wondered: why did they stop making Unreal games? I looked at their game chronology. On one hand, they made Gears of War, an Xbox exclusive that never interested me. And the other one? Oh, right: Fortnite. That's where Unreal Tournament went. They made tons of money for sure. But no company, including Epic, has made a competitive FPS + CTF game as solid as UT, UT2003, or UT2004 since that era
They had Unreal Tournament 4 in development around 2018 but it never gained much traction in the pre-alpha phase. Once Fortnite blew up they seemed to just focus on that and their app store.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3botRkqnwk
Halo Infinite is the closest I've gotten to the UT feeling nowadays. Simple arena, equal playing field, drop in drop out, tools-not-loadouts design. It's a shame how a variable and strong design gets put off into the corner to wither.
Splitgate 1 felt a lot like UT2k4 combined with Halo to me. Really fast, really fun.
I wanted to play UT2004 for some nostalgia recently. Turns out even though I own it on the Epic game store, I can't play it because Epic removed it from the Epic game store.
Didn't they make the game free? Or was that just UT99?
I think the problem is also that there are many FPS multiplayer CTF games even if they are not all great, they all compete for attention in a crowded market. Destiny, Call of Duty and all their variants.
>The folks impacted by the layoffs will receive a severance package that includes at least four months of base pay, with more based on tenure. We’re also extending Epic-paid healthcare coverage.
>For example, in the U.S., they’ll receive paid coverage for 6 months. We’ll also accelerate their stock options vesting through January 2027 and extend equity exercise options for up to two years.
https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/todays-layoffs
Epic should learn from Valve. The only guy touching TF2 is a cleaning manager who dusts off serves once in a year.
Coupled with the recent price increase of V-Bucks, things do not look like they are shaping up well.
https://www.fortnite.com/news/fortnite-v-bucks-price-increas...
Seems like Epic won the battle against Apple, but lost the war. My kids haven't played Fortnite since it was dropped from the Apple Store.
Wow and I thought the amount of money my son pays for skins alone would be more than enough to keep the entire company afloat
They have way too many employees for what they do.
Speaking personally, the move to unreal engine 5 ruined the feel of the game. Somehow it had a very unique and polished gameplay loop that was as addicting as CS and the unreal 5 launch changed it, at least for the hardware I was running
There are three other submissions in the queue and likely more on this.
I know someone in Epic and they told me that its no secret inside Epic that Roblox is killing them. Why? He told me a story where a neighbors kid came by and wanted to play Roblox but he told the kid he didn't have Roblox. The child replied "It's easy! I'll show you!" and this 8 year old sat at his PC, downloaded a few MB client, signs in, selects a game and is playing within minutes. The game was a brain dead platform jumping game where you jump to the top of a tower. No enemies. No items. No anything. Just get to the top. Yay. At one point the kid fell down and the game offered to move him back to where he was for $3. Yup a fucking game hit a kid up for hard cash. The people who makes these games are child predators. Scum really.
Epics problem is Unreal can't be easily deployed like Roblox. You want to play Lego star-wars? You need to first download the base Lego game of 30GB then the 20GB Star Wars pack. A Roblox user just downloads a small client, signs in and is ready to play a stupid simple game that isn't 50+ GB. Unfortunately most of those games are not games but attention stealers that entice users to spend real money on NOTHING.
Shame that everything has been boiled down to an attention and money milking scam.
The difference is that Roblox has a thousand "attention stealers" which have enough gameplay and multiplayer fun to keep an eight year old entertained for a long time. Fortnite is just the same recycled concept over and over, with an interface that is difficult for a child on a console. There are a number of Roblox games that are genuinely well-designed and fun, don't let the graphics fool you.
(Also, eight year olds don't have $3 in Robux unless someone buys it for them, so blame the parents as well)
No, Epic's problem is that they saw Roblox's success and went "we deserve that too because we say so, let's go all-in on this market that is already dominated by an established player!"
Roblox isn't killing Epic, Epic is killing itself by desperately trying to steal Roblox's players when they have no reason to stop playing Roblox. Even if they released a 50MB Fortnite client that streams low quality assets like Roblox, it would be no different because those kids would simply keep playing what everyone else is already playing. Tim Sweeney making another tweet about his metaverse or whatever isn't going to change that.
The Valve comparison is apt. The difference is Valve built Steam as infrastructure first, then quietly stepped back from games. Epic did it backwards — they built the game first, then tried to force the infrastructure (EGS) into existence with money. Much harder to do it that way.
> Epic did it backwards — they built the game first, then tried to force the infrastructure (EGS) into existence with money.
Didn't Valve push Steam through HL2? It's a different kind of forcing of course, but still.
Valve built more games than Epic in the past 10 years. Epic essentially only released Robo Recall and Fortnite + extra content, plus a spinoff of Rocket League which was an acquisition. Valve released a couple of duds (Artifact, Dota Underlords) but also some good games: Half-Life: Alyx, Counter-Strike 2, and Deadlock. They also did "The Lab" and "Aperture Desk Job" which, while not full games, were quite good as demos for their hardware.
I remember when Steam was just something I had to crack to play HL2 as a broke uni student. In the intervening decades I’ve shelled out for over 500 games on Gabe’s little experiment. Wild.
"As the first-person shooter game Fortnite"
What? If the person writing the article is so unfamiliar with the subject they are writing about, they likely should not be writing about it.
Not a single comment mentioning UEFN? Epic's failed attempt at copying Roblox?
Epic has been pissing money away paying "creators" to churn out slop "red versus blue" modes/maps for Epic's meta-verse.
A lot of these maps are effectively hello world applications. Like the lowest of low quality. You add in a few weapon spawns, a few prefab buildings, and you're done. Time to get yourself a few thousand a month.
Fortnite is 9 years old this year. Epic brought in biblical amounts of money from just this one property over this time. Where and how did they spend this money?
Let's see...
- Millions spent rushing out huge amounts of Fortnite content at a breakneck pace
- Millions spent organizing, designing and marketing 5 new Fortnite collabs every week
- Millions spent trying to wrangle Fortnite's spaghetti codebase as it crumbles under more than a decade of tech debt
- Millions spent trying and failing to keep the content pipeline flowing at a constant speed despite the tech debt
- Millions spent developing a failed Roblox competitor inside Fortnite
- Millions spent paying people to create awful AI generated games in their failed Roblox competitor
- Millions spent developing their own "metaverse" of brand-focused modes that nobody plays in their failed Roblox competitor
- Millions spent developing a failed Steam competitor
- Millions spent paying off developers to release their games exclusively on their failed Steam competitor
- Millions spent giving away free games every week on their failed Steam competitor
- Millions spent lining executives' pockets
It's really not hard to see where all that money is going.
Fortnite usage fell? Maybe there's hope for humanity after all.
Duplicate
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47504996
> Fortnite "Usage"
I like this choice of word, it seems fitting.
For context, they recently increased the prices of the game's cosmetics significantly to, and I quote, "help pay the bills" [1].
Apparently, that wasn't enough, and the billions of dollars in revenue the game makes every year are simply too little to keep the lights on. So now they're laying off over a thousand people and cutting several official gamemodes, so they can continue paying hundreds of millions to the creators of AI slop modes like Steal the Brainrot [2].
It's becoming increasingly clear that Epic Games is a dysfunctional company that simply stumbled onto a golden goose by sheer luck, and now that the goose can't lay eggs any faster to keep the line going up, they're panicking.
[1] https://www.fortnite.com/news/fortnite-v-bucks-price-increas...
[2] https://www.fortnite.com/news/fortnite-developers-will-soon-...
Epic was very lucky with Fortnite. Originally they showed the game at GDC as more of a mining, resource collection and building game. Frankly it looked boring.
Changing that to a shooter with the Battle Royale mechanic was a $10 billion win. They have managed it pretty well, but it seems they just over extended without innovating to attract and retain players.
Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47503239
Since when do people refer to game playing as usage?