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> While Fortnite is starting to grow again, the growth is driven primarily by creator content with significant revenue sharing, and this is a lower margin busin
by fidotron 3y ago
> While Fortnite is starting to grow again, the growth is driven primarily by creator content with significant revenue sharing, and this is a lower margin business than we had when Fortnite Battle Royale took off and began funding our expansion. Success with the creator ecosystem is a great achievement, but it means a major structural change to our economics.
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> We’ve built the best engine in the world, and will be hosting Unreal Fest next week to bring the community together and spotlight the things they are building with Unreal Engine and UEFN. Creators are making a living building for the Fortnite ecosystem, with time in third-party games now exceeding first-party.
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> We've been taking steps to reduce our legal expenses, but are continuing the fight against Apple and Google distribution monopolies and taxes, so the metaverse can thrive and bring opportunity to Epic and all other developers.
They are absolutely positioning Fortnite as a higher fidelity Roblox, with a view to becoming a whole gaming platform. It is a curious strategy to attack the legal foundations of one App Store while you attempt to build your own.
One of the bits of noise bouncing around the games industry is the extent to which UEFN is being seen as a sort of proving ground for teams and ideas. How viable it actually is as a business has yet to be seen.
- jncfhnb 3y agoI don’t think it’s that curious. Epic’s argument is that the App Store is fully closed and uses that forced exclusivity to take an unfair share of things, while also controlling things like discoverability. Epic’s platforms are 60% cheaper than Valve and Apple, allows for in app purchases that don’t leverage epic and thus give them no money, and from the sound of it is much more creator friendly than something like the ridiculous economics of Roblox (not familiar with it though)
- brookst 3y agoIt’s a great business model. Let someone else take the risks and sell the hardware, then use regulators to open the complementary goods to be undercut. Assuming they eventually win against Apple, they will make a fortune when they take on the console market with the precedent.
- jncfhnb 3y agoThe ideal state is healthy competition where consumers can choose to interact with the platform they want, and platforms need to reduce their cuts of revenue to be competitive. Platforms leveraging their market position to keep shares of revenue at 30% is insane.
- brookst 3y agoHow is it insane? I shipped an app and made some decent money. How much did Apple / Google do for me? Well, without the app stores and hardware sales I estimate I would have made $0. There is value in building and maintaining an ecosystem. I get they nobody likes paying a middleman, but there is value there.
- jncfhnb 3y agoIt is insane because you are willfully accepting an environment where a company forbids competition against itself using its market position in a different market (hardware). It’s great that they provide this service to you. But if they had competition it would be way cheaper and better
- brookst 3y agoSure, but by that logic we should do away with patents and copyrights. As a consumer, once someone has invested the energy and money to produce something, it’s better for me if someone else can clone it and sell it cheaper. But that’s not good long term. If there’s no reward for success, there’s no incentive to risk failure.
- jncfhnb 3y agoThis statement is stupidly unqualified. Yes, we should reward investments and inventions. No, that broad sentiment does not suffice to support Apple getting to tax all software at 30% by virtues of their hardware market control And forbidding competition against themselves.