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Epic Games Store Users Have Grown by 173% in Six Years, But Revenue Only by 1.6%
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GoG is generally the better alternative to steam than epic. Steam isn’t perfect but it works and has a decent consumer oriented service. GoG is doing great with conservation and drm free options but their launcher isn’t amazing. Pair either with Heroic games launcher or similar for a great experience on almost any OS
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Nah its the parents of iPad kids. Remember, this is the company that owns the biggest game with kids and teens right now, Fortnite.
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Makes sense, I have an account because it's fun to collect the free games even if I never play them, but I can't see myself spending money there.
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Its almost like half-assing a store front that runs like shit, lacks the most basic features and is generally perceived to be user-hostile is a bad way to attract business. When the freaking open source Heroic Game Launcher does a better job hooking into Epic's servers than their own damn launcher its time to do something. Take one of those millions of dollars you rake in every year and actually invest in the platform for cripes sake! 1. Reduce auto-signouts. This creates friction and forces users to take extra steps to access the game they wish to play. This causes users to go "nah I didn't really feel like playing that right now anyways" 2. Embed system requirements for games into the launcher. Users want to know if they can even install a game before clicking install 3. Show details about a game that a user has clicked on. Seriously if you're going to give away a hundred free games a year, folks aren't going to know jack shit about 90% of the indie titles you're surfacing. Most of the free titles I've actually played I've played because the marketing screenshots and description sounded cool, and I don't want to cross-reference between a web browser and a web-browser-wrapped-into-an-executable-that-runs-like-shit-but-installs-my-games-sometimes 4. SHOW THE GODDAMN DOWNLOAD SIZE AND INSTALL SIZE BEFORE BEGINNING THE DOWNLOAD!!!! My god this is not rocket science, its barely even computer science. Its literally the most basic feature of any software installer developed in the last 50 years, show an estimate for about how much hard drive space is needed. If I have 50GB free on a laptop with a 256GB drive in it, its just russian roulette for if I'll install a game or have to manually sort out my drive being filled to 0 bytes remaining by a game download that never would've completed anyways. 5. Stop forcing updates. If someone's launching a game that needs an update, let them launch it without updating. Also make it easier to force it to check for updates/apply already released updates. The background polling has entirely missed major game updates for my wife's Fortnite, and since those can be 30+GB downloads we'd really much prefer to run those updates when she isn't sitting down to play a bit of Fortnite. 6. Actually enable user reviews. Yes this requires moderation which requires workhours and therefore money. This is the kind of thing that that 10% cut of all sales you take is supposed to pay for. Users want to know what they're getting into before buying a game and committing to installing it and trying it out, let them! 7. Optimize the crap out of your launcher. It doesn't have to be perfect, but it can't be *gestures wildly at everything* this. Reduce the filesize of the webpages, run a few fewer javascripts, use better image compression, just most importantly make the launcher not run like its full of molasses The part that annoys me the most is Epic could simple reduce the free games to bi-weekly and rebudget those same dollars into platform improvements and actually create a viable platform that people don't hate. Just look at Steam, its got some glaring issues (online DRM, [massive illegal gambling problems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_Make_Games#Counter-Strike_skin_gambling), cyberbullying, unclear & inconsistent policies on adult content, rampant shovelware, etc. etc.) but by not being a pain in the butt to use, and having some decent company policies that aren't obviously anti-consumer they have an entire fandom devoted to them. Its just wasted potential. If Tim Sweeney felt like it he could actually build an incredible platform and actually compete with Steam, but instead they just engage in the most disjointed corporate bullshit possible
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GoG is generally the better alternative to steam than epic. Steam isn’t perfect but it works and has a decent consumer oriented service. GoG is doing great with conservation and drm free options but their launcher isn’t amazing. Pair either with Heroic games launcher or similar for a great experience on almost any OS
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I am curious how much of their growth is attributed to cheaters creating infinite accounts to claim free games so if they get banned on one account they just switch to another one.
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Whats the point? I've got to wrestle the client to play them and my speeds are capped ridiculously low. Steam at least doesnt seem to have a tiny cap on update and game downloads. Though sometimes whatever is hosting workshop can be slow.
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Right? The epic store is so slow and sluggish and awful. How fucking hard can it be today to make a good app for a single OS.I think the real atrocity is the inability to properly search on titles that you actually purchased, free or not. At least on Linux I have Heroic to list all games. But on IOS and Android you have to wade through shit or go based on your purchase history to find the titles among the free with in-app purchase shit.
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By redeeming Epic giveaways and never buying anything you are sending profits to the developer while simultaneously costing Epic money. Win/Win.
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Honestly it doesn't sound like it. To get that many new users and that little revenue pretty much implies that most of their "new users" are people who come in to get the free game, and won't put a dime into using it. If I ran a bookstore and did a promo where I gave a book away to everyone once a month. I went from 1000 customers a month, to 2,700 customers a month. but only sold 10 more books each month. That would pretty strongly demonstrate that people don't want to buy my books, and almost all of the increased traffic is people just taking free books and leaving.
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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.
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I caved and bought Alan Wake 2 and Kingdom Hearts Melody of Memories because I lost hope of them ever coming to Steam. The few exclusives they have explains the minimal growth pretty succinctly. I hope nobody involved is surprised
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Epic pays some amount of the price of the game to the devs for every free game claimed, so it costs Epic money and makes money for game devs in exchange for a bit of your time. Sometimes you end up trying a game you never would've purchased and end up loving it. For example, I snagged [Sable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sable_(video_game)) a few months ago for free through Epic and was absolutely blown away by how good that game was. It wasn't even on my radar but I saw it come up as the weekly free game and thought it looked neat so I downloaded it and booted it up
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Besides Epic giving out free games, I also have Luna that has weekly free games to claim. They got plenty of good games to claim in Epic Store. Never claimed a single game. Don't even have Epic Store account and have no will to do so. Fuck Epic. Their business model is shit. They do not want to compete with Valve, they just want to extort them with attraction of free games and release store exclusives.
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That certainly changes the calculation quite a bit, but how many people can be anticipated to claim a given free game is definitely going to be a point of negotiation on how much to pay the publisher to giveaway a given game, so in a roundabout way it does ultimately cost Epic more money if you do claim the games without downloading them
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One of the reasons EGS fails is Fortnite in my opinion. In Fortnite they have done all these things: they created a platform with social abilities and all that. Fortnite still brings them lots and lots of money, but this shouldn't be in Fortnite it should be in their launcher. It could be even more integrated than Steam does. Why not let games grant you skins you can use in other games as a character model (given the game supports it)?Skins part would work only if that is a game made by Epic and only if they would want to implement it. If we are talking about skins that after purchase are available in every or most games - that will never happen. That idea is dead on arrival. I recall web3 supporters claimed that this will happen and even then everybody laughed at them.
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My first thought is that they're eatingtheir own dog food, which is good. But the store still wasn't good last I checked, and it's the end-user experience that matters.In this case it's more like they're shoving their own dog food up their butts. It's technically possible but why would you. They do eat their own dogfood plenty, as their own games are all UE games. Well I guess it's just Fortnite now. Still a good thing that they use their own engine, otherwise it would be hard to have faith in it. But I have no idea why they'd use it for their launcher/store.
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