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They aren't losing money on Fortnite, they're losing money on vanity projects like the Epic Game Store where they spend tens of millions of dollars for exclusiv

They aren't losing money on Fortnite, they're losing money on vanity projects like the Epic Game Store where they spend tens of millions of dollars for exclusivity deals with developers, and give away free games to try to poach Steam users with an otherwise inferior product. Unfortunately it is their employees that are paying the price of leadership making it rain with their overflowing coffers they couldn't help but burn.

dclowd9901 7mo ago
This was the first thing that came to mind with me as well: the language of the reasoning for the layoffs. It's never a leadership failure is it?
Ethee 7mo ago
It's still funny to me that they would rather burn 9 figures in cash on these silly deals to try and 'trap' gamers on their platform instead of just... I don't know... making a better platform? The reason nobody competes with Steam is simply the sheer number of integration and platform features that make it easy to buy, play and share games with my friends. It's not that hard, stop trying to 'force' me to use your platform. Just make it a nice experience.
- yoyohello13 7mo ago
  > Just make it a nice experience. Haven’t you been paying attention? That’s not how we do things in business anymore…
  - lacy_tinpot 7mo ago
    It's truly incredible how difficult business people make doing business. Doing business is very simple, easy, and straightforward, but I suspect in a lot of cases the individual behavioral aspects of the executives get in the way of doing good business. Direction and leadership is something that these companies never seem to get right.
    - joe_mamba 7mo ago
      >It's truly incredible how difficult business people make doing business. And they're the ones making the most money and avoiding the layoffs.
  - malfist 7mo ago
    Well, we might make it a nice experience until we've attracted enough of you people to have a network affect. And then it's a steady march of price increases, additional revenue streams (including selling your data!) and reduction in features because they were "too expensive to maintain"
  - uyzstvqs 7mo ago
    Steam does. That's why they're the undefeated king. This applies to everything. If you see a product category where users are legitimately unhappy; then enter it, build something actually good, you'll be the biggest and richest in no-time.
    - laughing_man 7mo ago
      That's what's happening to Windows as we speak.
    - troosevelt 7mo ago
      Steam has a lot of issues but there are too just lots of areas where better products don't win out over inferior products, that's just not how the world works for lots of reasons.
      - storus 7mo ago
        Updating games on HDDs on Steam takes ages; I often see the download complete but then wait another 30 minutes for their diff to complete; and that happens with 10-20 games every week when they have big updates (10GB+). Just for this one thing I would switch elsewhere.
    - jrozner 7mo ago
      People hated steam when it launched but you needed it to play CS 1.6. It made installing mods easier. Then HL2 released, orange box, and they were able to get a critical mass as they provided platforms support for other games. Steam got better. It’s still not great but they have so much market share that basically any PC gamer already has it. Epic wants some of that money. The problem is nobody wants to install another store and they aren’t doing anything to improve gamer’s experience other than giving away games and having some exclusives. They’ll never hit the critical mass needed that way.
      - pas 7mo ago
        it was pretty meh back then, so people had pretty understandable reasons. it made LAN parties harder for example :) but it got a lot better. Epic had more money and time compared to Valve. and their store is still worse. sure, Steam has an enormous moat, but that won't be the case forever, Epic should be ready with a nice platform to exploit niches that Valve misses instead they hemorrhage money on things that does not make their fundamental position any better.
  - DANmode 7mo ago
    Not with that attitude! Demanding it is how Steam came about!
  - red-iron-pine 7mo ago
    only if you're publicly traded
- zer00eyz 7mo ago
  The irony here should be lost on no one. The the lawsuit with apple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Apple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Apple The massive set of fines... https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/fortnite-video-game-maker-epic-games-pay-more-half-billion-dollars-over-ftc-allegations https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/... > Just make it a nice experience. That might get in the way of greed and hubris.
  - slumberlust 7mo ago
    I think sweeny is an awful person overall. The lawsuit against apple and google is a net positive for consumers though. Having someone as big as Epic stand up to these digital silos is a good thing.
    - zer00eyz 7mo ago
      Assume for one moment that they were all great people over there. I suspect that they would STILL be in the same boat that they are in. You see a silo where I see a service provider. Does apple make money on doing what they do.. You bet. But the lesson here is that they make that money because of scale, and without it replacing payment processing, fraud management, and the customer service you need with it is a HARD problem. Epic needs more than Fortnite to justify running all that on their own or it's going to turn into a black hole: because payment processing for "digital goods" is a nightmare. I suspect that both apple and googles extension into payments at point of sale, has contractual ties to their App Store payment processing. Something Epic will always lack. The real pain in the ass here is the incumbent card processors, and their fee structures. I suspect that the industry is going to need to go back and re-visit micro transactions in the coming years.
    - johnnyanmac 7mo ago
      I think he's still at heart a developer. That's why all his initiatives that aren't Fortnite are so developer friendly. But he still is a CEO. So there will naturally be some evils he seeps into to make the company (and himself) richer. He still has his own interests, but my second hand experience is that even these layoffs are relatively respectful compared to most of the industry. I recognize that CEO side. But it's a real shame many people mostly turned on him in order to defend Steam. Steam sure isn't a saint either.
- glenstein 7mo ago
  One of the more fascinating parts of the Xbox plan of attack for its new console is its apparent marriage of Xbox, Steam, and Epic among possibly others in a unified console experience. Having a true console like experience with a variety of PC game stores plugged in I think is a rare lane available for Xbox to try and do something other than reproduce Steam but worse, and I'm curious how it's going to go.
  - bigfishrunning 7mo ago
    My guess is it doesn't go well -- with Gamepass they've taught Xbox gamers not to buy games, and with Steam integration they've given Xbox gamers a competing place to buy games (where Microsoft will pay a percentage to steam!) It'll probably turn a division of Microsoft that usually loses money into one that loses...more money.
  - hiccuphippo 7mo ago
    I can run Epic and GoG games in Steamdeck. All Steam had to do is not block them.
    - glenstein 7mo ago
      Right and itch.io and much besides. However, these integrations are janky and not built in as first class console experiences. Not that they need to be necessarily, I think having the steam store is enough in many respects. But for me, the dream is being able to browse and install games from itch.io with the same convenience as steam itself. So there's at least notionally and unclaimed lane for providing that kind of experience. It's the only available Lane that I can think of for out-Steaming Steam.
      - hiccuphippo 7mo ago
        Does Itch have a CLI for installing the games? From Heroic's FAQ, that's the first step for adding support to the store. https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher/issues/4605 https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher... Not exactly first class, but one step away.
- brendoelfrendo 7mo ago
  > It's not that hard, stop trying to 'force' me to use your platform. Just make it a nice experience. I feel like this is good advice, and should still be a pillar of building a business: prioritize customer satisfaction, and your happy customers will become repeat customers. But I don't think it's enough. Epic tried to launch a store in 2018, 15 years after the launch of Steam. That's 15 years of customers buying their games on steam, building a friends list, and getting used to making Steam their PC gaming "home." How do you convince someone who might have hundreds of games tied to one online account, that it is in their interest to open a new online account with a new merchant and start over from scratch? Your experience can't just be nicer, it needs to have some level of appeal that convinces customers to peel themselves away from whatever platform is their current default. I don't have a good answer for how to accomplish this. Epic tried it by paying devs for exclusives and freebies, litigation, and a PR campaign that Valve and Apple and Google were ripping people off. Their approach was hostile and didn't prioritize making a nice experience, and it seems to have failed. But I think these platforms are sticker than we give them credit for, and just making a nice experience isn't enough.
  - tayo42 7mo ago
    Why did they need to make a store? Seems like there was no need for it...
    - saalweachter 7mo ago
      Maybe they saw the 30% cut Apple and Google were taking on their app stores and wanted in on the action?
    - brendoelfrendo 7mo ago
      Why does anyone need to make a store? Walmart and Target both exist. Generally, consumer choice and industry competition are considered good things that drive innovation and the nicer experiences we're talking about.
      - kgwgk 7mo ago
- Hamuko 7mo ago
  Not only does Epic refuse to make their game store any better, Tim Sweeney will continue to whine about how Steam's 30% cut is way too much. Surely if it's too much, Epic Games should be able to provide the same service for their cut? But no, they continue selling a moped while saying how all of the motorcycle manufacturers are ripping you off.
  - tcmart14 7mo ago
    And lets not forget Tim Sweeney's dishonest representation. Sure, Steam can take a 30% cut, but they also offer a lot of avenues to avoid that. With Steam, a publisher can get a ton of activation codes and sell those activation codes on their site and not get hit with the 30% cut. No fee on in-game transactions, and as you build a user base for your games, Steam also lowers the 30%.
- keyringlight 7mo ago
  I can't help thinking the battle was lost before it even started, no matter how good the offering was because the PC and mobile platforms (where epic operate their store) have 99.9% already decided who owns them. The way I see it Epic wanted to copy what Counter-strike and HL2 was to Steam, but using Fortnite to push their store for a fresh generation of gamers. The problem is they couldn't replace or exist alongside the incumbents while trying to bring in more than a trivial amount of income. The only way I can see the outcome being different is if they were in the position Valve were in around 25 years ago with a fresh or poorly served market or something other than video games, few remember Stardock Desktop as a place they got their games.
  - surgical_fire 7mo ago
    They could totally carve their niche if they focused in making their store better. Could it surpass Steam? Probably not. But you don't need to surpass Steam to have a viable, profitable store. GoG is the alternative that proves the rule - it is smaller, but they have their niche offering. EGS is shit, and relied on exclusives (which everyone typically hates, especially on PC).
    - jamesfinlayson 7mo ago
      Yeah GOG for me fills a niche - old/classic games with no DRM. I realise that I can get them mostly from Steam but I support GOG and their goals.
    - keyringlight 7mo ago
      IIRC GoG has a pretty poor history in actually turning a profit with the exception of when CD Projekt release on of their own games, and even then they do the vast majority of their business on steam or the console stores. If GoG was a decent money-spinner then CP projekt wouldn't have split if off. Even a niche has a cost to operate, and that's with GoG being a pretty plain service on top of game downloads.
      - chupasaurus 7mo ago
- tcmart14 7mo ago
  As much as I love steam, some of this isn't even a high bar. I've always had issues with stuff loading slow or odd behavior on the steam store tab in the application. My understanding is it's because the store tab in the steam application is essentially a web browser, and it sorta works like ass.
  - 9x39 7mo ago
    It does use Chromium. Any web browser can seem slow vs a native app, though.
- ericd 7mo ago
  I think you’re massively underestimating the network effects in play. Steam has an enormous moat.
- mort96 7mo ago
  > The reason nobody competes with Steam is simply the sheer number of integration and platform features that make it easy to buy, play and share games with my friends. I don't agree. The reason I personally prefer Steam is that all my existing games are on Steam so if I keep buying on Steam I don't have to make and maintain accounts on other stores, if I keep buying my games on Steam I can keep using Steam as my only game launcher, and all my friends are on Steam so games with Steam multiplayer integration are easier to play if I too play it through Steam. The Epic Games Store client and game integration could be significantly better from a technical perspective in every possible way, and I would not be interested in moving to it. Steam is good enough and switching has a massive cost. I can't really imagine much that would make me use the Epic Games Store other than exclusivity or the promise of free games. Though I would be more likely to just not play a particular game if it's only available through the Epic Games Store.
  - zem 7mo ago
    agreed, the epic games store is crappy enough that i will not use it even for free and/or exclusive games. I might have if it was marketed as a clean, unobtrusive experience, but we all know that will never happen.
  - TulliusCicero 7mo ago
    It's both things, really. But other platforms really are rather pathetic in terms of feature set compared to Steam. Steam has a bajillion features, and it looks like other platforms aren't even trying to compete to provide a good user experience.
  - Aeolun 7mo ago
    If Steam was run by EA I’d abandon it in a second though. All those games that are left behind aren’t super relevant since I already barely play them.
  - wongarsu 7mo ago
    Another big thing is trust. With any of these digital markets I'm not truly buying games, I'm purchasing a revocable license. That requires a certain amount of trust that the platform isn't going to screw me over. Steam isn't perfect: they initially had to be forced to offer refunds, and their item economy enables barely disguised gambling. But by and large they have behaved very predictably and consumer-friendly. Sometimes by outright consumer-friendly policies like generous refunds or labeling games with AI assets. But usually by just not doing anything greedy. Or as the meme goes: "Gabe does nothing. wins."
- johnnyanmac 7mo ago
  Network effects disagree, sadly. You don't get market share from the leader by simply "being better". There's way better netowkrs than Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit out there. But some habits are as harder to break than they were to form.
  - Ethee 7mo ago
    I don't disagree with what you're saying. But for technical platforms it needs to be a combination of both. Discord is the perfect example of this, plenty of people I know of were completely fine with their Mumble/Teamspeak/Ventrilo setups, and in a lot of cases some of those were better than what Discord was offering for individual features, but the overall feature set and platform ease-of-use that Discord was offering drew in a large initial user base which then created the network effect you describe. A lot of my friends feel 'locked in' to Discord now and with their age verification roll out fiasco a lot of people want to leave, but there isn't a single offering that matches Discord's platform features and integrations. There definitely needs to be an incentive to leave sometimes and break away from that network effect, but if there's no actual competition then obviously yeah you're always going to be stuck.
- motbus3 7mo ago
  Let me make a disclaimer, I don't if it is true as CEO speech truthfulness seems to be made by ai. But once I saw the interview with the guy from epic or someone big there, I don't remember and they said the money for developers was from marketing campaigns which makes sense to me. They said that they wanted to make a better experience so the developers themselves would try to help being people to the platform but that never happened. It seems that the technology behind the epic store is, epically broken, pun intended. I've read somewhere that they tried to decouple chunks of the store and restart but the thing was so poorly done that it would be more expensive than just let it fade away and at some point they had a new epic store 2 created from scratch but to develop it to the end would be too expensive. As a swe myself, maybe they were trying to scale to steam level before being steam? I don't know. My last experience trying to use epic was trying to buy a game. But being greeted by a store login, then a loader of a store then a initial store that tried very hard to sell me call of duty and EA stuff. I found whatever I was trying to buy but I couldn't due to some bug in the payment. And never again. Not for any particular reason. I just didn't spend more time there. And now, with these layoffs what are they going to do? Are they revoke all the licenses for the games they gave and sold?
- Morromist 7mo ago
  I like having a huge library of games on epic-store but when I try to buy a game there - because they're having a sale - its a pain to find games. Steam's search isn't top-notch either, but its 1000x better than epic's. For example. I search for "roguelike" and it brings up 1 single game (which is coming soon). There are few tags on games. No way to refine a search. In fact they have a category called "rogue-like" which has a lot of games, but somehow the search just misses them. There's no way to refine results by popularity or most sales. I suspect this is all an intentional design philosophy of epic, a way to have a lot more control over what the user sees than steam, because its so bad it doesn't make any other sense. Also for some reason their store takes a LOT longer to load than steam. The game library UI is much worse. Pretty sure there's no easy way to mod games through the epic store or see dev updates or talk on a forum or submit bugs. Just so bad.
- TitaRusell 7mo ago
  Steam has been around for 20 years and gamers really, really care about their Steam profiles. Valve has created a kind of gaming Facebook. You can't replace that.
  - drnick1 7mo ago
    I don't care about my Steam profile. I do care about the convenience of having all games in a single "launcher" and seamless Linux compatibility through Proton.
- ikiris 7mo ago
  The main feature they don't want to add is making it easy to tell when games are crap by user reviews
  - TitaRusell 7mo ago
    I bought a game on Epic once but I ran into some problems. Epic doesn't have a community so I had to ask for help on the Steam forums.. Can't escape the feeling that Epic just want to sell games without engaging with their customers much.
- llyama 7mo ago
  A big reason it feels like nobody competes with steam is that if you want to sell your game on steam it can't be cheaper elsewhere. So any other store can't compete on price. If you don't sell your game on steam you are missing 90% of the market. So as long as Valve continue to make steam good enough, nobody has an incentive to switch. It's an abusive monopoly. Steam take 30% of revenue from developers and Epic take 12%, but the prices can't be 18% cheaper for the consumer without giving up 90% of the market!
  - antonhand 7mo ago
    That isn't true though. The only restriction is if the thing you're selling on that other store is Steam Keys themselves.
  - imtringued 7mo ago
    Are you seriously blaming Steam for game developers setting the price of their games the same on all platforms? They're the ones pocketing that 18% difference by the way and that 18% difference is literally the selling point that is supposed to lure in game developers to the epic games store. There has never been a promise of cheaper games. The "most favored nation" pricing you're complaining about being abusive refers to Steam key sales on third party platforms and that pricing exists for a blatantly obvious reason. How much of a percentage does Valve get from that sale? 0%. Absolutely nothing. The developer generated keys are free and Valve will still pay the distribution costs (storefront, downloads, multiplayer, etc) for you. If it was possible to sell a Steam key cheaper on another platform, then nobody would buy Steam keys from the Steam store anymore, which means their revenue would tank to zero, which in turn means they would have to cancel free steam key generation, duh. Valve is being extremely accommodating here and you're twisting it into its opposite, which is pretty disgusting.
    - llyama 7mo ago
      The problem is the Steam Distribution Agreement isn't public so I don't have a way to prove if this is true or false. At the same time there are articles like this https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2g1md0l23o https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2g1md0l23o on the bbc claiming a tribunal ruled a case can continue against Valve for "forcing game publishers to sign up to conditions which prevents them from selling their titles earlier or for less on rival platforms". The website for the law firm clearly states the price parity is not just for steam keys https://steamyouoweus.co.uk/the-claim https://steamyouoweus.co.uk/the-claim. If there was no evidence it would be thrown out. But until it concludes who knows what the truth is.
- pjerem 7mo ago
  Steam is actually not that good as an application. It’s slow, it’s full of ads, the UI is complex … But they are the Amazon of gaming : it’s a no brainer to buy games because you know you won’t get issues being reimbursed if it’s needed. Also SteamOS/Proton/Steam Deck are nice. And EPIC managed to do worse than that. I do feel GOG Galaxy could become a threat to Steam someday if they added official Linux support and a full screen version but last time I tried it it was pretty buggy.
- GreenVulpine 7mo ago
  Last I checked the Epic Games Store doesn't even support Linux - the new gaming frontier.
foolfoolz 7mo ago
there’s a huge component to gamers that they are emotional and resistant to change. gamers hated steam when it came out. and now the backlash against epic store is huge. they haven’t done a good job fixing the perception of epic store the way steam did
- applfanboysbgon 7mo ago
  > there’s a huge component to gamers that they are emotional and resistant to change. This is just wrong. You portray people as being irrational / "emotional", but Steam was actively bad when it first launched. The fact that people changed their opinions on it when it later became actually good is not emotional, that's in fact exactly rational. The Epic Game Store doesn't need to fix "perception", they need to fix their actual product instead of trying to take shortcuts to gaining users by burning hundreds of millions of dollars per year on exclusivity deals, which are extremely anti-consumer, and will obviously result in rational backlash against somebody blowing money to attempt to force people to use their product for access to a completely unrelated product.
  - ecshafer 7mo ago
    Exactly. Steam an launch was some other program you had to have running on your machine, that was buggy, taking up resources when most people were barely running most games (people upgraded computers to play Half Life 2!), and had no point. Steam with thousands of games, that regularly has (or had) massively deep sales that let you get games for cheap, barely uses resources (most players are not struggling now to run games), and run very smooth. Is a very different beat. Valve earned trust.
    - cyberrock 7mo ago
      Without commenting on any other part of this exciting console war, I don't know if this is true. Steam on my machine still always consumes nonzero CPU when minimized, possibly because it opens to the busy animation/video-filled front page then its WebView doesn't detect minimization. It's funny how Steam never comes up in the "stop making WebView/Electron apps" discussion when they were the original sinner (yes I know they were using IE originally).
zaptrem 7mo ago
In my experience, the Epic Games Store downloads faster, installs more efficiently, and launches games faster than Steam. The social features I actually use (i.e., add a friend, join them in a game) work fine. I'm not aware of any features Steam has that EGS lacks that I actually use frequently (Valve's VR, streaming tech, and Proton are great, but I don't use those frequently). It's not just me, many indie game developers are also big fans of EGS (most recent example that comes to mind are Jeff Kaplan's remarks during his 10 hour stream a week or two ago). Gamers' vehement defense of what is effectively a monopoly continues to confuse me.
- dgeiser13 7mo ago
  If this were true than Epic would have eaten Steam's lunch.
  - crummy 7mo ago
    or network effects are keeping people on a worse platform?
    - imtringued 7mo ago
      That's a weird way of saying "lack of competition". As others have mentioned, why should Epic Games bother supporting Linux? Considering that I'm gaming on Linux, the number of competitors is pretty small and close to zero, I'm not sure why I should be forced to switch operating systems to support the "better platform". I say this as someone who's been running Vortex/Skyrim modding on Linux years before there was official support for it and I'm kind of shocked honestly to hear that people are cheering for something I did so long ago (5 years to be precise) I hardly remember the time doing it.
- Rapzid 7mo ago
  I try out the Launcher every couple years to see if it's improved. I just installed and logged in for the first time since 2023. Looks like they have finally fixed lag and freeze jank that occured on every action, blocked scrolling, and etc. Unfortunately just clicking on the "Featured Discounts" items on the store home page.. 3-4+(more like 4-5+ on further testing) FULL seconds of blank until the game details load. An ecommerce site where the items take 3-4 seconds to display!? I flipped over to Steam and everything in the store loads "instantly". Sigh, I'll check back in 2028. Edit: It boggles the mind and defies reason that they can't get a handle on table-stakes UX after all this time, energy, and hundreds of millions of dollars sunk into it. Nepotism; gotta be, yeah?
ascagnel_ 7mo ago
The exclusivity deals they struck early on are an albatross that still drags them down. I think the audience would have been much more receptive to deals like Alan Wake 2, where that money spigot got turned into something totally unique that wouldn't have existed without that capital investment.
bergheim 7mo ago
Everybody says this. It's so weird. How on earth will epic win without exclusives? It's like launching some Facebook competitor "but you get two profile pictures". Noone would switch. All these geeks singing steam and lamenting competition. Competition bad for me mkay, steam good. /me shakes head
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- hamdingers 7mo ago
  How do they win with exclusives? The strategy is nonsense. For Sony, I get it. I want to play Demon Souls, I buy a PS5, now I own a PS5 I'm gonna buy more games for it. But for EGS this doesn't make sense. It costs me nothing to install both stores on my PC. I buy Alan Wake 2 on EGS, great, that doesn't make me any more likely to buy the next game I want there. Nothing about the platform is sticky or requires a sunk cost. Unless they're making enough money on the exclusive games to justify the deals on their own (which, given this announcement, seems unlikely) I don't see how they or you think it could work.
  - lux-lux-lux 7mo ago
    This is definitely wrong, Steam’s stickiness is a massive selling point.
    - hamdingers 7mo ago
      What part? Finish your thought. Steam is sticky (social features, network effects, etc) and EGS is not, so EGS exclusives do not work. What part of this is "definitely wrong"?
      - johnnyanmac 7mo ago
        It's called a network effect. At some point, you use it because you use it. And without any killer feature, you have no reason to move. It's not "wrong", but it explains why "just do better than Steam" does not work.
bobafett-9902 7mo ago
bingo. At least they didn't use AI as the "excuse" for the layoffs though ...
sergiotapia 7mo ago
It's hilarious how I must have like 80 games there, with zero intention of ever installing Epic, or even playing those games. Yet I must "claim" them... just in case. I bet the majority of users do that hahaha
surgical_fire 7mo ago
Interestingly, I don't even think that the Epic Game Store was a vanity project. It was probably a good idea, they had a successful product and could build up their store out of it. Basically what Valve did originally. But instead of focusing, you know, in making their story desirable to use, they focused on shit like exclusives. And for that, they should fail. I prefer GoG over Steam, even while I am super grateful for Steam making gaming on Linux possible. And GoG didn't need to rely on exclusives for this.
bradleybuda 7mo ago
> Unfortunately it is their employees that are paying the price of leadership making it rain [...] Epic's employees reaped the gains while it rained in the form of paychecks. While it sucks that people are losing their jobs, those individuals received (much of) the upside of this investment and their jobs never would have existed in the first place had the investment not been made. Their paychecks are not being clawed back. Shareholders (including executives who are largely paid via out-of-the money options) are bearing the costs. Consumers also benefit from increased competitive pressure on Valve and subsidized game prices. Would it be "better" if Epic had not invested in the Epic Game Store and paid a dividend or conducted a share buyback?
- aaron425 7mo ago
  For what it’s worth, Epic is a private company and employee upside has been capped in the sense that compensation has been mostly cash (and not Netflix tier cash). Exposure to equity may been a better way to share in upside and ensure some buy-in. IMO investing in a marketplace was fine, but hemorrhaging money for 7 years on non-performant software + free game bundles is probably not defensible from an executive standpoint.
  - laughing_man 7mo ago
    In my experience the buy-in you get from employee stock programs scales inversely with the head count. I worked for a huge company that gave out stock options. Nobody was really motivated by the stocks, because the company was so large your individual contribution meant exactly nothing unless you were at least a VP. A vesting bonus of some kind would have done just as much.
DiskoHexyl 7mo ago
A truly fascinating part is that feature and quality-wise EGS is still, after years of development, miles behind Steam. Epic likely has talented devs and clearly invests a lot of money into all of this, but it took them years to finally implement a cart. It's not the end of the world to not have one, but not if you are a digital store! It doesn't even have (or at least didn't the last time I checked) a review system. Steam isn't just a store anymore- it's closer to a social network with communities, discussions, mod workshop (which makes it stupid easy to install mods if a game supports this). With forums dying and reddit turning into whatever it is turning into, Steam forums is IT for a lot of gamers. If I see a game on sale the first thing I turn to is a review section- more often than not it's enough to gauge whether I'll buy this thing or not. And it's a nice place to ask whenever something in the game bugs our or doesn't work, or to just vent. EGS is (or least was) really damn slow to start (never mind to launch an actual game). Linux support is non-existent. Sure, it is extremely difficult to tackle a leader when a headstart is this large, and when people already have massive libraries of their own on Steam, but it's been what- 7 years of development? Epic had a clean slate, no compatibility to worry about and all the features their main competitor had, mapped out to copy- and they didn't even try to reach feature-parity. Giving out free games only takes you so far when people lack the necessities to stay at your platform
mrkramer 7mo ago
Epic lost billions of dollars when they were kicked out of the App Store and Google Play and they were out for a long time. Only now Fortnite is coming back to mobile.
- TheTon 7mo ago
  Exactly. Their holy war on the App Stores blunted Fortnite’s momentum at its apogee. On one hand, I admire their chutzpah. The App Store model has weighed down the entire software industry and has prevented entire categories of new products from growing out of infancy due to anticompetitive practices. Everyone, Apple and Google included, would actually be better off without the App Stores in their present form, and I’d love to see them weakened or eliminated. But on the other hand, Epic actually accomplished very little in their war, and nowhere near what being unavailable on mobile platforms for years cost them. Additionally, their refusal to go after Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch never made any sense to anyone except for those with a financial interest in those arrangements. The rest of us were just confused — the console App Stores are the exact same model as the mobile App Stores. I suspect Epic’s actual reason for not going after the consoles was a bit of realpolitik or cowardice depending on how you look at it. They couldn’t afford to be locked out of the mobile and console stores at the same time, so they invented some tortured rationale for why they could pay the console vendors their 30% but not the mobile vendors. But, this muddied their message and they came up mostly empty handed in the end, and here we are today.
teamonkey 7mo ago
Do we actually know that this is the case? Have they released any figures? How much money are they actually losing on the store?
hackyhacky 7mo ago
> they're losing money on vanity projects Among other vanity projects, they hired Simon Peyton Jones, long the most prominent developer of Haskell, to build "Verse", Tim Sweeney's hobby language [1]. I'm sure SPJ isn't that expensive, but still, it's pretty far from Epic's "core mission." [1] https://simon.peytonjones.org/verse-calculus/ https://simon.peytonjones.org/verse-calculus/
Frieren 7mo ago
> Unfortunately it is their employees that are paying the price of leadership Neoliberalism at its finest. The world moving towards conservatism has left us with this model: The working class takes the hit of each crisis from small to big. It is not a sustainable model.
meheleventyone 7mo ago
They are spending a lot of money on Fortnite’s UGC side in the form of paying developers for their games engagement as well.
pipes 7mo ago
That's not how I see it at all. Steam has some abusive policies like not allowing your game to be on other platforms for a cheaper price. They take 30 percent cut. Compare that to epic takes nothing on first million revenue and then 12 percent. Epic are trying to break into what is nearly a monopoly.

dclowd9901 7mo ago

This was the first thing that came to mind with me as well: the language of the reasoning for the layoffs. It's never a leadership failure is it?

Ethee 7mo ago

It's still funny to me that they would rather burn 9 figures in cash on these silly deals to try and 'trap' gamers on their platform instead of just... I don't know... making a better platform? The reason nobody competes with Steam is simply the sheer number of integration and platform features that make it easy to buy, play and share games with my friends. It's not that hard, stop trying to 'force' me to use your platform. Just make it a nice experience.

yoyohello13 7mo ago
> Just make it a nice experience. Haven’t you been paying attention? That’s not how we do things in business anymore…
- lacy_tinpot 7mo ago
  It's truly incredible how difficult business people make doing business. Doing business is very simple, easy, and straightforward, but I suspect in a lot of cases the individual behavioral aspects of the executives get in the way of doing good business. Direction and leadership is something that these companies never seem to get right.
  - joe_mamba 7mo ago
    >It's truly incredible how difficult business people make doing business. And they're the ones making the most money and avoiding the layoffs.
- malfist 7mo ago
  Well, we might make it a nice experience until we've attracted enough of you people to have a network affect. And then it's a steady march of price increases, additional revenue streams (including selling your data!) and reduction in features because they were "too expensive to maintain"
- uyzstvqs 7mo ago
  Steam does. That's why they're the undefeated king. This applies to everything. If you see a product category where users are legitimately unhappy; then enter it, build something actually good, you'll be the biggest and richest in no-time.
  - laughing_man 7mo ago
    That's what's happening to Windows as we speak.
  - troosevelt 7mo ago
    Steam has a lot of issues but there are too just lots of areas where better products don't win out over inferior products, that's just not how the world works for lots of reasons.
    - storus 7mo ago
      Updating games on HDDs on Steam takes ages; I often see the download complete but then wait another 30 minutes for their diff to complete; and that happens with 10-20 games every week when they have big updates (10GB+). Just for this one thing I would switch elsewhere.
  - jrozner 7mo ago
    People hated steam when it launched but you needed it to play CS 1.6. It made installing mods easier. Then HL2 released, orange box, and they were able to get a critical mass as they provided platforms support for other games. Steam got better. It’s still not great but they have so much market share that basically any PC gamer already has it. Epic wants some of that money. The problem is nobody wants to install another store and they aren’t doing anything to improve gamer’s experience other than giving away games and having some exclusives. They’ll never hit the critical mass needed that way.
    - pas 7mo ago
      it was pretty meh back then, so people had pretty understandable reasons. it made LAN parties harder for example :) but it got a lot better. Epic had more money and time compared to Valve. and their store is still worse. sure, Steam has an enormous moat, but that won't be the case forever, Epic should be ready with a nice platform to exploit niches that Valve misses instead they hemorrhage money on things that does not make their fundamental position any better.
- DANmode 7mo ago
  Not with that attitude! Demanding it is how Steam came about!
- red-iron-pine 7mo ago
  only if you're publicly traded
zer00eyz 7mo ago
The irony here should be lost on no one. The the lawsuit with apple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Apple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Apple The massive set of fines... https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/fortnite-video-game-maker-epic-games-pay-more-half-billion-dollars-over-ftc-allegations https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/... > Just make it a nice experience. That might get in the way of greed and hubris.
- slumberlust 7mo ago
  I think sweeny is an awful person overall. The lawsuit against apple and google is a net positive for consumers though. Having someone as big as Epic stand up to these digital silos is a good thing.
  - zer00eyz 7mo ago
    Assume for one moment that they were all great people over there. I suspect that they would STILL be in the same boat that they are in. You see a silo where I see a service provider. Does apple make money on doing what they do.. You bet. But the lesson here is that they make that money because of scale, and without it replacing payment processing, fraud management, and the customer service you need with it is a HARD problem. Epic needs more than Fortnite to justify running all that on their own or it's going to turn into a black hole: because payment processing for "digital goods" is a nightmare. I suspect that both apple and googles extension into payments at point of sale, has contractual ties to their App Store payment processing. Something Epic will always lack. The real pain in the ass here is the incumbent card processors, and their fee structures. I suspect that the industry is going to need to go back and re-visit micro transactions in the coming years.
  - johnnyanmac 7mo ago
    I think he's still at heart a developer. That's why all his initiatives that aren't Fortnite are so developer friendly. But he still is a CEO. So there will naturally be some evils he seeps into to make the company (and himself) richer. He still has his own interests, but my second hand experience is that even these layoffs are relatively respectful compared to most of the industry. I recognize that CEO side. But it's a real shame many people mostly turned on him in order to defend Steam. Steam sure isn't a saint either.
glenstein 7mo ago
One of the more fascinating parts of the Xbox plan of attack for its new console is its apparent marriage of Xbox, Steam, and Epic among possibly others in a unified console experience. Having a true console like experience with a variety of PC game stores plugged in I think is a rare lane available for Xbox to try and do something other than reproduce Steam but worse, and I'm curious how it's going to go.
- bigfishrunning 7mo ago
  My guess is it doesn't go well -- with Gamepass they've taught Xbox gamers not to buy games, and with Steam integration they've given Xbox gamers a competing place to buy games (where Microsoft will pay a percentage to steam!) It'll probably turn a division of Microsoft that usually loses money into one that loses...more money.
- hiccuphippo 7mo ago
  I can run Epic and GoG games in Steamdeck. All Steam had to do is not block them.
  - glenstein 7mo ago
    Right and itch.io and much besides. However, these integrations are janky and not built in as first class console experiences. Not that they need to be necessarily, I think having the steam store is enough in many respects. But for me, the dream is being able to browse and install games from itch.io with the same convenience as steam itself. So there's at least notionally and unclaimed lane for providing that kind of experience. It's the only available Lane that I can think of for out-Steaming Steam.
    - hiccuphippo 7mo ago
      Does Itch have a CLI for installing the games? From Heroic's FAQ, that's the first step for adding support to the store. https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher/issues/4605 https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher... Not exactly first class, but one step away.
brendoelfrendo 7mo ago
> It's not that hard, stop trying to 'force' me to use your platform. Just make it a nice experience. I feel like this is good advice, and should still be a pillar of building a business: prioritize customer satisfaction, and your happy customers will become repeat customers. But I don't think it's enough. Epic tried to launch a store in 2018, 15 years after the launch of Steam. That's 15 years of customers buying their games on steam, building a friends list, and getting used to making Steam their PC gaming "home." How do you convince someone who might have hundreds of games tied to one online account, that it is in their interest to open a new online account with a new merchant and start over from scratch? Your experience can't just be nicer, it needs to have some level of appeal that convinces customers to peel themselves away from whatever platform is their current default. I don't have a good answer for how to accomplish this. Epic tried it by paying devs for exclusives and freebies, litigation, and a PR campaign that Valve and Apple and Google were ripping people off. Their approach was hostile and didn't prioritize making a nice experience, and it seems to have failed. But I think these platforms are sticker than we give them credit for, and just making a nice experience isn't enough.
- tayo42 7mo ago
  Why did they need to make a store? Seems like there was no need for it...
  - saalweachter 7mo ago
    Maybe they saw the 30% cut Apple and Google were taking on their app stores and wanted in on the action?
  - brendoelfrendo 7mo ago
    Why does anyone need to make a store? Walmart and Target both exist. Generally, consumer choice and industry competition are considered good things that drive innovation and the nicer experiences we're talking about.
    - kgwgk 7mo ago
Hamuko 7mo ago
Not only does Epic refuse to make their game store any better, Tim Sweeney will continue to whine about how Steam's 30% cut is way too much. Surely if it's too much, Epic Games should be able to provide the same service for their cut? But no, they continue selling a moped while saying how all of the motorcycle manufacturers are ripping you off.
- tcmart14 7mo ago
  And lets not forget Tim Sweeney's dishonest representation. Sure, Steam can take a 30% cut, but they also offer a lot of avenues to avoid that. With Steam, a publisher can get a ton of activation codes and sell those activation codes on their site and not get hit with the 30% cut. No fee on in-game transactions, and as you build a user base for your games, Steam also lowers the 30%.
keyringlight 7mo ago
I can't help thinking the battle was lost before it even started, no matter how good the offering was because the PC and mobile platforms (where epic operate their store) have 99.9% already decided who owns them. The way I see it Epic wanted to copy what Counter-strike and HL2 was to Steam, but using Fortnite to push their store for a fresh generation of gamers. The problem is they couldn't replace or exist alongside the incumbents while trying to bring in more than a trivial amount of income. The only way I can see the outcome being different is if they were in the position Valve were in around 25 years ago with a fresh or poorly served market or something other than video games, few remember Stardock Desktop as a place they got their games.
- surgical_fire 7mo ago
  They could totally carve their niche if they focused in making their store better. Could it surpass Steam? Probably not. But you don't need to surpass Steam to have a viable, profitable store. GoG is the alternative that proves the rule - it is smaller, but they have their niche offering. EGS is shit, and relied on exclusives (which everyone typically hates, especially on PC).
  - jamesfinlayson 7mo ago
    Yeah GOG for me fills a niche - old/classic games with no DRM. I realise that I can get them mostly from Steam but I support GOG and their goals.
  - keyringlight 7mo ago
    IIRC GoG has a pretty poor history in actually turning a profit with the exception of when CD Projekt release on of their own games, and even then they do the vast majority of their business on steam or the console stores. If GoG was a decent money-spinner then CP projekt wouldn't have split if off. Even a niche has a cost to operate, and that's with GoG being a pretty plain service on top of game downloads.
    - chupasaurus 7mo ago
tcmart14 7mo ago
As much as I love steam, some of this isn't even a high bar. I've always had issues with stuff loading slow or odd behavior on the steam store tab in the application. My understanding is it's because the store tab in the steam application is essentially a web browser, and it sorta works like ass.
- 9x39 7mo ago
  It does use Chromium. Any web browser can seem slow vs a native app, though.
ericd 7mo ago
I think you’re massively underestimating the network effects in play. Steam has an enormous moat.
mort96 7mo ago
> The reason nobody competes with Steam is simply the sheer number of integration and platform features that make it easy to buy, play and share games with my friends. I don't agree. The reason I personally prefer Steam is that all my existing games are on Steam so if I keep buying on Steam I don't have to make and maintain accounts on other stores, if I keep buying my games on Steam I can keep using Steam as my only game launcher, and all my friends are on Steam so games with Steam multiplayer integration are easier to play if I too play it through Steam. The Epic Games Store client and game integration could be significantly better from a technical perspective in every possible way, and I would not be interested in moving to it. Steam is good enough and switching has a massive cost. I can't really imagine much that would make me use the Epic Games Store other than exclusivity or the promise of free games. Though I would be more likely to just not play a particular game if it's only available through the Epic Games Store.
- zem 7mo ago
  agreed, the epic games store is crappy enough that i will not use it even for free and/or exclusive games. I might have if it was marketed as a clean, unobtrusive experience, but we all know that will never happen.
- TulliusCicero 7mo ago
  It's both things, really. But other platforms really are rather pathetic in terms of feature set compared to Steam. Steam has a bajillion features, and it looks like other platforms aren't even trying to compete to provide a good user experience.
- Aeolun 7mo ago
  If Steam was run by EA I’d abandon it in a second though. All those games that are left behind aren’t super relevant since I already barely play them.
- wongarsu 7mo ago
  Another big thing is trust. With any of these digital markets I'm not truly buying games, I'm purchasing a revocable license. That requires a certain amount of trust that the platform isn't going to screw me over. Steam isn't perfect: they initially had to be forced to offer refunds, and their item economy enables barely disguised gambling. But by and large they have behaved very predictably and consumer-friendly. Sometimes by outright consumer-friendly policies like generous refunds or labeling games with AI assets. But usually by just not doing anything greedy. Or as the meme goes: "Gabe does nothing. wins."
johnnyanmac 7mo ago
Network effects disagree, sadly. You don't get market share from the leader by simply "being better". There's way better netowkrs than Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit out there. But some habits are as harder to break than they were to form.
- Ethee 7mo ago
  I don't disagree with what you're saying. But for technical platforms it needs to be a combination of both. Discord is the perfect example of this, plenty of people I know of were completely fine with their Mumble/Teamspeak/Ventrilo setups, and in a lot of cases some of those were better than what Discord was offering for individual features, but the overall feature set and platform ease-of-use that Discord was offering drew in a large initial user base which then created the network effect you describe. A lot of my friends feel 'locked in' to Discord now and with their age verification roll out fiasco a lot of people want to leave, but there isn't a single offering that matches Discord's platform features and integrations. There definitely needs to be an incentive to leave sometimes and break away from that network effect, but if there's no actual competition then obviously yeah you're always going to be stuck.
motbus3 7mo ago
Let me make a disclaimer, I don't if it is true as CEO speech truthfulness seems to be made by ai. But once I saw the interview with the guy from epic or someone big there, I don't remember and they said the money for developers was from marketing campaigns which makes sense to me. They said that they wanted to make a better experience so the developers themselves would try to help being people to the platform but that never happened. It seems that the technology behind the epic store is, epically broken, pun intended. I've read somewhere that they tried to decouple chunks of the store and restart but the thing was so poorly done that it would be more expensive than just let it fade away and at some point they had a new epic store 2 created from scratch but to develop it to the end would be too expensive. As a swe myself, maybe they were trying to scale to steam level before being steam? I don't know. My last experience trying to use epic was trying to buy a game. But being greeted by a store login, then a loader of a store then a initial store that tried very hard to sell me call of duty and EA stuff. I found whatever I was trying to buy but I couldn't due to some bug in the payment. And never again. Not for any particular reason. I just didn't spend more time there. And now, with these layoffs what are they going to do? Are they revoke all the licenses for the games they gave and sold?
Morromist 7mo ago
I like having a huge library of games on epic-store but when I try to buy a game there - because they're having a sale - its a pain to find games. Steam's search isn't top-notch either, but its 1000x better than epic's. For example. I search for "roguelike" and it brings up 1 single game (which is coming soon). There are few tags on games. No way to refine a search. In fact they have a category called "rogue-like" which has a lot of games, but somehow the search just misses them. There's no way to refine results by popularity or most sales. I suspect this is all an intentional design philosophy of epic, a way to have a lot more control over what the user sees than steam, because its so bad it doesn't make any other sense. Also for some reason their store takes a LOT longer to load than steam. The game library UI is much worse. Pretty sure there's no easy way to mod games through the epic store or see dev updates or talk on a forum or submit bugs. Just so bad.
TitaRusell 7mo ago
Steam has been around for 20 years and gamers really, really care about their Steam profiles. Valve has created a kind of gaming Facebook. You can't replace that.
- drnick1 7mo ago
  I don't care about my Steam profile. I do care about the convenience of having all games in a single "launcher" and seamless Linux compatibility through Proton.
ikiris 7mo ago
The main feature they don't want to add is making it easy to tell when games are crap by user reviews
- TitaRusell 7mo ago
  I bought a game on Epic once but I ran into some problems. Epic doesn't have a community so I had to ask for help on the Steam forums.. Can't escape the feeling that Epic just want to sell games without engaging with their customers much.
llyama 7mo ago
A big reason it feels like nobody competes with steam is that if you want to sell your game on steam it can't be cheaper elsewhere. So any other store can't compete on price. If you don't sell your game on steam you are missing 90% of the market. So as long as Valve continue to make steam good enough, nobody has an incentive to switch. It's an abusive monopoly. Steam take 30% of revenue from developers and Epic take 12%, but the prices can't be 18% cheaper for the consumer without giving up 90% of the market!
- antonhand 7mo ago
  That isn't true though. The only restriction is if the thing you're selling on that other store is Steam Keys themselves.
- imtringued 7mo ago
  Are you seriously blaming Steam for game developers setting the price of their games the same on all platforms? They're the ones pocketing that 18% difference by the way and that 18% difference is literally the selling point that is supposed to lure in game developers to the epic games store. There has never been a promise of cheaper games. The "most favored nation" pricing you're complaining about being abusive refers to Steam key sales on third party platforms and that pricing exists for a blatantly obvious reason. How much of a percentage does Valve get from that sale? 0%. Absolutely nothing. The developer generated keys are free and Valve will still pay the distribution costs (storefront, downloads, multiplayer, etc) for you. If it was possible to sell a Steam key cheaper on another platform, then nobody would buy Steam keys from the Steam store anymore, which means their revenue would tank to zero, which in turn means they would have to cancel free steam key generation, duh. Valve is being extremely accommodating here and you're twisting it into its opposite, which is pretty disgusting.
  - llyama 7mo ago
    The problem is the Steam Distribution Agreement isn't public so I don't have a way to prove if this is true or false. At the same time there are articles like this https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2g1md0l23o https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2g1md0l23o on the bbc claiming a tribunal ruled a case can continue against Valve for "forcing game publishers to sign up to conditions which prevents them from selling their titles earlier or for less on rival platforms". The website for the law firm clearly states the price parity is not just for steam keys https://steamyouoweus.co.uk/the-claim https://steamyouoweus.co.uk/the-claim. If there was no evidence it would be thrown out. But until it concludes who knows what the truth is.
pjerem 7mo ago
Steam is actually not that good as an application. It’s slow, it’s full of ads, the UI is complex … But they are the Amazon of gaming : it’s a no brainer to buy games because you know you won’t get issues being reimbursed if it’s needed. Also SteamOS/Proton/Steam Deck are nice. And EPIC managed to do worse than that. I do feel GOG Galaxy could become a threat to Steam someday if they added official Linux support and a full screen version but last time I tried it it was pretty buggy.
GreenVulpine 7mo ago
Last I checked the Epic Games Store doesn't even support Linux - the new gaming frontier.

foolfoolz 7mo ago

there’s a huge component to gamers that they are emotional and resistant to change. gamers hated steam when it came out. and now the backlash against epic store is huge. they haven’t done a good job fixing the perception of epic store the way steam did

applfanboysbgon 7mo ago
> there’s a huge component to gamers that they are emotional and resistant to change. This is just wrong. You portray people as being irrational / "emotional", but Steam was actively bad when it first launched. The fact that people changed their opinions on it when it later became actually good is not emotional, that's in fact exactly rational. The Epic Game Store doesn't need to fix "perception", they need to fix their actual product instead of trying to take shortcuts to gaining users by burning hundreds of millions of dollars per year on exclusivity deals, which are extremely anti-consumer, and will obviously result in rational backlash against somebody blowing money to attempt to force people to use their product for access to a completely unrelated product.
- ecshafer 7mo ago
  Exactly. Steam an launch was some other program you had to have running on your machine, that was buggy, taking up resources when most people were barely running most games (people upgraded computers to play Half Life 2!), and had no point. Steam with thousands of games, that regularly has (or had) massively deep sales that let you get games for cheap, barely uses resources (most players are not struggling now to run games), and run very smooth. Is a very different beat. Valve earned trust.
  - cyberrock 7mo ago
    Without commenting on any other part of this exciting console war, I don't know if this is true. Steam on my machine still always consumes nonzero CPU when minimized, possibly because it opens to the busy animation/video-filled front page then its WebView doesn't detect minimization. It's funny how Steam never comes up in the "stop making WebView/Electron apps" discussion when they were the original sinner (yes I know they were using IE originally).

zaptrem 7mo ago

In my experience, the Epic Games Store downloads faster, installs more efficiently, and launches games faster than Steam. The social features I actually use (i.e., add a friend, join them in a game) work fine. I'm not aware of any features Steam has that EGS lacks that I actually use frequently (Valve's VR, streaming tech, and Proton are great, but I don't use those frequently). It's not just me, many indie game developers are also big fans of EGS (most recent example that comes to mind are Jeff Kaplan's remarks during his 10 hour stream a week or two ago). Gamers' vehement defense of what is effectively a monopoly continues to confuse me.

dgeiser13 7mo ago
If this were true than Epic would have eaten Steam's lunch.
- crummy 7mo ago
  or network effects are keeping people on a worse platform?
  - imtringued 7mo ago
    That's a weird way of saying "lack of competition". As others have mentioned, why should Epic Games bother supporting Linux? Considering that I'm gaming on Linux, the number of competitors is pretty small and close to zero, I'm not sure why I should be forced to switch operating systems to support the "better platform". I say this as someone who's been running Vortex/Skyrim modding on Linux years before there was official support for it and I'm kind of shocked honestly to hear that people are cheering for something I did so long ago (5 years to be precise) I hardly remember the time doing it.
Rapzid 7mo ago
I try out the Launcher every couple years to see if it's improved. I just installed and logged in for the first time since 2023. Looks like they have finally fixed lag and freeze jank that occured on every action, blocked scrolling, and etc. Unfortunately just clicking on the "Featured Discounts" items on the store home page.. 3-4+(more like 4-5+ on further testing) FULL seconds of blank until the game details load. An ecommerce site where the items take 3-4 seconds to display!? I flipped over to Steam and everything in the store loads "instantly". Sigh, I'll check back in 2028. Edit: It boggles the mind and defies reason that they can't get a handle on table-stakes UX after all this time, energy, and hundreds of millions of dollars sunk into it. Nepotism; gotta be, yeah?

ascagnel_ 7mo ago

The exclusivity deals they struck early on are an albatross that still drags them down. I think the audience would have been much more receptive to deals like Alan Wake 2, where that money spigot got turned into something totally unique that wouldn't have existed without that capital investment.

bergheim 7mo ago

Everybody says this. It's so weird. How on earth will epic win without exclusives? It's like launching some Facebook competitor "but you get two profile pictures". Noone would switch. All these geeks singing steam and lamenting competition. Competition bad for me mkay, steam good. /me shakes head

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
hamdingers 7mo ago
How do they win with exclusives? The strategy is nonsense. For Sony, I get it. I want to play Demon Souls, I buy a PS5, now I own a PS5 I'm gonna buy more games for it. But for EGS this doesn't make sense. It costs me nothing to install both stores on my PC. I buy Alan Wake 2 on EGS, great, that doesn't make me any more likely to buy the next game I want there. Nothing about the platform is sticky or requires a sunk cost. Unless they're making enough money on the exclusive games to justify the deals on their own (which, given this announcement, seems unlikely) I don't see how they or you think it could work.
- lux-lux-lux 7mo ago
  This is definitely wrong, Steam’s stickiness is a massive selling point.
  - hamdingers 7mo ago
    What part? Finish your thought. Steam is sticky (social features, network effects, etc) and EGS is not, so EGS exclusives do not work. What part of this is "definitely wrong"?
    - johnnyanmac 7mo ago
      It's called a network effect. At some point, you use it because you use it. And without any killer feature, you have no reason to move. It's not "wrong", but it explains why "just do better than Steam" does not work.

bobafett-9902 7mo ago

bingo. At least they didn't use AI as the "excuse" for the layoffs though ...

sergiotapia 7mo ago

It's hilarious how I must have like 80 games there, with zero intention of ever installing Epic, or even playing those games. Yet I must "claim" them... just in case. I bet the majority of users do that hahaha

surgical_fire 7mo ago

Interestingly, I don't even think that the Epic Game Store was a vanity project. It was probably a good idea, they had a successful product and could build up their store out of it. Basically what Valve did originally. But instead of focusing, you know, in making their story desirable to use, they focused on shit like exclusives. And for that, they should fail. I prefer GoG over Steam, even while I am super grateful for Steam making gaming on Linux possible. And GoG didn't need to rely on exclusives for this.

bradleybuda 7mo ago

> Unfortunately it is their employees that are paying the price of leadership making it rain [...] Epic's employees reaped the gains while it rained in the form of paychecks. While it sucks that people are losing their jobs, those individuals received (much of) the upside of this investment and their jobs never would have existed in the first place had the investment not been made. Their paychecks are not being clawed back. Shareholders (including executives who are largely paid via out-of-the money options) are bearing the costs. Consumers also benefit from increased competitive pressure on Valve and subsidized game prices. Would it be "better" if Epic had not invested in the Epic Game Store and paid a dividend or conducted a share buyback?

aaron425 7mo ago
For what it’s worth, Epic is a private company and employee upside has been capped in the sense that compensation has been mostly cash (and not Netflix tier cash). Exposure to equity may been a better way to share in upside and ensure some buy-in. IMO investing in a marketplace was fine, but hemorrhaging money for 7 years on non-performant software + free game bundles is probably not defensible from an executive standpoint.
- laughing_man 7mo ago
  In my experience the buy-in you get from employee stock programs scales inversely with the head count. I worked for a huge company that gave out stock options. Nobody was really motivated by the stocks, because the company was so large your individual contribution meant exactly nothing unless you were at least a VP. A vesting bonus of some kind would have done just as much.

DiskoHexyl 7mo ago

A truly fascinating part is that feature and quality-wise EGS is still, after years of development, miles behind Steam. Epic likely has talented devs and clearly invests a lot of money into all of this, but it took them years to finally implement a cart. It's not the end of the world to not have one, but not if you are a digital store! It doesn't even have (or at least didn't the last time I checked) a review system. Steam isn't just a store anymore- it's closer to a social network with communities, discussions, mod workshop (which makes it stupid easy to install mods if a game supports this). With forums dying and reddit turning into whatever it is turning into, Steam forums is IT for a lot of gamers. If I see a game on sale the first thing I turn to is a review section- more often than not it's enough to gauge whether I'll buy this thing or not. And it's a nice place to ask whenever something in the game bugs our or doesn't work, or to just vent. EGS is (or least was) really damn slow to start (never mind to launch an actual game). Linux support is non-existent. Sure, it is extremely difficult to tackle a leader when a headstart is this large, and when people already have massive libraries of their own on Steam, but it's been what- 7 years of development? Epic had a clean slate, no compatibility to worry about and all the features their main competitor had, mapped out to copy- and they didn't even try to reach feature-parity. Giving out free games only takes you so far when people lack the necessities to stay at your platform

mrkramer 7mo ago

Epic lost billions of dollars when they were kicked out of the App Store and Google Play and they were out for a long time. Only now Fortnite is coming back to mobile.

TheTon 7mo ago
Exactly. Their holy war on the App Stores blunted Fortnite’s momentum at its apogee. On one hand, I admire their chutzpah. The App Store model has weighed down the entire software industry and has prevented entire categories of new products from growing out of infancy due to anticompetitive practices. Everyone, Apple and Google included, would actually be better off without the App Stores in their present form, and I’d love to see them weakened or eliminated. But on the other hand, Epic actually accomplished very little in their war, and nowhere near what being unavailable on mobile platforms for years cost them. Additionally, their refusal to go after Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch never made any sense to anyone except for those with a financial interest in those arrangements. The rest of us were just confused — the console App Stores are the exact same model as the mobile App Stores. I suspect Epic’s actual reason for not going after the consoles was a bit of realpolitik or cowardice depending on how you look at it. They couldn’t afford to be locked out of the mobile and console stores at the same time, so they invented some tortured rationale for why they could pay the console vendors their 30% but not the mobile vendors. But, this muddied their message and they came up mostly empty handed in the end, and here we are today.

teamonkey 7mo ago

Do we actually know that this is the case? Have they released any figures? How much money are they actually losing on the store?

hackyhacky 7mo ago

> they're losing money on vanity projects Among other vanity projects, they hired Simon Peyton Jones, long the most prominent developer of Haskell, to build "Verse", Tim Sweeney's hobby language [1]. I'm sure SPJ isn't that expensive, but still, it's pretty far from Epic's "core mission." [1] https://simon.peytonjones.org/verse-calculus/ https://simon.peytonjones.org/verse-calculus/

Frieren 7mo ago

> Unfortunately it is their employees that are paying the price of leadership Neoliberalism at its finest. The world moving towards conservatism has left us with this model: The working class takes the hit of each crisis from small to big. It is not a sustainable model.

meheleventyone 7mo ago

They are spending a lot of money on Fortnite’s UGC side in the form of paying developers for their games engagement as well.

pipes 7mo ago

That's not how I see it at all. Steam has some abusive policies like not allowing your game to be on other platforms for a cheaper price. They take 30 percent cut. Compare that to epic takes nothing on first million revenue and then 12 percent. Epic are trying to break into what is nearly a monopoly.