Here's Epic's Enshittification Journey as a platform. Let it be known that it didn't have to be this way. Epic (Mega)Games was a mild-mannered game development

Here's Epic's Enshittification Journey as a platform. Let it be known that it didn't have to be this way. Epic (Mega)Games was a mild-mannered game development company that sold a popular engine used in many AAA games. Act I; Users lured, moats built: Epic pivoted towards Games-as-a-Service. They took investment [0] and guidance from Tencent to the tune of 40% of the company. Fortnite and the F2P Unreal Tournament reboot were developed and released in this timeframe. These free titles would bring in the gamers into the Epic ecosystem. Act II; Users exploited, business customers courted: Fortnite adds subscriptions in 2017 (Battle Pass Season 2 [1]) and makes money hand-over-fist. At the same time, the Tencent deal allowed them to relicense their engine away from the high upfront cost to "Free" until a certain point [2]. They also charged a far less cut than Steam, used hundreds of millions of dollars of their own investment to bring other developers to the ecosystem, as well as publishing a number of games that used the engine. This lured developers to the platform with their own dreams of Fortnite revenues. More investment poured in. Relating this back to the original article here, in 2019 Epic gave a grant of $1.2 million to Blender [3] to develop their tools to integrate Unreal Engine, including those for visual artists and film. Act III; Everybody is shafted: See my original comment. [0]: https://www.investopedia.com/news/how-tencent-changed-fortnite-creator-epic-games-fortunes/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/how-tencent-changed-fortni... [1]: https://fortnite.fandom.com/wiki/Season_2 https://fortnite.fandom.com/wiki/Season_2 [2]: https://fortune.com/2015/03/03/epic-games-unreal-tech-free/ https://fortune.com/2015/03/03/epic-games-unreal-tech-free/ [3]: https://www.blender.org/press/epic-games-supports-blender-foundation-with-1-2-million-epic-megagrant/ https://www.blender.org/press/epic-games-supports-blender-fo...