Download the games too. Up their infastructure costs.

Alan Wake 2 is the only title I ever bought on Epic too. Do not regret it, despite my dislike of Epic and EGS. My desire to support Remedy was magnitudes larger than any desire to protest Tim Sweeny.

I have hundreds of games on epic. I get the free game every time it changes. Never paid for a single thing from them.

I'd sooner post them some cash and pirate it, honestly.

Their entire plan is giving away AAA games for free to lure people in and then make all that money back later by raising prices or subscription models. Its been quite obvious but people just use their shitty store anyways.

I always felt there was promise to a new store with a big backing to challenge Steam. I think Steam is great and it's my primary PC games store, but I see the concern of only having one real player in the market. But EGS simply hasn't done it. It feels like they recognized the reasons Steam is such a huge player in the space; it's not just the library and the sales, but the level of consumer-focused support and features the platform offers. And that's the key, Steam is a _platform_, not just a store. EGS has never become a platform. It's missing features, it's social features are anemic, it's like they put some effort in to get it off the ground and not broken, and then have just hoped giving away free games will somehow magically convince people to spend money there. I think there's reasons to be concerned about Steam, but you cannot ignore how broadly consumer friendly the platform is. Their hardware initiatives only highlight what a complete package their ecosystem is and they're loaded with some of the most consumer-friendly choices in the industry. EGS is stuck in no-man's land. Steam is a better platform, GoG is more consumer-friendly. Humble has Choice which can be a good deal. Fanatical does a better job with sales and credit from purchase. EGS just kind of sits in a no-mans land with no compelling features other than you don't need to spend money to get games, which is great for us but a terrible business strategy for Epic.

the free games store

I bought a couple things on epic early on because I thought competition would be good. But epic kind of sucks and has no Linux support, so I stopped.

still quite impressive given all the free games they give away and presumably pay the publishers for...

It's revenue, so costs don't matter.

Who'd have thought making things free while making a big noise out of it, taking over what people liked without offering tangible improvement, and showing spite towards competition, would cause them to not show healthy growth. Also makes me wonder who finances the.

I wouldn't give them a dime even if it meant playing my favorite series' sequel. I don't like the people behind it, I don't like how they think, I don't like what they envision for the industry, and I don't want to contribute in any measure to any of that ever happening.

Don't they have Fortnite?

Full-circle back to the days of buying computer games through the mail.

Not number of users, mind you, that's the increase in mass of the exact same users.

what does that mean

That the users have put on a lot of weight

Yep, let's see how their profit has improved (or not) in that same timeframe.

The problem is these stores (Epic but also the Microsoft Store and Amazon's PC game store) only come along because some executive says "hey what if instead of Valve taking a cut from most PC games, we took a cut from most PC games", there's 0 interest or intent for them to be competition (as seen by the exclusives) for Steam or improve the developer/user experience. Any time these massive companies offer a cheaper subsidised alternative to any existing product it's to push out the smaller players with less resources and build their own monopoly.

Absolutely. It's also an immense amount of work to get a platform up to a competitive standard with Steam; I'm not sure a small company will ever be able to catch up in any short term time frame. But stores like Fanatical, GreenManGaming, GameBillet, etc. have the better idea of just being stores that focus on getting customers better deals. They don't even attempt to edge onto Steam's turf because a storefront can't compete with Steam, nor can a half-baked launcher. Reality is that Valve has functionally a 20 year head start on any company that wants to try and edge in on their turf. So it can't be done just to get a cut of sales because you're not going to have the follow-through to build the user base if that's your reason.