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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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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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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.I disagree with your statement. 20 years of head start could also be seen as 20 years of polishing a previously non-existent service. Today Steam's features are widely known. Just make an app with same or similar features and you're golden. The blueprint is there! As an example of "what-could-have-been" I would present Immich which is an alternative to Google Photos and iCloud. Developed by a tiny group of people. It does lack some features that Google Photos/iCloud has. But for the most part it easily could substitute anyone's photo-storing needs. If bunch of people with no money in their pocket and only free time off work managed to develop a fully functional, well polished photo app that would rival market giants, why cant market giants make something that would rival Steam?
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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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You're still being an "active user" that they can use to pad their numbers and entice investors. If you want to hurt Epic the best way to do it is to not log into their system at all.I mean defining "active users" is an inherently political choice in any metric. You're ultimately choosing how to slice the data for analysis, so if you adjust your metrics on customers who only claim free games vs customers who actually spend money on the platform the data can tell completely different stories. I suppose the point is, collecting the free games probably creates non-negligable costs for Epic, and how that looks on their released metrics is entirely up to how the data gets sliced
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I mean defining "active users" is an inherently political choice in any metric. You're ultimately choosing how to slice the data for analysis, so if you adjust your metrics on customers who only claim free games vs customers who actually spend money on the platform the data can tell completely different stories. I suppose the point is, collecting the free games probably creates non-negligable costs for Epic, and how that looks on their released metrics is entirely up to how the data gets slicedIt's a negligible cost. Evidenced by the fact that despite a significant number of "new users" just collecting the free games and not spending any money, EGS continues to give away free games. Clearly padding the number of users is worth it to them more than the 'cost' of those users claiming a free license on their account. Otherwise they would stop doing it.
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I disagree with your statement. 20 years of head start could also be seen as 20 years of polishing a previously non-existent service. Today Steam's features are widely known. Just make an app with same or similar features and you're golden. The blueprint is there! As an example of "what-could-have-been" I would present Immich which is an alternative to Google Photos and iCloud. Developed by a tiny group of people. It does lack some features that Google Photos/iCloud has. But for the most part it easily could substitute anyone's photo-storing needs. If bunch of people with no money in their pocket and only free time off work managed to develop a fully functional, well polished photo app that would rival market giants, why cant market giants make something that would rival Steam?Comparing a photo app to steam is like comparing basic addition to quantum physics. The sheer amount of complexity that goes into the business side out side of just the app it self is truly immense. Steam is more then just an app. It's entire business empire with years and years of connections, agreements and contracts, secondary services, infrastructure and more. Even if you managed to clone steam 1:1 you would still have nothing. The app alone is honestly the least important aspect of the entire thing.
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