The price of taking on Steam - Epic Games loosing money with EGS according to Apple

[PCGuy_5960]

2 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

The revenue has declined im pretty sure the last time I checked. That being said it's still over 1 billion dollars so can't say it's a small amount of money they are making on fortnite still. Honestly I don't think the game will ever really go away just like games like csgo or league of legends. Sure the popularity might fall but not to zero. Multi-player games have incredible replay ability which is why they are so popular and because the fortnite is free it is easily accessible to all while also having good ways to monetize it. 

Yeah, compared to its peak fortnite definitely isn't making as much money as it used to, but quite frankly, I don't think any game can compete with fortnite's peak. My point was that the game is still alive and brings in huge amounts of money to epic games, the only thing that has (at least in my experience) changed is the target audience.

[DrMacintosh]

“Investors, it is true that we’re losing a lot of money, but let me explain to you why that’s a good thing so you can give me even more money!” -Epic

[Nicnac]

Welp imma take the free games as long as it lasts  still spend more times in games I launch thru steam tho 

[Kisai]

11 hours ago, DriftMan said:

1. Create shitty store

2. Waste money on getting exclusive games on your shitty store

3. ????

4. Still have a shitty store, don't understand why you are so hated

 

Good guy EGS doing their very best: crap

If I'm being blunt...

 

EGS, cut your losses. Ubisoft and EA Origin already learned this the hard way that nobody wants a third party store. Likewise  the only store worse than EGS is Microsoft's.

 

It's a lesson that gets repeated so many times in different tech industries it's almost as if the idiots that run these companies all went to the same business school. "We want to keep all the moneys, so let's duplicate services that other companies have experience with with our talentless hacks, and surely people will want to give us all the moneys."

 

Like EA Origin is very much garbage, same with Ubisoft Uplay. EGS is no different in any aspect other than giving games away for free. I have so little confidence in the store being around in 5 years I'm unwilling to spend money on it if the same title is available on Steam, or is likely to be on Steam in the next 2 years.

 

That's EGS's only opportunity, is to secure exclusives and piss off everyone who wants to play that game. 

 

It's the same problem Google/Stadia didn't learn either. Only Google's own hubris tends to result in self-owns. How many times a third party game console has come out (yes including the "Steam" game console), and it was firmly ignored.

 

Look, I'll give these "alternatives" one thing, we need to be reminded every 5 years that console hardware is garbage, and if they'd just all go away, every game would be on the PC. Game developers do not want an open ecosystem because they know the pirates are on the PC. They could always just produce the games for iOS/MacOS first instead, but Apple's refusal to make any gaming-level computer keeps this from happening. Apple could make an exclusivity deal with Nintendo, where Apple products run Multiplayer Switch titles in a cross-play environment (eg Mario Maker, Mario Party, Smash Bros, Pokemon) to expand the reach of the franchise, and an emulated environment (NES/SNES/N64/GB/GBA/DS/GC/Wii/WiiU/3DS) that requires the Nintendo eShop account to be connected. Yet I see Nintendo would rather just set money on fire and never provide a way to play these games easily like SEGA does.

 

Epic getting Kingdom Hearts from Disney/Square-Enix seems like another EGS attempt at locking in exclusivity, but keep in mind that the game is already on the PS4, or even the PS2 (for KH1 and KH2) and if you already have a console, you're not going to buy an additional copy just for the sake of having it on PC.

 

Until such time there is a way to have a unified ownership of a game end user license across game stores on any platform, nobody wants there to be multiple game stores, they want to use the one that all their stuff is already on. EGS would have to quite literately block Steam from getting ANY and ALL games for consecutive years to force anyone to use EGS.

 

 

[Touch My Hamm]

I have issues with Steam mostly because its customer support is almost non existent and with Steam greenlight and prelaunch games they have allowed some very sketchy games on the platform some of which proved having coin miners or suspicious software that are still sitting on the store. Its hard to take on something that hasnt had competition for so long that its hard to pull people away. The store is the main reason I believe that valve sort of stopped making games. It makes sense to capitalize on the store since its pulling in easier money (probably more when you count in dev costs of a game). 

 

The next iteration for me would be one launcher that without utilization impact hold all my friends lists and groups cross every launcher while having the ability to cross play with all of them. Everything right now is either in very early development or has a large impact on performance due to having the need to communicate live with all the launchers. I think we are too early for subscription based launchers giving you all games (see origin some people might like it but not mass accepted). 

[tikker]

4 hours ago, DrMacintosh said:

“Investors, it is true that we’re losing a lot of money, but let me explain to you why that’s a good thing so you can give me even more money!” -Epic

WW1984 spoilers, don't read if you care about that movie

Spoiler

Why does that sentence, in my mind, match so well with Maxwell Lord in Wonder Woman 1984 lol.

That movie basically sums it up

Quote

Black Gold Cooperative Epic Games continued to portray an outward appearance of success, but had actually started becoming financially unviable due to a lack of any oil discoveries <insert whatever game or pro-consumer feature here>.

What's next. Epic becoming a Monkey's Paw and starting to grant peoples wishes?

 

 

This ball has to come around, no? Call it an "investment" all you want, but you can only take so much water before the ship will sink. They'll have to start thinking about turning a profit at some point.

 

23 minutes ago, GodSeph said:

The next iteration for me would be one launcher that without utilization impact hold all my friends lists and groups cross every launcher while having the ability to cross play with all of them.

Fingers crossed we'll get this golden egg at some point, after we're through this 15 standards phase. It's the "streaming wars" all over again. I hope the bubble pops and that we realise that gaming (and streaming) are areas where (in my opinion of course) a monopoly is beneficial.

[Neftex]

??? theyre not buying exclusives to make direct profit on them, theyre buying them to get people comfortable with using their platform. as long as they make profit from overall sales theyre doing it right

[Doobeedoo]

Can they just focus on developing new UT game, I know I ask too much.

[Rauten]

No surprise there; it was obvious from the very onset that the idea was/is to use the money they're making from Fortnite into establishing a userbase through exclusivities and free giveaways to position themselves as competition to Steam.

Noone thought the store itself was going to be profitable for a looooong while.

 

2 hours ago, Doobeedoo said:

Can they just focus on developing new UT game, I know I ask too much.

UT? What is that? Some kind of cereal brand? </s>

[Kroon]

Something a lot of posters here are forgetting is that there is two sides to a store.  There is a developer side and a consumer side.  From a developers perspective are EGS so much better then any alternative, specially if you are using Unreal engine.  Even as a small time developer you get a lot of help not only in the implementation of EGS in your game but even things like marketing and general development help.  Compared to Steam that only throw a API in your face and till you to solve it your self.  Previous there have been a good Steam developer community to ask but that is now failing and Steam offers no help at all.

 

So I'm thinking that Epic are doing a smart thing here.  First they get the developers to engage/invest time into their plattform and when the back end are built up they will start om improving the consumer side of the shop.  Because this is an chicken and egg problem, without developers they can get customers.

 

5 hours ago, Doobeedoo said:

Can they just focus on developing new UT game, I know I ask too much.

Was not long ago Epic said that this segment/genre was not large enough at the moment. Perhaps in a few years things will change.

 

 

[Touch My Hamm]

17 hours ago, tikker said:

I hope the bubble pops and that we realise that gaming (and streaming) are areas where (in my opinion of course) a monopoly is beneficial.

I am not 100% sure if your hoping for a monopoly or not with this? I would disagree if you are referring to monopoly being beneficial. We can see this with steam, When Valve used to make games and first made the store and now it does very little except sit here taking bigger and bigger % of a sale from the developers. Pretty much anywhere there is a monopoly we see stagnant progress since there is no need for it. 

We can take intel where from 2000 series up till AMD released Ryzen we say every CPU have maybe a 5-10% performance boost with 4 cores and 8 threads with increasing prices. Now with competition we have selection and 2 companies going at it to get our money forcing each other to either lower prices or give a better deal. With world events its hard to have the full argument since Covid cannot be taken as the standard of what happens with sales. 

[JZStudios]

On 4/12/2021 at 3:14 AM, RejZoR said:

I only use EGS for free games too. As for exclusives, I just waited for Borderlands 3 to come to steam and bought it there. I just don't want to use EGS really. Steam and GOG are enough. Hell, even Origin is a massive annoyance as is and I only use it for Battlefield, Dead Space and Need for Speed games. Outside of that I often don't even install it.

Since I'm cheap EGS has been my main source of playing and installing games. Outside it being dumb to move game drives, I've had exactly zero issues with EGS at all, unlike Steam which is constantly breaking something. Steam was always a pile of shit, I don't know why people like it so much. Everything it does, it does poorly and there's better places to do them.

 

On 4/12/2021 at 4:37 AM, Stahlmann said:

There was GOG 2.0 that promised to bring all the different clients together and launch all your games from one app. But you still have to run ALL these apps in the background if you want GOG to launch these games.

 

I really try to get everything on steam and avoid the other platforms as much as possible. The only one of these that is allowed to automatically launch on my PC startup is steam. The main reason why i have games on the other platforms are because either they are simply not available anywhere else or i bought a key online and didn't watch out for what store it was.

No you don't. Galaxy will open and launch the client, and you can have it exit the client when the game closes, even Steam which normally doesn't allow for that.

GOG games also don't require Galaxy.

 

Ironically, this is why EGS exists. Steam has a stranglehold on the market despite being garbage and people refuse to shop other stores.

 

On 4/12/2021 at 8:06 AM, Zodiark1593 said:

I pretty much stick to GoG as the games don’t complain about being offline all the time, or a game I want to play single-player outright stop working due to “needing” a multi GB update. 
 

I don’t even use the launcher. I just downloaded the standalone installs. I’d really love for more PC titles to go standalone as well. Some of my favorite games regrettably are only available on Steam (or console). 

A lot of EGS games (not all) are DRM free, though you do need the launcher to download them. Some games like Arkham Knight had that shitty denuvo removed on EGS so it runs better than it does on Steam, unless they updated it at some point.

[RejZoR]

@JZStudios

Reason we love Steam so much isn't because it's the best. We're just fed up with running 50 game clients

 

[tikker]

1 hour ago, GodSeph said:

I am not 100% sure if your hoping for a monopoly or not with this? I would disagree if you are referring to monopoly being beneficial. We can see this with steam, When Valve used to make games and first made the store and now it does very little except sit here taking bigger and bigger % of a sale from the developers. Pretty much anywhere there is a monopoly we see stagnant progress since there is no need for it. 

We can take intel where from 2000 series up till AMD released Ryzen we say every CPU have maybe a 5-10% performance boost with 4 cores and 8 threads with increasing prices. Now with competition we have selection and 2 companies going at it to get our money forcing each other to either lower prices or give a better deal. With world events its hard to have the full argument since Covid cannot be taken as the standard of what happens with sales. 

Fair point. To clarify, I did not mean to imply a monopoly is beneficial in general. I also agree with your point about needing competition for innovation to happen, but how much more can you innovate on "Add to cart > purchase". Epic's innovation there is apparently to forego a shopping cart alltogether.

 

Your example of Intel, Nvidia, AMD is one I fully agree with. That's an area where we benefit a lot from competition. For streaming services the argument is perhaps a bit stronger than for gaming storefronts. The former leads to having to have a dozen $10 a month subscriptions to cover every show (which could also be a plus, say if you only care about Disney content you go to Disney+), while the latter are (for now) still free to use.

 

I'm not saying Steam is an angel and it's a free market after all, so developers/publishers who don't agree with that 30% cut, for example, can go and have gone elsewhere as we see. The problem with a million clients and storefronts for me is that everything gets spread so thinly. No longer are achievements centralised, hours played differs, friendlists need to multiplied and, worst of all, if they decide to publish on another platform "launching" it from that platform launchers their launcher to launch your game anyway.

 

Now Steam isn't really a textbook monopoly and maybe I shouldn't be praying for an actual monopoly. For me it's more like Google. Sure there are others out there, but nothing beats "the one". Why I think that a monopoly of Steam or whatever may not be so bad here is that there is no competition or innovation going on in my opinion. The only way most of these stores and launchers seem compete is with carrots on sticks and preventing you from obtaining the game anywhere except their store. I'm also obviously biased, as I grew up with Steam from almost its conception.

 

20 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

@JZStudios

Reason we love Steam so much isn't because it's the best. We're just fed up with running 50 game clients

 

Plenty of hate when Steam first came out as well.

38 minutes ago, JZStudios said:

I've had exactly zero issues with EGS at all, unlike Steam which is constantly breaking something. Steam was always a pile of shit, I don't know why people like it so much. Everything it does, it does poorly and there's better places to do them.

EGS is a far cry from those better places though.

[Blademaster91]

52 minutes ago, JZStudios said:

Since I'm cheap EGS has been my main source of playing and installing games. Outside it being dumb to move game drives, I've had exactly zero issues with EGS at all, unlike Steam which is constantly breaking something. Steam was always a pile of shit, I don't know why people like it so much. Everything it does, it does poorly and there's better places to do them.

Well I've never had an issue with Steam, and not being able to move a game drive easily definitely seems like a pain to use compared to Steam, but not surprising for a launcher that still doesn't even have a shopping cart.

Sure the free games are tempting but having Steam, Origin, Uplay, and GOG are enough launchers for me so i'm not even interested in EGS, and last time I considered using EGS I heard pausing downloads doesn't always work and thats a feature I like if I don't want to leave my PC on to download a game.

[Sauron]

Absolutely irrelevant, the EGS isn't the only way developers have to release a game for Windows.

[Stahlmann]

1 hour ago, JZStudios said:

Ironically, this is why EGS exists. Steam has a stranglehold on the market despite being garbage and people refuse to shop other stores.

I personally don't think steam is garbage at all. Otherwise why would so many people use it?

 

That's the same with so many people saying Windows 10 is crap, but in the end most people use it because it's the best OS around.

[Fatih19]

On 4/13/2021 at 1:05 AM, DrMacintosh said:

“Investors, it is true that we’re losing a lot of money, but let me explain to you why that’s a good thing so you can give me even more money!” -Epic

"That's a good thing" - a certain Vermont senator.

[Zodiark1593]

8 hours ago, JZStudios said:

 

 

A lot of EGS games (not all) are DRM free, though you do need the launcher to download them. Some games like Arkham Knight had that shitty denuvo removed on EGS so it runs better than it does on Steam, unless they updated it at some point.

One game I’d really like to have (legit, my favorite RPG) is Final Fantasy XII, though as it’s on only Steam, I’m pretty much stuck emulating the IZJS version (quirks and all), or on my Playstation 2 at a “crisp” 640 x 480i. I’d probably pay up the standard $60 if I could get a stand-alone download. 

[brownninja97]

I've got to the point where I just want the EGS store to fail, I am worried that other companies could see it as the standard and mimic it, anyone with a whole lot of money can just brute force their way into making all sorts of titles exclusive to their subpar platform that I dont want to be a part of. Its great that they have given away a lot but I cant see people staying on their platform, nothing motivates me to come back to it apart from exclusives and quite a large number of people will just wait for a year. EGS just seems like a money pit, once fortnite dries up I cant imagine they will want to keep a failing product losing hundreds of millions a year. Sure Unreal engine will keep them profiting overall but this just isnt sustainable. Its only a matter of time before the bean counters kick the doors down and start asking questions about how they are gonna turn this around. 

 

Honestly whats going to make this profitable aside from free give aways, exclusives and the sales dotted over the year. 

 

In the past year their main competition has smashed its all time login record and ingame record and likely sold the most games it ever has. With rumors of gamepass coming to it how can egs match that. It just seems like a failed project to me. 

[Kisai]

On 4/13/2021 at 9:56 AM, RejZoR said:

@JZStudios

Reason we love Steam so much isn't because it's the best. We're just fed up with running 50 game clients

 

This.

 

Also, the lack of patches for old games when the developer disappears, game auto-updaters don't work, etc.

 

However that's not always the case. GOG is marginally better at having updated versions of dosbox, where as Steam versions of legacy games contain ancient versions of dosbox, and often are missing install tools needed to configure the game. However neither Steam or GOG ever release DOS titles with a customized dosbox that supports the intended sound hardware of the game (eg MT-32, General Midi) which results in most games having the OPL-2 music hardware which is far inferior. It doesn't help that Windows and MacOS have essentially removed MIDI sound card support. Unless you're doing DAW work, some kind of hacky work-around is needed to use the OS midi support. 

 

Then you have games that were designed for Windows 3.1 which do not work at all. Games designed for Windows 95/98 that had obscure copy protection that won't work, and games that only work in 8-bit palette full screen mode that Windows no longer supports.

 

In fact of all the old games I've been trying to make work, I've had better luck getting pre-1994 games to work, than I've had 1994-2005 games work. Many of these games, if not re-released on steam require disc cracks, or making an ISO of the game disc to work on Windows 10.

 

 

[jagdtigger]

On 4/12/2021 at 10:46 PM, Kisai said:

pirates are on the PC.

And on consoles too....

[LAwLz]

I really don't get all the hate people seem to have for Epic games.

I don't think it's any better or worse than Steam. Actually, I take that back. I think EGS is slightly better than Steam because it gives more money to the developers rather than the middle-man.

 

I am getting strong religion-like vibes from people when it comes to Steam and EGS. People seem to WANT to hate one and love the other. 

[Kisai]

8 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

And on consoles too....

Pirates on consoles have to work for it and usually risk destroying the hardware in the process. Now if you mean pirates who dumped the games for other pirates to play on emulators, no that's nearly exclusive to PC (Windows and Linux), because again, they have to work for it. 

 

eg, dumping disc games, you need hardware or modified consoles. dumping rom carts, you need a modified console or a dedicated rom copier. This is why I just roll my eyes and go "whatever" when people talk about homebrew. One would not have gone through the effort to acquire a copier unit if you had not intended to play pirated games on the original hardware, and likewise repro carts are simply counterfeit copies that will wreck your original console because they're made with non-vintage parts.

 

The people who make the mods, the blanks carts for repro's, the software to do the hacking, know their work will be used almost entirely for piracy and they are fine with that, because it "might" allow playing fan-localizations on vintage hardware, which is far more frequently seen than the more typical romhack or homebrew. Like the most interesting thing out there is extending functionality of the SNES to have cd-quality audio sound tracks, since it can be accomplished in two ways: Pirating the OST/use fan-remixes, or enhancing the SPC to replace the samples.

 

Yet, ebay and used game stores are now littered with repros which are pirate copies of carts. If it looks too clean, it's probably a repro. English copy of unreleased japanese game in a SNES cart shape? yeah, fake.

 

You know what's nice about Steam? Many indie games make the soundtrack available without having to hack apart or write a tool to extract/mod the game to get the music. You don't see this on any other game store. Heck the only reason I have the Smash Bros sound track on CD was because Nintendo made the CD available at some point. I almost forgotten I had legitimately bought it and didn't have to do something ridiculous to get it onto the various devices that play music. I'd like to own copies of the sound tracks of many games I played going back to the SNES era, but alas, if any were produced for Japanese games (eg Mario and Zelda) they never made it to stores here, then or now.

 

EGS doesn't offer anything compelling but "free games", but one game every two weeks, of quality that can be anywhere from a 10 year old game to a brand new game, most of these have been on steam already. This does not endear me to making purchases on the store, it just turns it into a gamified "check in every day to see if we offered something else for free", even if I've only ever played like two of these free games in the entirety the EGS has been available.

 

It would be different if the "Free games" were perpetual, eg if they were ever offered for free, you could get them for free or for a "catch up" cost rather than paying full price, so EGS ends up with a list like Stadia ends up with a list of games that you can play with your $10/mo or spend, but even Stadia just outright deletes things from Stadia pro, and if you forget about it for a month because you were busy, those games will go bye-bye. Maybe you were never interested in them.

 

Suffice it to say EGS, and Stadia in this regard is as bad as coupon-clipping nonsense everyone had to do, and sometimes till do, to get the best prices on things, if you don't waste several hours of your time, you end up spending a lot more on things, but likewise when something is on sale, you just keep paying money for things you don't necessarily need or want because of FOMO. 

 

This all really needs to stop. I like free games, but I don't like the idea that you have only a week or two to redeem it, because that just drives people to "buy" all the free games out of FOMO and just drives fake engagement, yes maybe 10,000 people "bought" the free game, but maybe only 20 people actually downloaded and played it. The only game that ever really did insanely good on EGS for being free is GTAV.

 

The games you pay money for though? What's the point if I can get it on steam already? EGS may be willing to lose money to "gain market share" through loss-leaders, but software doesn't really have loss leaders when the vast majority of "free, perpetual" games are just P2W Lootbox/Gachapon style money/time-sinks, and the only stuff people care about is available on much more functional platforms.

 

 

 

[jagdtigger]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

Pirates on consoles have to work for it and usually risk destroying the hardware in the process.

HW modding is a thing of the past, now they are using SW mods (vulnerabilities mainly). And it does not destroy the HW, worst that can happen that the OS gets borked but you can recover from that at home with a few basic tools (for the PS4 you only need a thumbdrive for example).