Epic Games marking people buying too fast as fraudulent users

[D13H4RD]

On 5/22/2019 at 3:51 AM, Bouzoo said:

For serious, is there a single thing they did right with EGS? 

Revenue split. That’s about it.

 

What baffles me is that Epic usually has some good software guys on there. So why does it have to take quite a while to program a shopping cart in, especially since even smaller websites with far less people working on software already does so.

[Jito463]

23 minutes ago, D13H4RD said:

Revenue split. That’s about it.

I would argue they didn't even get that right.  They're basically subsidizing it with the income from Fortnight, which means that the 88/12 model isn't sustainable long term.

[HarryNyquist]

12 hours ago, D13H4RD said:

What baffles me is that Epic usually has some good software guys on there. So why does it have to take quite a while to program a shopping cart in, especially since even smaller websites with far less people working on software already does so.

Because they can't give a shit about this. If they start dedicating resources to making EGS better and on parity with other clients, they take that many more people away from Fortnite work. They actually can't afford to slow down dev on Fortnite.

 

12 hours ago, Jito463 said:

They're basically subsidizing it with the income from Fortnight, which means that the 88/12 model isn't sustainable long term.

Exactly. Unless they keep this up forever, and it will NOT keep up forever, it will fall back to 70/30 like everyone else that doesn't have a cash cow hit.

[Brooksie359]

On 5/21/2019 at 3:57 PM, Waffles13 said:

How is it even possible for them to be this incompetent. I've shopped on extremely niche hobby websites that had totally functional shopping carts with coupon codes and shipping calculators and the whole shebang.

 

Anyone with coding experience: realistically how long would it take a competent programmer to implement a very basic but functional shopping cart into an piece of software? Surely it couldn't be more than a few days to get working and then maybe a week or two to test and double check everything, right? 

 

Even if they give zero shuts about their PR or the user experience, why would they not just throw one or two software devs at it and get it over with? They are throwing around millions of dollars like it's pocket change, how have they not just contracted out to a small team to make their store functional on a basic level? 

They are too busy contracting all the available programmers to make fortnite meme emotes. 

[dalekphalm]

13 hours ago, Jito463 said:

I would argue they didn't even get that right.  They're basically subsidizing it with the income from Fortnight, which means that the 88/12 model isn't sustainable long term.

That's speculation. You don't know that 12% isn't enough to be profitable.

[HarryNyquist]

4 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

That's speculation. You don't know that 12% isn't enough to be profitable.

That's true! But Epic is a unique case among game distribution platforms (among other things) where the split is almost universally 70/30. I would say it's a safe speculation that 88/12 is biting into a bottom line somewhere if no one else is considering or doing it.

[Ominous]

[dalekphalm]

1 minute ago, HarryNyquist said:

That's true! But Epic is a unique case among game distribution platforms (among other things) where the split is almost universally 70/30. I would say it's a safe speculation that 88/12 is biting into a bottom line somewhere if no one else is considering or doing it.

We all know that Epic is undercutting the competition and the normal split.

 

We do not know if it's still profitable or not. Anyone stating for a fact that it's unsustainable, is either a high level Epic executive with insider financial information, or they're lying, because this is not information that is currently public knowledge.

 

It might be so. It might not be so.

 

We do know that Valve makes hundreds of millions per year from their 30% split.

[Thaldor]

21 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

We all know that Epic is undercutting the competition and the normal split.

 

We do not know if it's still profitable or not. Anyone stating for a fact that it's unsustainable, is either a high level Epic executive with insider financial information, or they're lying, because this is not information that is currently public knowledge.

 

It might be so. It might not be so.

 

We do know that Valve makes hundreds of millions per year from their 30% split.

Considering that EGS puts almost every payment costs to the customer, the eshop itself is so under developed that free eshop plugins are better than it and as total the whole system seems as desperate as someone who went to the sea in a barrel, I would say that that 12% cut isn't really profitable or at the best its marginally profitable.

IIRC there was some discussion somewhere a long while ago when Steam Greenlight was changed that even Valve makes looses with their 30% cut with some titles that sell very badly and basicly just some 1 or 2 people buy them (and there's a lot of them in Steam).

EGS might be sligthly profitable as long as they keep the store closed, but if they were to open it like Steam has been opened, they are going to go unprofitable and fast.

It really tells a lot that they push the payment costs to the customers. If the 12% cut would be that profitable, they would eat those costs just because it would be more clear and better marketing, but as they are pushing them to the customers it's quite clear that that 12% cut isn't enough to cover those at most 1-2€/$ costs per payment. I don't know how well it stands even with Steam, but in EU companies must pay the VAT to the country of the customer in webshops, and I would say that Valve can easily eat those costs with their 30-22% cuts, but 12% cut will never be enough in cases like Finland where VAT for games is 24% and could see that if Epic was faced with those the games from EGS would be a lot more expensive in here.

[Jito463]

44 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

That's speculation. You don't know that 12% isn't enough to be profitable.

We do know that fees typically absorbed by other stores (such as Steam) are currently being passed on to customers with EGS.  It is speculation - and I should have worded it better to reflect that - but it's not without logic or reason behind it.

[IWannaBeUniqueMom]

@OP did you have to explain what a shopping cart is? Seriously?

 

Fuck the epic store, only idiots keep it in their PC

[dalekphalm]

3 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

We do know that fees typically absorbed by other stores (such as Steam) are currently being passed on to customers with EGS.  It is speculation - and I should have worded it better to reflect that - but it's not without logic or reason behind it.

That's fair - you can make an educated assumption. But I've seen too many people on here just assume as a fact that EGS's 12% cut is losing them money. They quite likely might be correct. My problem is that they state it as a fact with zero basis or evidence.

 

Anyway, we'll see long term how this plays out.

 

5 minutes ago, Thaldor said:

Considering that EGS puts almost every payment costs to the customer, the eshop itself is so under developed that free eshop plugins are better than it and as total the whole system seems as desperate as someone who went to the sea in a barrel, I would say that that 12% cut isn't really profitable or at the best its marginally profitable.

IIRC there was some discussion somewhere a long while ago when Steam Greenlight was changed that even Valve makes looses with their 30% cut with some titles that sell very badly and basicly just some 1 or 2 people buy them (and there's a lot of them in Steam).

EGS might be sligthly profitable as long as they keep the store closed, but if they were to open it like Steam has been opened, they are going to go unprofitable and fast.

It really tells a lot that they push the payment costs to the customers. If the 12% cut would be that profitable, they would eat those costs just because it would be more clear and better marketing, but as they are pushing them to the customers it's quite clear that that 12% cut isn't enough to cover those at most 1-2€/$ costs per payment. I don't know how well it stands even with Steam, but in EU companies must pay the VAT to the country of the customer in webshops, and I would say that Valve can easily eat those costs with their 30-22% cuts, but 12% cut will never be enough in cases like Finland where VAT for games is 24% and could see that if Epic was faced with those the games from EGS would be a lot more expensive in here.

Developing the initial platform costs a lot of money. This would be true of any platform. Once they've got the foundation, though, getting a return on their investment might well be possible with 12%, over the long term. We simply don't know.

 

And also passing on fees to the customer is a pretty standard tactic for "discount" type retailers. You have to pay the fees, but you also know they're charging you the bare minimum anyway.

 

Now - in this case, this more benefits the developer than the consumer, since the consumer doesn't see a lower price on the EGS store. So you have to decide whether supporting the developer is worth paying those fees, etc.

[Thaldor]

2 minutes ago, IWannaBeUniqueMom said:

@OP did you have to explain what a shopping cart is? Seriously?

 

1 minute ago, dalekphalm said:

Developing the initial platform costs a lot of money. This would be true of any platform. Once they've got the foundation, though, getting a return on their investment might well be possible with 12%, over the long term. We simply don't know.

 

And also passing on fees to the customer is a pretty standard tactic for "discount" type retailers. You have to pay the fees, but you also know they're charging you the bare minimum anyway.

 

Now - in this case, this more benefits the developer than the consumer, since the consumer doesn't see a lower price on the EGS store. So you have to decide whether supporting the developer is worth paying those fees, etc.

My (more or less) educated guess is that in long run EGS is unprofitable with 12%. That might be profitable with big titles that sell well, but if Valve manages to make losses with 30% cut, there will be a lot more unprofitable titles with 12% cut. Also the difference with high sale title cuts (12% vs. 22%) is huge and if that 12% would really be profitable, Valve would be swimming in money with even one high sale title. That 30% cut is in any case huge (physical sales have the same and they have a ton more costs included), but when companies are not making that well (AFAIK GOG isn't swimming in money and they take 30% cut) even with that I would say that 12% cut is probably just barely covering the costs.