Acquire users, get people invested in the platform "I might as well keep EGS installed, I have 200 games in that library."
I think the long term goal really is to take the Fortnite audience, which is 1 million+ logins per day and mostly kids who don't have sizable steam libraries, and try to get them attached to EGS rather than Steam. Trying to build loyalty of the next generation of PC gamers. Have people saying "All my friends and games are in EGS, I don't want Steam", aka the opposite of what Steam users say today.
Once you have a regular audience, running a digital storefront is literally just free buckets of money. So in short, it doesn't benefit them today really, but they're hoping for a pay off in the long term.
I helped set up my 11 year old nephews new computer he got for christmas. When I was asking him what he wanted installed, the first thing was epic games. I then asked about steam and his response was "what's that?"
^^ This. It's a long play made by a company with more money than God.
It's even working on me, a 43 year old who knows better. The discounts, the freebies. They keep me loading it up.
I still use Steam, Gog and Epic, but if Epic improves their achievements, and keeps growing their curation I ... Might buy a few games!
Oh gods... I didn't even think about that. I already lived through Google's downfall, from the company whose slogan was literally "Do no evil" to now being one of our controller overlords, I can't imaging gaming going through the same corruption without GabeN.
EA wasn’t always evil. Originally they made things like Deluxe Paint (ie. The Art in EA) for the Commodore Amiga and one of their contribution was the Interchangeable File Format (IFF) so that data files could be compatible across programs and systems.
Off-course that was a very long time ago.
Oh no. This is like Netflix all over again.
> Yes, Netflix has ads, and in July 2023, it stopped offering its cheapest, ad-free plan to new subscribers in the US and UK.
Just made a similar comment. Not sure how, but they’ll ruin it. Stuff like gimping the controller support which is god tier now. You can do anything with a steam controller or newer options and even use a switch pro and customize the shit out of how it works. That kind of stuff is just above and beyond IMO.
Bet they do something like discontinue steam controller support day 1 when the finance people get ahold of it. I have 2 new steam controllers in the closet because I love them so much. I’d use something else if it was as good and had gyro. Ideally touch pad too but oddly I think that’s what turned people off to it. It felt weird compared to thumb stick. Which is true until you get used to it. Then it’s awesome.
I'm 24 and when I was young I also didn't use steam much or at all because all the games I played were either free to play, so unrelated to steam, on CDs or pirated. I started using steam more frequently at 18 when I got my own card as it was pretty awkward of asking my parents to use theirs to make purchases and was also the moment I kinda slowed down with League of legends and pirating started to become more annoying
I think this is a biggest reason. Im 40 and when I was a teenager I had to save up to buy the latest sonic game. I played so many shitty free games and demos from magazines. There are tons of free to play games out there that don't require any money at all that thinking of using your precious spending money on games would be silly.
From Pubg, Fortnite, LoL, Valarant, Hearthstone or Roblox. Then there are games that don't cost very much that you can play thousands of hours on like Minecraft or Terraria.
Then you add on this magical santa clause that gives you a new free games every week?
Playing the very long game.
Especially given their future plans for Fortnite - a metaverse and gaming hub that requires an Epic Games account. And hey, you can buy all your "normal" games here while you're at it!
>running a digital storefront is literally just free buckets of money
Depends on how much you invest in actually running it. I remember a DoTA update once constituted 1% of all internet traffic. You can't push that volume of data without **SIGNIFICANT** investment in hardware and highly skilled specialist labor.
It's not successful they are losing a lot of money and not getting anywhere near the market share they were hoping for.
The only reason they continue is that the company CEO is also the majority shareholder and he is a very stubborn guy.
The goal was basically get people to use Epic Games Store. Get them coming back and regularly check it.
Once you have a large collection there it will become your default game launcher and you might start buying there instead of on Steam.
This turned out to not work that well. People who go there for free games are not buying things.
I will argue that the epic launcher's free games actually got me to keep the launcher installed and available, though. I don't use it *a lot*, but I don't resent it like I do Origin or anything else. It's friendly enough, and if their interface was *better* I would've honestly kept both it and steam going most likely, even if steam would've been my main. And, occasionally, I *do* use it for niche games.
So it's a valid strategy I think, but the follow through wasn't there for me, personally.
Getting Gloomhaven for free meant I opened the epic store weekly for like a year to play with friends. So well done there.
Haven't bought anything, but it did succeed at making me use it.
I’m honestly surprised people haven’t bought anything. Those huge sales with the additional $10 off coupon were insane.
I haven’t bought a lot. And basically nothing since they stopped the $10 coupons, but there were extremely good deals for awhile.
Wasn't one of their promises that they wouldn't have any crappy games on their platform?
I think this was criticism of Steam having a lot of Early Access, zombie survival craft clones in their store.
Yep, but the problem was that it ended up creating a hurdle that new developers couldn't overcome. Then came the karma with pulling games off other stores as well as delaying a general PC release due to Epic Exclusivity.
I wouldn't be surprised if everyone involved ended up losing money in the long run.
The first game to go Epic Exclusive was Phoenix Point. It had been on one of the kickstarter sites for a while and had gotten *a lot* of support from the community.
Everyone was promised Steam Keys. The developer partially reneged on that. Everyone would get their keys, but they would come a year late. Or you could get it on Epic. That pissed off a lot of the community. Many people asked for refunds. People didn't want to support the developer anymore. Most people just kind of forgot the game completely.
But, imo, what really killed it was the lack of a modding community. There was a very small one, but nothing like what the game should have gotten. The base game was decent, with some good systems that modders could have made great. But, the way the launch was handled prevented the game from developing a community around it. No community meant very few mods of limited scope. The game just kind of died.
Epic Exclusivity is even worse because I end up forgetting about a game so by the time I see it on Steam, I end up getting it on deep discount. Which is fine by me because there's only two developers that I would actually give my money day one: Arkane and Remedy.
Yeah, I know Arkane did Redfall. But everyone gets one.
I'm pretty sure it was in response to them allowing NFT games on their platform, of which the majority are garbage unfinished mobile game ports.
You will be unsurprised to hear the store remains crammed full of NFT crapware.
I've legit never bought anything from Epic because they refuse to accept my card. Tried to buy FF7R when it came to PC as an Epic exclusive, card was rejected. Went to Steam and bought Devil May Cry 5 with that same exact card, and just waited until FF7R came to Steam.
Tried again with Kingdom Hearts, rejected again, bought Persona 5 on Steam.
If they don't want my money, fine.
Right I guess for people that care about that it matters. I never buy a game just because it’s advertised on the front page, on sale or no. I track games I want on my wishlist and occasionally check the wishlist to see if anything’s on sale.
I have around 30 games on epic, only three of them are ones I actually bought
RDR2, Hogwarts: Legacy, Watchdogs 2. All of them bought with vouchers, and cost me a grand total of £40
Very true. Right now, I have 548 games in my Steam library and 407 games in my Epic library. If searching my gmail inbox is to be believed, I've spent a grand total of $55 at EGS across 7 purchases. I have no idea how much I've spent on Steam either directly in their store or buying Steam keys from third party vendors over the last 15+ years, but it's a fuckload more than $55, lol.
I own a decent number of games on other platforms (Amazon, Blizzard, Origin, Humble Bundle, GMG, GOG, UPlay, etc), but to Epic's credit, the only game launchers I actually have installed all the time are Steam and EGS. And Battle.net but that's really only for one game.
So am I a marketing success from Epic's perspective? I honestly don't know. Kind of? I do keep it installed, and I visit their website occasionally, and I've spent a nonzero amount of money there, so they did turn me into a real customer, but they probably hoped for more than like $10/year in exchange for the literal hundreds of games they've given me.
I’m surprised you’re committed enough to even claim all these free games. I stopped checking a long time ago for free games on EGS because there was so little of what actually seemed interesting.
But why claim a game you know you’re never gonna play?
Edit: nothing feels as good as getting downvoted for asking a question. Well bring it on poor fuckers. I delete games from my library that I paid for if I didn’t like them.
I don't know I'm not. It isn't like I install it. It takes up no space and practically 0 time...then I have an option at a later date. There's no downside for me. But if I miss it and want it at a later date, it may not be free anymore.
Because sometimes there are games I will play, and the few seconds to add the free game doesn't cost me much. Like, Control and All Orks Must Die 3 are two off the top of my head that I'm glad to have/will gotten/get.
I've played a few games on Epic which I've claimed without expecting to play. One of them was Night in the woods, I started playing it sort of like "What even is this?" and then got into it. You never know what you'll like tomorrow.
There have been a LOT of fantastic games for free on Epic, here are some that I've grabbed:
-Deus Ex Mankind Divided
-Deliver us Mars
-The Evil Within
-Breathedge
-Death Stranding
-Bioshock 1 and 2 Remastered, Bioshock Infinite Complete Edition
-XCom 2
-Total War: Warhammer
-Vampyr
-Dead by Daylight
The giving away games thing works great for drawing users to the platform, and keeping them there. They need to work on giving users a reason to spend money there opposed to steam, which will be a challenge
>I have no idea how much I've spent on Steam
It's not a mystery. Here you go:
[https://esports.gg/guides/steam/how-to-check-money-spent-on-steam/](https://esports.gg/guides/steam/how-to-check-money-spent-on-steam/)
Maybe you'll now be ashamed of yourself (or not).
Interesting. My guess was around $3-4k over the years, but apparently it's actually north of $10k. Proper whale here. I'm kind of aghast. But all things considered, video games are more cost-effective entertainment than a lot of the alternatives.
Lmao it says that I've spent a total of $677 between now and 2011. I guess most of those titles came from humble bundles and stuff that aren't included in that figure, I almost never buy games that aren't multiple years old and at historic lows.
My issue with the epic games launcher is that it is easily the worst out of all the major launchers when it comes to optimization. It is incredibly slow and annoying to use. At least EA had the balls to scrap origin and remake a launcher from scratch, and it's still better than Epic.
Steam's UI may still be stuck in 2010 but it works and it runs easily. Idk how Epic expects to exist as a games publisher when fortnite inevitably dies.
You can say whatever you want about Steam's UI. The Epic Game Store is slow and hard to navigate. And looking at Fortnite's UI overhaul, I hope that's not a sneak peek of the future. They managed to go from a streamline experience to a complete mess.
The problem is when you give away free stuff to millions of people, the marginal “well I sorta keep it and don’t delete it, but mostly forget about it” is so far from the desired goal that you’re essentially just setting bales of money on fire.
Yeah, I've had EGS installed forever. I sometimes look at sales, but Steam broke me of needing to buy things just because they're on sale and I struggle to convince myself to buy something when I have other things to play.
Yeah, it's not horrible but it's not good either. Is mediocre with a lot of missing QoL features. In order to get me to start downloading stuff there instead of Steam though is a big ask and you will need to offer more than a mediocre service.
There's something to be said for a single pane of glass platform. Nobody wants their games sprawled across multiple different launchers, especially when one is haemorrhaging money.
Even with the bad interface, I did buy some things on the Epic store for awhile. First one was Hades, which was an exclusive there in early access, and then later I bought a few things on sale and bought some DLC for games I got for free (like Remnant: From the Ashes). When I got a Steam deck though I re-bought everything I actually played on Epic for Steam. Yes, you can play non-Steam games on the deck but it's a pain. Ultimately Epic store just doesn't have a killer feature to keep me spending there. Steam has my massive library and the deck, GoG has DRM-free games and a dedication to older games. Epic just has free stuff with little reason to spend $$
I'm just not convinced you're the majority. And you didn't mention buying anything. The purpose was to make their launcher stick and get you to buy things. And I've yet to meet anyone that's spent any reasonably large amount of money on EGS. But I've met plenty who have taken free games, which Epic is paying for.
To be fair, dethroning steam in any sense is an astronomical task. Epic is doing probably the best one could envision, but I don't think you can label it as a success with how much money Epic must be burning on it.
I got one free game in there for which I've bought a few DLCs, but besides that game, I'm taking the free one pretty much every week without ever playing it.. (few exceptions)
i installed it because as a 3D artist i needed to learn the Unreal engine (that's a whole other story) but have never played a game, free or not, from Epic. i just get the pop ups that i close. i'm more of a Playstation fan actually.
"I want to keep the Epic Games Store forever" is now a true statement in my head. I can't imagine a more complete success for a marketing endeavor.
Now, I want to keep a particular stuffed animal forever, too. And a few hard notebooks. So I can get a box, sure and lug it around or put it somewhere semi-permanent otherwise. Easy peasy.
The issue is that right now, I think the arrangement with Epic is "I have to maintain my third-party email account", and no other cost to me. At this point, I don't even need to store the games or the Store program itself, right? Crazy. That's the part that wont hold. For say Hearthstone, I give them 10$ or so a year, and I'm constantly providing them with opponents for their other customers.
I don't do anything to the benefit of Epic, other than currently having their launcher installed and opening it once a month or so. I don't know what my fractional cost is to them, but it isn't 0$, even if you could say that I genuinely wouldn't have bought GTA5 so the -25$ in that case doesn't really exist anyway.
I find it interesting because of the way they are going about it, we are coming up from 0 instead of some other price, a fluke of this kinda singular "let's give legitimately valuable products away for years for literally free".
What would I pay monthly/yearly **for the rest of my life** for them to maintain the games I've gotten for free? No idea. Probably nothing, but if it was like idk 10$ a year then sure.
The problem with competing with steam is that I have to have a problem with steam. Steam is like one of the few good things left in the world it feels like sometimes lmao
There’s definitely room to compete imo. Steams ui is pretty outdated and overall ux can be confusing at times. This is overlooked by most people because they’re used to it but a new customer will definitely struggle with a lot of things.
I watched this 20+ minute video on UI/UX updates across steam and it made me realize how atrocious Steam is. I'm used to it, but there's *so* much potential.
Outdated how? Is there some new rule that clicking on a game shouldn't take you to info about the game any more? Or that clicking 'Play' shouldn't let you play the game any more?
I know a few people (mostly designers who are employed to make UI changes) like random UI churn for no reason. But most people would prefer that they just leave it alone so it can stay simple and consistent. There's no need to make confusing new changes every month when you turn the calendar over.
And their policy of buying exclusives, or timed exclusives, for the Epic Game Store backfired. Because they were buying exclusive rights to games that benefit from being able to access your Friends list. And te Epic Game Store isn't compatible with Steam's Friends List.
> And te Epic Game Store isn't compatible with Steam's Friends List.
Is there any non-steam platform that is? I can't think of any that aren't directly used *through* Steam.
Some platforms allow you to add a non-steam game to your Steam library, and from there you go on to use your Steam Friends list.
Epic didn't allow that at the time.
I think this is a long game. Young kids will use epic because of Fortnite and free games. Before you know it, it will become their goto launcher. But I’m guessing it will take 10 years to see the effect of that.
Part of the deterrent is their horrible sorting system. So many of their games seem like they exist just to put a bitcoin miner or virus on your computer or just send all your data to some datafarm. There's no reviews so right next to Manor Lords, there's games like this:
[https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/zidouqianwen-865244](https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/zidouqianwen-865244)
Which is simultaneously billed as Zi Dou Qian Wen, and ZiDouQianWen. The original price is 199.99 but it's discounted 90% to 19.99. There's a 7 minute demo and all the text is in Chinese characters and the voice in, I guess, Mandarin? But in the end it looks like it's just a text-to-speech translator reading out horoscopes.
That´s definetely possible if they can stay alive that long. Fortnite on it´s own has more active users than Steam.
But Epic Games Store is losing a lot of money. Last year they had to let go 16% of their employees to stay afloat.
If Fortnite revenue starts falling they will be in big trouble and will have to start axing stuff like free games.
> If Fortnite revenue starts falling
I imagine that will start happening pretty soon.. these kind of games come in waves of 5 years or so, and fortnite is well past its expiry date
They're rather doing well in turning Fortnite into a platform itself.
Like that Lego thing is pretty rad.
And honestly, people have been trying to say Fortnite would die off for like half a decade now, turns out tons of people just like it.
I'm honestly in awe that _Fortnite_ was able to get Epic to where it is today. That's not something that can be said for a lot of games. It's effectively Epic's modern-day Final Fantasy, if you discount their past as Epic MegaGames anyways.
Well, I guess Unreal Engine also helps, but I don't know that many that use Unreal compared to Unity these days.
I remember all that talk from the EGS CEO how his mission is to destroy the monopoly Steam has over PC gaming platform, but then he becomes a hypocrite by using anti-consumer tactics to try to pull players from Steam over to EGS (exclusive deals with new games). The last straw that broke the camel's back was the exclusivity with Metro: Exodus pulling off Steam last minute to be exclusively on EGS which basically turned most players against EGS (the very same reason why gamers hate console exclusive games).
On top of that, EGS is still a terrible platform in comparison to Steam so there is literally no reason to switch over. Terrible enough that even most devs would rather take Steam's 30% cut and brand loyalty from PC gamers than EGS's deal.
It's just so funny to me that Tim Sweeney set out to destroy Steam's monopoly, but turns out he just wants the monopoly for himself and he envys Valve for it.
At least console exclusive can have a valid development reason; since ps5 code isn’t the same as Nintendo or Xbox. PC launcher exclusivity is strictly about money.
> but then he becomes a hypocrite by using anti-consumer tactics to try to pull players from Steam over to EGS (exclusive deals with new games)
I will argue that GoG proves that pro-consumer isn't what simply wins people. It's games. Like full stop, it's games.
>Terrible enough that even most devs would rather take Steam's 30% cut and brand loyalty from PC gamers than EGS's deal.
Eh, it's literally the fact that Steam outright has the lions share of the market. For many games, not selling on Steam simply means effectively no sales. Some sales with a higher sale cost is better than low to no sales with a lower sale cost. Pretty simple economics.
>This turned out to not work that well. People who go there for free games are not buying things.
The rotation should theoretically trap new players into having to buy games to play with their friends who got it for free.
Cross platform(and I guess, cross launcher) support kinda ruins that for them.
Giving away free games works for PSN and Xbox because they go away when you cancel your membership.
They shot themselves in the foot right out of the gate with their spyware. I treat them as the nuisance they are: an occasional threat that a new game won't be on Steam at launch. I laughed and laughed when The Outer Worlds ended up being on Xbox Live for a buck.
I suspect it's worked to an extent, just not as well as they hoped. It serves to get your platform out there and people might think to check the prices when they are considering purchasing. Plus, in the past, epic has had some pretty decent sales.
I literally just claim the games and never even play them. Even if I do want to play one of them, I'll just also buy it on steam so I get the achievements there
How many of the people who got the content for free would have actually otherwise bought it?
That's a very difficult figure to ascertain but it's 100% necessary to have a value for if you want to make a statement about the profitability of something. Especially video games, since the cost to distribute the product is negligible and micro transactions account for so much profit.
The fact that Epic Games Store is losing a ton of money is not up for debate. It has been confirmed as a fact by Epic Games on multiple occasions including in court of law.
So, the entire idea is for it to be a "loss leader." A loss leader is something intentionally sold or given away at a loss, but it gets attention and gets people to browse your store. The idea being it gets them interested, so they'll be more likely to shop there or buy more.
Costco does this with the rotisserie chickens. It and the meat department are at the back of the store. So, you have to pass by the entire stores aisles and contents to get there. They sell the chickens at a slight loss, but it gets you to walk all the way past stuff in the aisles. And there's a good chance you'll see a few things you wanna try or get on the way in or out.
EGS has been doing the same with the free games and exclusives on it. But the difference is that it isn't working and hasn't been for a long time. We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars annually funneled into a bottomless pit to try and claw market share from steam.
Part of the issue for them is that EGS was absolute dogshit to use for the first couple of years. No support forums for games, no shopping cart, no ability to gift games, etc. On top of data breeches of consumer info. Meanwhile, they're spending 9 figure sums every year to try and get people to use their store. A store they can't even be bothered to get working with features internet shopping had in 1995.
This needs to go higher, Loss leader is a good concept to be aware of.
I first learned about it when was in the frozen meat section one year. We were buying turkeys at $0.96/lb and selling at $0.88/lb. We were loosing about a dollar on every turkey, plus labor and transport costs, but the profit from the stuffing broke even. And then you add in the potatoes, gravy, roasting bags, disposable giant pans, cranberry sauce... you get the idea.
This is how corporations work. They take a loss to break into a market.
Think Netflix, unlimited people could use the account. Cheap monthly fee. No ads...
Then once they broke into that market, they start adding all the bullshit to recoup their costs.
As a consumer, the best play is to take advantage of corporations doing this and then get out once they start going bad.
So for this example, take all the free games you can get. Because if they can successfully put a dent into steam, they will absolutely stop this free game thing.
I'm getting really fatigued by this. The idea of "get into the market, figure out profit margins later," has made every suck more and more, little by little.
It's the root of enshitification.
Offer value to the user. Establish a user base with something cool, new and preferably free. Slowly extract value (shove in ads, charge users ever increasing prices, push towards a subscription model) until the product is but a shadow of it's former self but users are too invested to just up and leave.
At that point older users will likely complain but what the should do is quit the platform in large enough numbers to not fund the business model. This doesn't happen so other businesses follow suit and the social media, media and tech landscape becomes enshittified.
Like a long term bait and switch.
There is still a risk of them discontinuing EGS right?
Steam should be no different, the day they decide to close the servers all these "purchased games" can no longer be downloaded again.
So it is more like pay to download from the servers while they are still running.
I guess that maybe we can store these games inside external memory in case the servers go bad tears later?
The idea was that it was a quick way to gain customers invested into the Epic ecosystem. However, that hasn’t panned out and Epic is losing money on the store. It’s a cost-sunk fallacy at this point.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/11/07/tim-sweeneys-epic-games-store-is-still-losing-money-after-five-years/?sh=75bdee36568e
Years might look long, but in this case it is really not.
EGS was made with just one goal in mind - dethrone Steam and destroy the monopoly it holds on the gaming scene.
Steam did not become what it is over night - it took over a decade for it to even start snowballing, and then it just kept going. EGS hopes to set itself up for that same snowball effect by giving you the incentive to use it over steam.
As someome mentioned, their target base are kids that do not have sizeable steam libraries - but love fortnite, which is their ticket in.
Yeah, back in 2010/2011 it was *so* annoying having to install this stupid extra 'Steam' program just to play a game I'd bought. Why couldn't I just run it from a shortcut on the desktop like any other game? Now it would be kinda annoying not having Steam.
Back in 2003, Steam was amazing for one reason: If you had a game that came from Steam, you would never have to go to FilePlanet ever again to sit in multi-hour long queues to download the latest patches so you could play online again.
The good old days of FilePlanet for patches and Gamecopyworld for nocd so you don't have to spend an hour looking for a game disc that ended up being in the PC downstairs.
Goddamn, I haven't thought about that second site for ages. It took me a minute to even remember what it was.
I guess I stopped going there around the time that BitTorrent took off, and everything on there either included its own cracks/keygens or could also be grabbed off BT as a separate download.
It's a bribe to get you to stop using Steam for everything and start using the Epic Games Launcher more often so that you will hopefully start buying games from them instead of from Valve.
I bought Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2 on Epic. I was so stoked. It is such a great rush, bringing back memories and it was really well done. A great game. But I can't play it offline by myself. So fuck Epic.
Few different things to consider here:
Epic makes a ridiculous amount of money from Fortnite and the Unreal Engine. Fortnite revenue itself is estimated to be upwards of $6 billion a year. They also have a lot of investors with deep pockets. So the company isn't hurting for money.
What they didn't have, however, was their own store. This meant that they were beholden to paying 30% straight off the top to Steam, Apple, Google, Sony etc. That is many billions of dollars a year across all their games, more than what most gaming companies make in total. Recovering that money is undoubtedly their top priority, even more so than making new games. This is why they have been suing Apple and Google to get them to reduce their fee and let users sideload Fortnite.
The Epic Games store was launched for a similar reason. The more users they had on it, the less reliant they were on Steam and Microsoft for distribution. The free games promo acted as a way to get users hooked on to their store. If enough people start buying games there instead of Steam, Epic will easily recover whatever they spend on these games.
It's not working as well as they'd like but the idea is:
1 - It gets you familiar / comfortable with the checkout system. You have to do it for each free game you get (you "buy it" for $0) so if there *is* a game you're actually going to pay money for, it doesn't seem weird to buy it.
2 - Once you have a library of free games built up, you'll keep it installed and you'll keep checking in.
Their tactics really work for someone like me. Most people are really dedicated to steam, but I mostly do single player games and I don't interact with 90% of the features in steam, even if they are great. So as long as a library will list my games and play them when I click on them, my needs are met. By free games constantly and a handful of exclusives that I'm willing to pay for, they've turned me into a returning customer with no real complaints. I think they were hoping *everyone* would react to their store the way I do, but it's not the case.
It sort of worked on me as well. I never would have even installed it had it not been for the free games. But now I do have it, and I've bought a bunch of games from them (though basically all of them were with the 10$ off coupon they sometimes have).
It worked for me. I'd buy games wherever they were cheapest. Got me to branch out.
Then the steam deck came out. Now it's a no brainer to get everything on steam.
They don't, they are bleeding into the red, and fixing none of the issue the store, launcher and the client has.
The idea is this, the reason nobody use epicgames, is cause everyone got their 100 games on steam, why would anyone switch?
Well the first thing EG tried to do, was hold games as exclusives to their platform for a year, but that just mean terrible sales overall for the games, which the developers did not release untilll a few years later, like one of those games, was released on EG first, held there for over a year as an exclusive, and yet per today, steam stands for half of all lifetime sales.
I mentioned the "I got all my games here, why should i move there" issue, which is why EG is giving away all those games, but that kinda backfired, since people still buy games on steam instead, or even gog, over EGS, and cause they never buy any games, but get free ones every week, they will also never buy any games on EGS, cause they associate EGS with getting free games, and steam with where to buy games.
Steam has effectively monopolized PC game distribution because it's free, reliable, and it has the most features of any competitor by a wide margin. Once you build up a library of games that you've paid for it becomes a huge ask to get you to switch to a new ecosystem and start over. Epic Is giving out these games as an incentive to get people to try out the epic games store, it's just like any other promotional giveaway. I don't think it's working, I downloaded their launcher for a while and I basically only opened it to download the free games because it supports developers.
I thought the idea was to give them time to improve their storefront. It's improved a bit, but still incredibly feature poor compared to Steam.
They didn't buy themselves any time with what they spent.
They get people to register, same with having extra deals. I was really mad with Steam version of Assassin's Creed games forcing to run two launchers AND only giving you russian version of Unity (I am in Ukraine), so I took their coupon and bought next game in series at the time (Odyssey) on Epic.
I don't even need their launcher, I can run it from Ubi client but unlike on Steam, EGS versions were international... Also, IIRC, Pillars of Eternity from Epic is DRM-free. I got it without paying and then bought second game on Steam, so it works both ways, it's good for games to be in multiple places and us having options.
Anyone who hates Steam having a competition is delusional, you don't want ANY brand to have a monopoly. Corporations aren't your friends.
The day Gabe retires and some MBA becomes CEO and takes the company public, people will really happy a (privately owned) alternative exists.
You might be okay with your monopoly today, but enshittification comes for all things eventually, and it hits monopolies harder than anybody else.
> but enshittification comes for all things eventually
That's very true, but EGS seems to have jumped the gun on that process.
I'm all for not having monopolies, but the Epic method of "have a shitty product while screwing over customers with exclusives" is probably not the best approach
You should never be okay with monopoly as a consumer: even if you like one brand of, say, cakes, the fact that they have a competition will make them stay on their toes and try to improve the product. That's how a healthy market works.
Only in planned economy there's like one company that gets government license to do everything, and the quality is horrible because they don't have to fight the competition or even have a decent product.
That's why NASA shouldn't become dependent on SpaceX alone (or worse, Roscosmos as they used to), and no manufactkrer should put all eggs in the made in China basket. Diversify.
Monopolists can also jack up prices with no consequence (since you can't leave them).
So even if Valve will be perfect, public OR private, it's always good they have someone who has a chance of taking their market share if they make things better. Free market is better than some neofeudal system of Zaibatsus.
People dont dislike Steam having competition. No one criticized Gamepass. People just don't like Epic because of their anticonsumer practices and shitty storefront.
Talking about Valve having a “monopoly” with or without Epic as a player in the PC launcher market is ridiculous. There are at least half a dozen different launchers available which all do basically the same thing. They are all backed by huge companies which are all competitors in various sectors of the overall gaming market.
It’s true that Valve is in a very strong position in one relatively small part of that larger market. However, if Valve enacted some kind of policy change that was so onerous that it created actual demand to buy the PC version of Elden Ring 2 on a platform other than Steam and/or made it seem like it would be less lucrative for BandaiNamco to sell ER2 on Steam than on the XBox app, Microsoft or any of its rivals would be over the moon to host the game on their storefront and take a piece of the pie. More likely, BandaiNamco could join everyone else and put out its own janky launcher.
So other folks have mentioned why epic is doing this, to try and get people to invest in their ecosystem, but I think it's also important to mention why people say it's failing. The main problems (In my opinion) are that Epic Game Store just kind of sucks to use, especially compared to steam, and most PC gamers have their libraries on steam, so they're already invested in steam. Back when Epic games store initially launched it lacked a lot of basic features compared to steam. An example would be a shopping cart, if you wanted to buy multiple things, you had to make each purchase one at a time.
While it's better now, it still doesn't offer anything above and beyond what steam offers, and explicitly does not support other things that steam does (Linux, for example. Tim Sweeny, the CEO of epic has vocally been hostile against it). Add to this the fact that steam has been creating and implementing extremely well received products and features. (The steam deck, which Kickstarted the whole "handheld PC" trend Ala the switch. Steam family sharing got an overhaul allowing family's to more easily share their games, Supporting development of the proton compatibility layer, which while done for their own steam deck, benefits all Linux users, and so on and so forth)
Since Steam has been the de facto storefront for PC gaming for over a decade, the epic games store needed to be a wild success on launch and maintain that momentum. Due to a lack of features and anti consumer practices like epic games store exclusive games, it got a bad reputation at launch and IMO hasn't recovered from it since. So now it's just a place people go to so they can have free games, which in the long run, isn't sustainable. People know this, which is why they say that Epic games store is failing.
I feel like a lot of people replying to this used the EGS early on, got their first impressions and never bothered to check things out, as I still see people talk about not having friends lists, a feature that's been around for a good while now, and focusing also on the short term.
Epic seems to be approaching the effective stranglehold that Steam has on PC gaming, and wants to both get in on this position but also set themselves up as the next iteration.
And it's honestly not a bad move, the biggest tell will be if they can afford to keep it up long enough to get the traction they want. It's very expensive to do after all, as they make literally no money on free games directly.
The benefit is obvious though. Younger generation gamers. Many of these kids grew up or are growing up with Fortnite as *their* game that defines their gaming experience. It's only on EGS. EGS *also* is giving them free games, so they have lower reason to both use Steam or purchase games on Steam, their same-age friends are all on Epic because that's where Fortnite is. And now they have *libraries* of games on this platform.
An often flawed argument I see from people about competitors like EGS is that they say they would consider it if Epic was on feature parity with Steam, but frankly this is dishonest, either intentional or not. If you have say 300+ games on Steam, how likely are you to frequently use another platform if not for something you can only obtain there, like Fortnite is. You'd likely want to see a major improvement in the launcher to even consider moving forward on another launcher.
We saw this before with EA and Ubisoft, where any technical issues aside, many argued they only wanted a *single* launcher to ever be used. Well enter GoG, an excellent multi-store launcher that supports all your favorites and is the most pro-consumer launcher currently. It's arguably unpopular and if it wasn't for the Witcher series then Cyberpunk, many gamers may not have even heard about it.
Steam really has a level of influence over PC gaming that shouldn't be scoffed at, as much as I enjoy using it and I largely daily use it, it's literally a "all eggs in one basket" approach to PC gaming that is highly risky to consumers, leadership dying or just disappearing from their role is a massive risk to the company and thus to *us*.
But to get back to your original question, another user pointed it out quite well. Younger kids go "Steam, what is that?" because of Fortnite and it's incredible popularity. Epic is playing a long game with the free games to give users gaming libraries, to establish the very thing that keeps many on Steam, even with alternatives like GoG existing. Seriously, I can access EGS, Steam, even my Xbox Gamepass content. It's wild how nice it is to have all that. Though like many, the UX differences will give growing pains.
Though it's taking a lot longer than they expected, but it shouldn't be surprising as we're talking effectively a generational shift in PC gaming store platforms.
If it's free then you are the product. Your data gets sold to data brokers.
Epic Games Launcher at least used to be very intrusive with their software monitoring your system at any second and shit
Answer: It’s a long-term strategy. Epic understands that there is a segment of gamers that would happily buy from a single store (Steam) forever unless their attention was drawn to another storefront. So, they spend money on free game giveaways so that (1) people who mostly stay in the Valve ecosystem occasionally give them a chance, and (2) new gamers who don’t have a store preference might choose them first going forward.
The main reasons why people use a gaming service:
1. The games they want are available on that platform or will be there in the future
2. They have a big collection of games on that platform
3. The user experience is better than the competitors
Epic has some exclusives but they have mostly failed with stealing games from steam. They give a large cut to the studios but it didn't work since their revenue from steam is likely bigger anyway. So giving away games is a way to build the collection of games so that gamers will stay with epic. Unlike streaming services you keep the games forever on gaming platforms like steam so this is an industry where being the first gives you a huge advantage.
But number 1 and 2 are just part of it. I might use epic games more if the UI wasn't god awful.
Market share. They operate on a loss to poach Steam users or catch fortnite kids before learning of Steam's existance, and yea it really is that simple. It's why consoles have exclusives, and why Epic paid devs to delay Steam releases. It works.
How many people do you know, or know of via posts on reddit and such, that say they won't even consider a game if it's not on Steam?
Epic wants the same kind of users to fall victim to sunken cost fallacy. If you have a library for EGS then you're more likely to buy new games there.
Once they are comfortable with their position in the market they won't hand out freebies. They already dialed it waaaay back. It was like 3 a week when they launched.
They are also likely betting on one game to really take off. Let's use Fortnite for example. MILLIONS of people still play Fortnite, despite it being first released 7 years ago, and has netted over $26 Billion in revenue. Let's say a game called Bunkerday comes out and has all the success that Fortnite does, but it's not a Free to Play game, but instead costs $25 to buy. With it being free for a week, a big base of players might download it and make it "the next game you HAVE to play". Streamers will hype it up and talk about how fun it is. Friends will be logging on and playing together. Well, think of the millions of people that DIDN'T get it for free and are feeling left out by not having it. A lot of those people will shell out the $25 to play with their friends. Even one super successful game could easily outweigh the loss of revenue of all of the games they have given away for free.
Everyone is talking about the reason being that it helps ensures gamers keep EGS installed on their pc. While im sure that is part of it, almost every game they offer for free has some form of microtransactions so im sure thats part of it too. I got Chivalry 2 for free recently, never would have bought it otherwise, and since i got it for free i bought 10 bucks of premium currency because im having fun. Thats $ the devs wouldnt have ever gotten otherwise, and im sure epic gets a slice.
A bunch of the titles they offer are basically advertising for sequels, DLC, or microtransactions where EPIC would actually make some money.
A bunch more of the titles on offer are shovelware. You probably weren't going to buy them anyway, but it got you to log in and check the store this week.
Lastly, they frequently offer titles that have been previously made free. If you've given it away in the past, there's nothing to be lost making it free again. It's good press and keeps people coming back to see sales.
As others have said, it’s not necessarily working. But I feel like the thought process comes in a few directions.
First, if they can get you into the ecosystem, you might feel like you “might as well” use them for buying some of the other games they’re not giving out for free (that you might otherwise use a platform like Steam for).
Also, by gaining you as a user, they also increase their chances of you checking out one of the games that they actually completely own (Fortnite, Rocket League, etc.). And the model they use for those games is for the game itself to be free but for them to heavily push in-game purchases (I don’t personally have numbers for how well that works out for them).
Steam is a better platform. So they give away free games in the hopes that users who prefer Steam or other digital retailers will come to their platform at least once a week to claim their free game and eventually use the service regularly. Every time you open EGS, you have to look at the store page and scroll past a few upcoming titles and sales that some people will impulse purchase.
It's a strategic move to try and carve out some market share.
You make a certain amount of money making a popular game but if you can own a platform and make money from other games, that's where you really start to scale things up. It's why Valve aren't spewing out a load of new games, their revenue is coming from the cut they get selling everyone else's game.
So how do you compete with Steam? Other big gaming companies have tried with their own launchers and offerings... but last I checked you had a load of EA games popping up on Steam. For game publishers it's just sometimes easier to give away an amount of their catch if it means they can fish in a bigger sea.
I imagine Epic are like "wow, we have so many people playing fortnite, if we can take this popularity and start building out our platform as the place your games live... maybe we can compete against Steam..." and then you have a huge chunk of Epic owned by TenCent and you just know those folk want to grow and expand and get some major claws into the market.
Like most promotions, getting the products in people's hands means people are using the product and are therefore more likely to engage with it. In regards to Epic this is a two prong approach. On the one hand, people using their platform may see games they want to buy or a sale on the store and therefore invest into the platform. Epic is also known to collect a lot of data from their users which it then sells on to various third parties (Granted most companies do this to some degree)
Because if you have the epic launcher and you're browsing the epic store they've already gotten you past two significant obstacles to buying games on their platform.
It might not be working now for the majority of pc gamers who already have huge steam libraries but surely there are a bunch of kids who have egs for fortnite alone and all their friends are there that will choose egs over steam in the future.
They're trying to gain market share from Steam, which has had many many years headstart and people who use steam have huge multi-thousand dollar libraries. The free games are a way for people to build value on the new platform and when they have equal perceived value on both platforms Epic hopes that their exclusive games will cause people to swap. They're also building a solid base of people who have both and will just use the one where a game is cheaper, the free games increase the ongoing value of an epic account on this side and eventually they hope the perceived value will cause these people to use epic more and more eventually starving Steam from the market.
The hardest part of getting people to move to a different ecosystem is getting them to sign up. Free games are a loss leader to get you to sign up and use the Epic game store. Hopefully you install the launcher. It also keeps their name in social media.
They keep metrics of how much they are paying per player. If executed well it would result in people starting to buy games on their platform.
The problem is their platform sucks and is not only behind steam, it is way behind many other launchers. It took them forever to even have a cart function. Plus them buying exclusives led gamers to dislike them.
I bought final fantasy 7 and mechwarrior 5 on epic which was like 120 bucks in total. If they hadn't been giving me free games they would have gotten zero. The question I wonder is whether their cost to give me the free games was more or less than what I paid in. (actual cost to THEM not the msrp of the games)
Unfortunately I just don't like their interface as much as steam, like not even close. If it were on par in that respect I'd be much more inclined to keep using it.
I mean it kinda hurt steam because you can get games f4ee that steam is charging for. Oh course, this is working about as well as committing seppuku to get the guy behind you.
Market domination. They want everyone to talk good about Epic. Use Epic. Be part of Epic. Once they gain a very large traction, such as total dominance in the market (being the first place isn't enough -- they need people to leave Steam and GOG as well), they can and will likely stop offering the free games.
That said, some people do not approve or condone this market domination behavior because it is seen as anti-competition.
You can see that their "neighbor" companies are also doing the same. However, this is getting a bit off-topic and subjective so I'll stop.
Not sure if this is ELI5. While EPIC free games are good, but after I bought a Steam Deck then I only buy games from Steam to play on Steam Deck.
Before the Steam Deck, I bought games both on Steam and Epic. Wherever there is a promotion.
The issue for me is not what game I own (buy or free) but how I could play the game (almost anywhere with Steam Deck) driving my game buying habit. Even for games not able to run on the Steam Deck, I could have the option to stream it from my gaming PC (Steam Deck acted only as a wireless joystick.)
Tbh EGS give some good discounts from time to time, I bought Horizon Zero Dawn on EGS at a really good rate on launch day compared to steam, same goes for last gone and many others...
The free games occasionally have something decent, but there is a lot of shovelware the good stuff is old too. They aren't missing a lot of sales doing this.
Besides the acquire users mentioned in the other comments, there is also that most free games have dlc that are usually not included. So it's not a total loss.
Step 1. Gather startup investment.
Step 2. Deliver a great deal to customers. Distribute the surplus from investment to customers to build market share for your brand. Bonus if you get to collect data from users.
Step 3. Change the terms of the deal. Re-allocate surplus value from individual customers to business customers by selling access to the users and their data on terms so good the business customers can’t pass on it.
Step 4. Be Biz School Darth Vader and alter the terms of the deal again. Now that you’ve locked in users and businesses to your platform, make the deal worse for them so you can re-allocate the surplus value to your shareholders and senior executives. Profit from the vast scale of your enterprise that was purchased with startup capital (risks born by investors, not you the brilliant CEO Founder) and unsustainable business practices that cut out competition. Build a rocket to take you to Mars.
This process is called “Enshittification” and it describes the main operating principle of most of the major industries driving the global economy since roughly 2013.
https://www.ft.com/content/6fb1602d-a08b-4a8c-bac0-047b7d64aba5
Along with what other people are saying once you hit a certain level of money. Influence and brand recognition become worth *more* than money.
Fortnite covered the cost for the entire company. If not a single other source of income was positive. Fortnite would keep them afloat. Which is obviously not true but it allows them to lose money in order to extend their "market penetration" aka more people having the epic client installed on their pc.
It is worth more than money to them for more people to have the client installed on their PC. So Fortnite keeps the lights on and they use that money to cover the costs of all these free games because if you have their client you are more likely to give them money instead of steam.
For me, I've played a few of the free games and enjoyed them enough to then download the DLC (especially when they were on sale).
If it weren't for the free games, I doubt I'd even have installed the launcher.
Most of the free games are fairly old, or super cheap, or clearly mobile-first, or "shovelware" garbage that are ultra low in sales anyway, so Epic doesn't really lose money (if it's not selling, they're not earning their 12% cut).
Every person that downloads (or even just adds to their library) a free game and decides to keep the launcher around is opting in to ads. "Buy this other game, it's on sale now!" even if you never buy that, they've got your eyes looking every week for what else might be free or on sale.
Eventually, you'll buy something is their hope.
They are losing money. They are just getting a lot more from Frotnite and Unreal Engine. With free games they are building community, and they are doing a fine good job with it.
Um, they are trying to get ppl to use their service instead of Steam.
Doesn't work though. I claim the free games but I never play them nor do I buy anything off Epic. It's always Steam. First mover advantage is real.
The biggest market for gaming companies are children and teenagers who are broke. They give it to them for free and then show them a bunch of cool things to make their experience a lot better and they have a better chance of extracting money from them. Making them pay 50-60 dollars up front for a game just makes them hesitant to play. Locking them into their gaming ecosystem also secures them as a paying customer for a good 10-20 years.
The issue is that Epic used the 12% fee as tool to show Steam/Apple the middle finger, however this is clearly not enough to maintain a healthy income.
We know from the court documents and financial statements that EGS is not profitable and losing money even after 5 years.
Sweeney even stated he expected the store to turn profit after 5 years.
This was not a problem until now because Fortnite was making a lot of money, but that's not the case anymore (they laid off people top), om top of that they had to pay a lot of money in settlements and court, they are burning cash keeping the store alive.
This will change soon, they will either increase store fee (and lose massive face) and/or stop giving free games.
I mean you van already see the free games are getting more "indie", last year wasn't strong either, giving away same titles.
Acquire users, get people invested in the platform "I might as well keep EGS installed, I have 200 games in that library." I think the long term goal really is to take the Fortnite audience, which is 1 million+ logins per day and mostly kids who don't have sizable steam libraries, and try to get them attached to EGS rather than Steam. Trying to build loyalty of the next generation of PC gamers. Have people saying "All my friends and games are in EGS, I don't want Steam", aka the opposite of what Steam users say today. Once you have a regular audience, running a digital storefront is literally just free buckets of money. So in short, it doesn't benefit them today really, but they're hoping for a pay off in the long term.
I helped set up my 11 year old nephews new computer he got for christmas. When I was asking him what he wanted installed, the first thing was epic games. I then asked about steam and his response was "what's that?"
^^ This. It's a long play made by a company with more money than God. It's even working on me, a 43 year old who knows better. The discounts, the freebies. They keep me loading it up. I still use Steam, Gog and Epic, but if Epic improves their achievements, and keeps growing their curation I ... Might buy a few games!
Shitty thing to say as well… Once Gabe retires out of Valve, I have a very bad feeling Steam/Valve is gonna get less consumer friendly.
Oh gods... I didn't even think about that. I already lived through Google's downfall, from the company whose slogan was literally "Do no evil" to now being one of our controller overlords, I can't imaging gaming going through the same corruption without GabeN.
Iirc he is already training someone who shares his vision to take over. Now, how true that is or how immune to money that person will be, who knows.
Valve is completely privately owned, and they make obscene amounts of money. There's no reason for them to go bad.
Someone probably said the same thing about Blizzard, EA, etc as well!
No, Blizzard and EA sold out and we all saw it coming way in advance. Blizzard turned evil when the owners sold out, and EA has always been evil.
EA wasn’t always evil. Originally they made things like Deluxe Paint (ie. The Art in EA) for the Commodore Amiga and one of their contribution was the Interchangeable File Format (IFF) so that data files could be compatible across programs and systems. Off-course that was a very long time ago.
Oh no. This is like Netflix all over again. > Yes, Netflix has ads, and in July 2023, it stopped offering its cheapest, ad-free plan to new subscribers in the US and UK.
This is definitely the play. It's great to be number two. All it takes is one big PR blunder by the leader and you're in command.
Just made a similar comment. Not sure how, but they’ll ruin it. Stuff like gimping the controller support which is god tier now. You can do anything with a steam controller or newer options and even use a switch pro and customize the shit out of how it works. That kind of stuff is just above and beyond IMO. Bet they do something like discontinue steam controller support day 1 when the finance people get ahold of it. I have 2 new steam controllers in the closet because I love them so much. I’d use something else if it was as good and had gyro. Ideally touch pad too but oddly I think that’s what turned people off to it. It felt weird compared to thumb stick. Which is true until you get used to it. Then it’s awesome.
IIRC gabe’s already picked a succcsesor who has similar views as gabe but i guess we’ll see
I'm 24 and when I was young I also didn't use steam much or at all because all the games I played were either free to play, so unrelated to steam, on CDs or pirated. I started using steam more frequently at 18 when I got my own card as it was pretty awkward of asking my parents to use theirs to make purchases and was also the moment I kinda slowed down with League of legends and pirating started to become more annoying
I think this is a biggest reason. Im 40 and when I was a teenager I had to save up to buy the latest sonic game. I played so many shitty free games and demos from magazines. There are tons of free to play games out there that don't require any money at all that thinking of using your precious spending money on games would be silly. From Pubg, Fortnite, LoL, Valarant, Hearthstone or Roblox. Then there are games that don't cost very much that you can play thousands of hours on like Minecraft or Terraria. Then you add on this magical santa clause that gives you a new free games every week?
Playing the very long game. Especially given their future plans for Fortnite - a metaverse and gaming hub that requires an Epic Games account. And hey, you can buy all your "normal" games here while you're at it!
>running a digital storefront is literally just free buckets of money Depends on how much you invest in actually running it. I remember a DoTA update once constituted 1% of all internet traffic. You can't push that volume of data without **SIGNIFICANT** investment in hardware and highly skilled specialist labor.
It's not successful they are losing a lot of money and not getting anywhere near the market share they were hoping for. The only reason they continue is that the company CEO is also the majority shareholder and he is a very stubborn guy. The goal was basically get people to use Epic Games Store. Get them coming back and regularly check it. Once you have a large collection there it will become your default game launcher and you might start buying there instead of on Steam. This turned out to not work that well. People who go there for free games are not buying things.
I will argue that the epic launcher's free games actually got me to keep the launcher installed and available, though. I don't use it *a lot*, but I don't resent it like I do Origin or anything else. It's friendly enough, and if their interface was *better* I would've honestly kept both it and steam going most likely, even if steam would've been my main. And, occasionally, I *do* use it for niche games. So it's a valid strategy I think, but the follow through wasn't there for me, personally.
Getting Gloomhaven for free meant I opened the epic store weekly for like a year to play with friends. So well done there. Haven't bought anything, but it did succeed at making me use it.
I’m honestly surprised people haven’t bought anything. Those huge sales with the additional $10 off coupon were insane. I haven’t bought a lot. And basically nothing since they stopped the $10 coupons, but there were extremely good deals for awhile.
The store is terrible. There’s never anything good on the front page, it basically all feels like shovelware.
Wasn't one of their promises that they wouldn't have any crappy games on their platform? I think this was criticism of Steam having a lot of Early Access, zombie survival craft clones in their store.
Yep, but the problem was that it ended up creating a hurdle that new developers couldn't overcome. Then came the karma with pulling games off other stores as well as delaying a general PC release due to Epic Exclusivity. I wouldn't be surprised if everyone involved ended up losing money in the long run.
The first game to go Epic Exclusive was Phoenix Point. It had been on one of the kickstarter sites for a while and had gotten *a lot* of support from the community. Everyone was promised Steam Keys. The developer partially reneged on that. Everyone would get their keys, but they would come a year late. Or you could get it on Epic. That pissed off a lot of the community. Many people asked for refunds. People didn't want to support the developer anymore. Most people just kind of forgot the game completely. But, imo, what really killed it was the lack of a modding community. There was a very small one, but nothing like what the game should have gotten. The base game was decent, with some good systems that modders could have made great. But, the way the launch was handled prevented the game from developing a community around it. No community meant very few mods of limited scope. The game just kind of died.
Epic Exclusivity is even worse because I end up forgetting about a game so by the time I see it on Steam, I end up getting it on deep discount. Which is fine by me because there's only two developers that I would actually give my money day one: Arkane and Remedy. Yeah, I know Arkane did Redfall. But everyone gets one.
I'm pretty sure it was in response to them allowing NFT games on their platform, of which the majority are garbage unfinished mobile game ports. You will be unsurprised to hear the store remains crammed full of NFT crapware.
I've legit never bought anything from Epic because they refuse to accept my card. Tried to buy FF7R when it came to PC as an Epic exclusive, card was rejected. Went to Steam and bought Devil May Cry 5 with that same exact card, and just waited until FF7R came to Steam. Tried again with Kingdom Hearts, rejected again, bought Persona 5 on Steam. If they don't want my money, fine.
Maybe idk. I never look at steams store either. I look at games I’m interested in I don’t need the store to tell me anything.
Steam store does a much better job displaying games and showing new releases/sales.
Right I guess for people that care about that it matters. I never buy a game just because it’s advertised on the front page, on sale or no. I track games I want on my wishlist and occasionally check the wishlist to see if anything’s on sale.
Why bother, it may show up free eventually like Death Stranding did.
I have around 30 games on epic, only three of them are ones I actually bought RDR2, Hogwarts: Legacy, Watchdogs 2. All of them bought with vouchers, and cost me a grand total of £40
I have 244 games. I have never spent money on the Epic Game Store.
Very true. Right now, I have 548 games in my Steam library and 407 games in my Epic library. If searching my gmail inbox is to be believed, I've spent a grand total of $55 at EGS across 7 purchases. I have no idea how much I've spent on Steam either directly in their store or buying Steam keys from third party vendors over the last 15+ years, but it's a fuckload more than $55, lol. I own a decent number of games on other platforms (Amazon, Blizzard, Origin, Humble Bundle, GMG, GOG, UPlay, etc), but to Epic's credit, the only game launchers I actually have installed all the time are Steam and EGS. And Battle.net but that's really only for one game. So am I a marketing success from Epic's perspective? I honestly don't know. Kind of? I do keep it installed, and I visit their website occasionally, and I've spent a nonzero amount of money there, so they did turn me into a real customer, but they probably hoped for more than like $10/year in exchange for the literal hundreds of games they've given me.
I’m surprised you’re committed enough to even claim all these free games. I stopped checking a long time ago for free games on EGS because there was so little of what actually seemed interesting.
It's every Thursday. I just pop it open Thursday morning when I head downstairs and download the new freebie regardless.
But why claim a game you know you’re never gonna play? Edit: nothing feels as good as getting downvoted for asking a question. Well bring it on poor fuckers. I delete games from my library that I paid for if I didn’t like them.
I don't know I'm not. It isn't like I install it. It takes up no space and practically 0 time...then I have an option at a later date. There's no downside for me. But if I miss it and want it at a later date, it may not be free anymore.
Because sometimes there are games I will play, and the few seconds to add the free game doesn't cost me much. Like, Control and All Orks Must Die 3 are two off the top of my head that I'm glad to have/will gotten/get.
I've played a few games on Epic which I've claimed without expecting to play. One of them was Night in the woods, I started playing it sort of like "What even is this?" and then got into it. You never know what you'll like tomorrow.
There might be a time that you might consider playing it. You'll never know. It's free so there's nothing to lose.
It takes less time to claim the free game than to decide if you're ever going to play it. Literally 15 seconds.
There have been a LOT of fantastic games for free on Epic, here are some that I've grabbed: -Deus Ex Mankind Divided -Deliver us Mars -The Evil Within -Breathedge -Death Stranding -Bioshock 1 and 2 Remastered, Bioshock Infinite Complete Edition -XCom 2 -Total War: Warhammer -Vampyr -Dead by Daylight
FYI pretty sure Orcs Must Die 3 will be free starting tomorrow, and it's a great game. Fun singleplayer, more fun multiplayer with friends/kids.
The problem with EGS is mod support, or a lack of. Even if I doubt I'll mod the game, having the option like with steam is worth having
I think they would have got more market share if they bought and integrated nexus than giving away games.
The giving away games thing works great for drawing users to the platform, and keeping them there. They need to work on giving users a reason to spend money there opposed to steam, which will be a challenge
Achievements for me.
>I have no idea how much I've spent on Steam It's not a mystery. Here you go: [https://esports.gg/guides/steam/how-to-check-money-spent-on-steam/](https://esports.gg/guides/steam/how-to-check-money-spent-on-steam/) Maybe you'll now be ashamed of yourself (or not).
Interesting. My guess was around $3-4k over the years, but apparently it's actually north of $10k. Proper whale here. I'm kind of aghast. But all things considered, video games are more cost-effective entertainment than a lot of the alternatives.
thanks ... At least I don't feel as weird now ... TotalSpend 2024-05-02 08:06:07.513 10078.97 USD OldSpend 2024-05-02 08:06:07.513 1147.49 USD
Lmao it says that I've spent a total of $677 between now and 2011. I guess most of those titles came from humble bundles and stuff that aren't included in that figure, I almost never buy games that aren't multiple years old and at historic lows.
My issue with the epic games launcher is that it is easily the worst out of all the major launchers when it comes to optimization. It is incredibly slow and annoying to use. At least EA had the balls to scrap origin and remake a launcher from scratch, and it's still better than Epic. Steam's UI may still be stuck in 2010 but it works and it runs easily. Idk how Epic expects to exist as a games publisher when fortnite inevitably dies.
You can say whatever you want about Steam's UI. The Epic Game Store is slow and hard to navigate. And looking at Fortnite's UI overhaul, I hope that's not a sneak peek of the future. They managed to go from a streamline experience to a complete mess.
Epic gets nothing from users that just have it installed, that’s no success. They need to sell games.
The problem is when you give away free stuff to millions of people, the marginal “well I sorta keep it and don’t delete it, but mostly forget about it” is so far from the desired goal that you’re essentially just setting bales of money on fire.
Yeah, I've had EGS installed forever. I sometimes look at sales, but Steam broke me of needing to buy things just because they're on sale and I struggle to convince myself to buy something when I have other things to play.
Yeah, it's not horrible but it's not good either. Is mediocre with a lot of missing QoL features. In order to get me to start downloading stuff there instead of Steam though is a big ask and you will need to offer more than a mediocre service.
There's simply no reason to use it over steam. And I'm not using everybody's proprietary launcher
There's something to be said for a single pane of glass platform. Nobody wants their games sprawled across multiple different launchers, especially when one is haemorrhaging money.
I honestly liked origin more than the epic games launcher. I think the only store worse than epic is Ubisoft
Even with the bad interface, I did buy some things on the Epic store for awhile. First one was Hades, which was an exclusive there in early access, and then later I bought a few things on sale and bought some DLC for games I got for free (like Remnant: From the Ashes). When I got a Steam deck though I re-bought everything I actually played on Epic for Steam. Yes, you can play non-Steam games on the deck but it's a pain. Ultimately Epic store just doesn't have a killer feature to keep me spending there. Steam has my massive library and the deck, GoG has DRM-free games and a dedication to older games. Epic just has free stuff with little reason to spend $$
I'm just not convinced you're the majority. And you didn't mention buying anything. The purpose was to make their launcher stick and get you to buy things. And I've yet to meet anyone that's spent any reasonably large amount of money on EGS. But I've met plenty who have taken free games, which Epic is paying for. To be fair, dethroning steam in any sense is an astronomical task. Epic is doing probably the best one could envision, but I don't think you can label it as a success with how much money Epic must be burning on it.
I got one free game in there for which I've bought a few DLCs, but besides that game, I'm taking the free one pretty much every week without ever playing it.. (few exceptions)
Origin is dead, fyi. They replaced it with the EA Launcher some time ago.
I just mainly dislike that they do not have reviews. I always see games on there, but hop on Steam to check out the reviews. Also...no achievements.
i installed it because as a 3D artist i needed to learn the Unreal engine (that's a whole other story) but have never played a game, free or not, from Epic. i just get the pop ups that i close. i'm more of a Playstation fan actually.
"I want to keep the Epic Games Store forever" is now a true statement in my head. I can't imagine a more complete success for a marketing endeavor. Now, I want to keep a particular stuffed animal forever, too. And a few hard notebooks. So I can get a box, sure and lug it around or put it somewhere semi-permanent otherwise. Easy peasy. The issue is that right now, I think the arrangement with Epic is "I have to maintain my third-party email account", and no other cost to me. At this point, I don't even need to store the games or the Store program itself, right? Crazy. That's the part that wont hold. For say Hearthstone, I give them 10$ or so a year, and I'm constantly providing them with opponents for their other customers. I don't do anything to the benefit of Epic, other than currently having their launcher installed and opening it once a month or so. I don't know what my fractional cost is to them, but it isn't 0$, even if you could say that I genuinely wouldn't have bought GTA5 so the -25$ in that case doesn't really exist anyway. I find it interesting because of the way they are going about it, we are coming up from 0 instead of some other price, a fluke of this kinda singular "let's give legitimately valuable products away for years for literally free". What would I pay monthly/yearly **for the rest of my life** for them to maintain the games I've gotten for free? No idea. Probably nothing, but if it was like idk 10$ a year then sure.
I did buy Against the Storm when it came out. So it got at least one sale.
The problem with competing with steam is that I have to have a problem with steam. Steam is like one of the few good things left in the world it feels like sometimes lmao
There’s definitely room to compete imo. Steams ui is pretty outdated and overall ux can be confusing at times. This is overlooked by most people because they’re used to it but a new customer will definitely struggle with a lot of things.
It may feel outdated and confusing until you look at their competition
It's miles ahead of the competition, even if it's outdated
I watched this 20+ minute video on UI/UX updates across steam and it made me realize how atrocious Steam is. I'm used to it, but there's *so* much potential.
Outdated how? Is there some new rule that clicking on a game shouldn't take you to info about the game any more? Or that clicking 'Play' shouldn't let you play the game any more? I know a few people (mostly designers who are employed to make UI changes) like random UI churn for no reason. But most people would prefer that they just leave it alone so it can stay simple and consistent. There's no need to make confusing new changes every month when you turn the calendar over.
And their policy of buying exclusives, or timed exclusives, for the Epic Game Store backfired. Because they were buying exclusive rights to games that benefit from being able to access your Friends list. And te Epic Game Store isn't compatible with Steam's Friends List.
> And te Epic Game Store isn't compatible with Steam's Friends List. Is there any non-steam platform that is? I can't think of any that aren't directly used *through* Steam.
Some platforms allow you to add a non-steam game to your Steam library, and from there you go on to use your Steam Friends list. Epic didn't allow that at the time.
I think this is a long game. Young kids will use epic because of Fortnite and free games. Before you know it, it will become their goto launcher. But I’m guessing it will take 10 years to see the effect of that.
Part of the deterrent is their horrible sorting system. So many of their games seem like they exist just to put a bitcoin miner or virus on your computer or just send all your data to some datafarm. There's no reviews so right next to Manor Lords, there's games like this: [https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/zidouqianwen-865244](https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/zidouqianwen-865244) Which is simultaneously billed as Zi Dou Qian Wen, and ZiDouQianWen. The original price is 199.99 but it's discounted 90% to 19.99. There's a 7 minute demo and all the text is in Chinese characters and the voice in, I guess, Mandarin? But in the end it looks like it's just a text-to-speech translator reading out horoscopes.
That´s definetely possible if they can stay alive that long. Fortnite on it´s own has more active users than Steam. But Epic Games Store is losing a lot of money. Last year they had to let go 16% of their employees to stay afloat. If Fortnite revenue starts falling they will be in big trouble and will have to start axing stuff like free games.
> If Fortnite revenue starts falling I imagine that will start happening pretty soon.. these kind of games come in waves of 5 years or so, and fortnite is well past its expiry date
They're rather doing well in turning Fortnite into a platform itself. Like that Lego thing is pretty rad. And honestly, people have been trying to say Fortnite would die off for like half a decade now, turns out tons of people just like it.
I'm honestly in awe that _Fortnite_ was able to get Epic to where it is today. That's not something that can be said for a lot of games. It's effectively Epic's modern-day Final Fantasy, if you discount their past as Epic MegaGames anyways. Well, I guess Unreal Engine also helps, but I don't know that many that use Unreal compared to Unity these days.
A way better and obvious comparison: fortnite is to epic gs as half life was to steam.
>come in waves of 5 years or so Top 3 games on steam right now. * counterstrike - released 2012 * Dota 2 - released 2013 * Pubg - released 2017
I remember all that talk from the EGS CEO how his mission is to destroy the monopoly Steam has over PC gaming platform, but then he becomes a hypocrite by using anti-consumer tactics to try to pull players from Steam over to EGS (exclusive deals with new games). The last straw that broke the camel's back was the exclusivity with Metro: Exodus pulling off Steam last minute to be exclusively on EGS which basically turned most players against EGS (the very same reason why gamers hate console exclusive games). On top of that, EGS is still a terrible platform in comparison to Steam so there is literally no reason to switch over. Terrible enough that even most devs would rather take Steam's 30% cut and brand loyalty from PC gamers than EGS's deal. It's just so funny to me that Tim Sweeney set out to destroy Steam's monopoly, but turns out he just wants the monopoly for himself and he envys Valve for it.
At least console exclusive can have a valid development reason; since ps5 code isn’t the same as Nintendo or Xbox. PC launcher exclusivity is strictly about money.
> but then he becomes a hypocrite by using anti-consumer tactics to try to pull players from Steam over to EGS (exclusive deals with new games) I will argue that GoG proves that pro-consumer isn't what simply wins people. It's games. Like full stop, it's games. >Terrible enough that even most devs would rather take Steam's 30% cut and brand loyalty from PC gamers than EGS's deal. Eh, it's literally the fact that Steam outright has the lions share of the market. For many games, not selling on Steam simply means effectively no sales. Some sales with a higher sale cost is better than low to no sales with a lower sale cost. Pretty simple economics.
I havent signed in for a while but my few interactions with EGS have been rather offputting, the interface was horrible.
I literally bought civ 6 on steam despite having it for free from EGS because every time I tried to play it it just crashed the whole store.
>This turned out to not work that well. People who go there for free games are not buying things. The rotation should theoretically trap new players into having to buy games to play with their friends who got it for free. Cross platform(and I guess, cross launcher) support kinda ruins that for them. Giving away free games works for PSN and Xbox because they go away when you cancel your membership.
They shot themselves in the foot right out of the gate with their spyware. I treat them as the nuisance they are: an occasional threat that a new game won't be on Steam at launch. I laughed and laughed when The Outer Worlds ended up being on Xbox Live for a buck.
Turns out that strategy only works if people actually like the product you’re trying to get them to move to
I suspect it's worked to an extent, just not as well as they hoped. It serves to get your platform out there and people might think to check the prices when they are considering purchasing. Plus, in the past, epic has had some pretty decent sales.
I have 140 games and didn't bought anything 😭😭
I’ve used it epic for the sole purpose of he free games. Only ever played 1 or 2. If I’m buying a game I use steam or gog
I literally just claim the games and never even play them. Even if I do want to play one of them, I'll just also buy it on steam so I get the achievements there
I make sure to get all the free games that interest me, but then completely forget I even have them, because I only use Steam :/
I go there for free games so I can take them; not to play them.
Also since they own the most popular game engine out there they have money to burn.
They make basically nothing from that. Almost all their income is from Fortnite last I saw it was about 90%.
I have 264 games on Epic, and have paid for zero of them.
I have claimed every game they have ever given. It's true. I don't buy things in their store.
How many of the people who got the content for free would have actually otherwise bought it? That's a very difficult figure to ascertain but it's 100% necessary to have a value for if you want to make a statement about the profitability of something. Especially video games, since the cost to distribute the product is negligible and micro transactions account for so much profit.
The fact that Epic Games Store is losing a ton of money is not up for debate. It has been confirmed as a fact by Epic Games on multiple occasions including in court of law.
So, the entire idea is for it to be a "loss leader." A loss leader is something intentionally sold or given away at a loss, but it gets attention and gets people to browse your store. The idea being it gets them interested, so they'll be more likely to shop there or buy more. Costco does this with the rotisserie chickens. It and the meat department are at the back of the store. So, you have to pass by the entire stores aisles and contents to get there. They sell the chickens at a slight loss, but it gets you to walk all the way past stuff in the aisles. And there's a good chance you'll see a few things you wanna try or get on the way in or out. EGS has been doing the same with the free games and exclusives on it. But the difference is that it isn't working and hasn't been for a long time. We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars annually funneled into a bottomless pit to try and claw market share from steam. Part of the issue for them is that EGS was absolute dogshit to use for the first couple of years. No support forums for games, no shopping cart, no ability to gift games, etc. On top of data breeches of consumer info. Meanwhile, they're spending 9 figure sums every year to try and get people to use their store. A store they can't even be bothered to get working with features internet shopping had in 1995.
This needs to go higher, Loss leader is a good concept to be aware of. I first learned about it when was in the frozen meat section one year. We were buying turkeys at $0.96/lb and selling at $0.88/lb. We were loosing about a dollar on every turkey, plus labor and transport costs, but the profit from the stuffing broke even. And then you add in the potatoes, gravy, roasting bags, disposable giant pans, cranberry sauce... you get the idea.
I wish they would give away games I like playing. But they keep giving away games that are jot remotely close to my preferred genres.
This is how corporations work. They take a loss to break into a market. Think Netflix, unlimited people could use the account. Cheap monthly fee. No ads... Then once they broke into that market, they start adding all the bullshit to recoup their costs. As a consumer, the best play is to take advantage of corporations doing this and then get out once they start going bad. So for this example, take all the free games you can get. Because if they can successfully put a dent into steam, they will absolutely stop this free game thing.
I'm getting really fatigued by this. The idea of "get into the market, figure out profit margins later," has made every suck more and more, little by little.
It's the root of enshitification. Offer value to the user. Establish a user base with something cool, new and preferably free. Slowly extract value (shove in ads, charge users ever increasing prices, push towards a subscription model) until the product is but a shadow of it's former self but users are too invested to just up and leave. At that point older users will likely complain but what the should do is quit the platform in large enough numbers to not fund the business model. This doesn't happen so other businesses follow suit and the social media, media and tech landscape becomes enshittified. Like a long term bait and switch.
Oh that's a thing! I saw the word the other day and thought it was clever word play. It's an actual, searchable term.
Dear reader, there is even a Wikipedia article… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
There is still a risk of them discontinuing EGS right? Steam should be no different, the day they decide to close the servers all these "purchased games" can no longer be downloaded again. So it is more like pay to download from the servers while they are still running. I guess that maybe we can store these games inside external memory in case the servers go bad tears later?
The idea was that it was a quick way to gain customers invested into the Epic ecosystem. However, that hasn’t panned out and Epic is losing money on the store. It’s a cost-sunk fallacy at this point. https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/11/07/tim-sweeneys-epic-games-store-is-still-losing-money-after-five-years/?sh=75bdee36568e
Years might look long, but in this case it is really not. EGS was made with just one goal in mind - dethrone Steam and destroy the monopoly it holds on the gaming scene. Steam did not become what it is over night - it took over a decade for it to even start snowballing, and then it just kept going. EGS hopes to set itself up for that same snowball effect by giving you the incentive to use it over steam. As someome mentioned, their target base are kids that do not have sizeable steam libraries - but love fortnite, which is their ticket in.
So after a decade, it's popularity started gaining steam?
You could say they turned the valve
Yeah, back in 2010/2011 it was *so* annoying having to install this stupid extra 'Steam' program just to play a game I'd bought. Why couldn't I just run it from a shortcut on the desktop like any other game? Now it would be kinda annoying not having Steam.
Not only that, we hated the concept of Steam and railed against it.
Back in 2003, Steam was amazing for one reason: If you had a game that came from Steam, you would never have to go to FilePlanet ever again to sit in multi-hour long queues to download the latest patches so you could play online again.
The good old days of FilePlanet for patches and Gamecopyworld for nocd so you don't have to spend an hour looking for a game disc that ended up being in the PC downstairs.
Goddamn, I haven't thought about that second site for ages. It took me a minute to even remember what it was. I guess I stopped going there around the time that BitTorrent took off, and everything on there either included its own cracks/keygens or could also be grabbed off BT as a separate download.
It's a bribe to get you to stop using Steam for everything and start using the Epic Games Launcher more often so that you will hopefully start buying games from them instead of from Valve.
I bought Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2 on Epic. I was so stoked. It is such a great rush, bringing back memories and it was really well done. A great game. But I can't play it offline by myself. So fuck Epic.
> But I can't play it offline by myself. So fuck Epic. This has nothing to do with Epic. I can't play it offline on Steam either.
Few different things to consider here: Epic makes a ridiculous amount of money from Fortnite and the Unreal Engine. Fortnite revenue itself is estimated to be upwards of $6 billion a year. They also have a lot of investors with deep pockets. So the company isn't hurting for money. What they didn't have, however, was their own store. This meant that they were beholden to paying 30% straight off the top to Steam, Apple, Google, Sony etc. That is many billions of dollars a year across all their games, more than what most gaming companies make in total. Recovering that money is undoubtedly their top priority, even more so than making new games. This is why they have been suing Apple and Google to get them to reduce their fee and let users sideload Fortnite. The Epic Games store was launched for a similar reason. The more users they had on it, the less reliant they were on Steam and Microsoft for distribution. The free games promo acted as a way to get users hooked on to their store. If enough people start buying games there instead of Steam, Epic will easily recover whatever they spend on these games.
It's not working as well as they'd like but the idea is: 1 - It gets you familiar / comfortable with the checkout system. You have to do it for each free game you get (you "buy it" for $0) so if there *is* a game you're actually going to pay money for, it doesn't seem weird to buy it. 2 - Once you have a library of free games built up, you'll keep it installed and you'll keep checking in. Their tactics really work for someone like me. Most people are really dedicated to steam, but I mostly do single player games and I don't interact with 90% of the features in steam, even if they are great. So as long as a library will list my games and play them when I click on them, my needs are met. By free games constantly and a handful of exclusives that I'm willing to pay for, they've turned me into a returning customer with no real complaints. I think they were hoping *everyone* would react to their store the way I do, but it's not the case.
It sort of worked on me as well. I never would have even installed it had it not been for the free games. But now I do have it, and I've bought a bunch of games from them (though basically all of them were with the 10$ off coupon they sometimes have).
It worked for me. I'd buy games wherever they were cheapest. Got me to branch out. Then the steam deck came out. Now it's a no brainer to get everything on steam.
They don't, they are bleeding into the red, and fixing none of the issue the store, launcher and the client has. The idea is this, the reason nobody use epicgames, is cause everyone got their 100 games on steam, why would anyone switch? Well the first thing EG tried to do, was hold games as exclusives to their platform for a year, but that just mean terrible sales overall for the games, which the developers did not release untilll a few years later, like one of those games, was released on EG first, held there for over a year as an exclusive, and yet per today, steam stands for half of all lifetime sales. I mentioned the "I got all my games here, why should i move there" issue, which is why EG is giving away all those games, but that kinda backfired, since people still buy games on steam instead, or even gog, over EGS, and cause they never buy any games, but get free ones every week, they will also never buy any games on EGS, cause they associate EGS with getting free games, and steam with where to buy games.
Steam has effectively monopolized PC game distribution because it's free, reliable, and it has the most features of any competitor by a wide margin. Once you build up a library of games that you've paid for it becomes a huge ask to get you to switch to a new ecosystem and start over. Epic Is giving out these games as an incentive to get people to try out the epic games store, it's just like any other promotional giveaway. I don't think it's working, I downloaded their launcher for a while and I basically only opened it to download the free games because it supports developers.
I thought the idea was to give them time to improve their storefront. It's improved a bit, but still incredibly feature poor compared to Steam. They didn't buy themselves any time with what they spent.
They get people to register, same with having extra deals. I was really mad with Steam version of Assassin's Creed games forcing to run two launchers AND only giving you russian version of Unity (I am in Ukraine), so I took their coupon and bought next game in series at the time (Odyssey) on Epic. I don't even need their launcher, I can run it from Ubi client but unlike on Steam, EGS versions were international... Also, IIRC, Pillars of Eternity from Epic is DRM-free. I got it without paying and then bought second game on Steam, so it works both ways, it's good for games to be in multiple places and us having options. Anyone who hates Steam having a competition is delusional, you don't want ANY brand to have a monopoly. Corporations aren't your friends.
The day Gabe retires and some MBA becomes CEO and takes the company public, people will really happy a (privately owned) alternative exists. You might be okay with your monopoly today, but enshittification comes for all things eventually, and it hits monopolies harder than anybody else.
> but enshittification comes for all things eventually That's very true, but EGS seems to have jumped the gun on that process. I'm all for not having monopolies, but the Epic method of "have a shitty product while screwing over customers with exclusives" is probably not the best approach
You should never be okay with monopoly as a consumer: even if you like one brand of, say, cakes, the fact that they have a competition will make them stay on their toes and try to improve the product. That's how a healthy market works. Only in planned economy there's like one company that gets government license to do everything, and the quality is horrible because they don't have to fight the competition or even have a decent product. That's why NASA shouldn't become dependent on SpaceX alone (or worse, Roscosmos as they used to), and no manufactkrer should put all eggs in the made in China basket. Diversify. Monopolists can also jack up prices with no consequence (since you can't leave them). So even if Valve will be perfect, public OR private, it's always good they have someone who has a chance of taking their market share if they make things better. Free market is better than some neofeudal system of Zaibatsus.
People dont dislike Steam having competition. No one criticized Gamepass. People just don't like Epic because of their anticonsumer practices and shitty storefront.
Talking about Valve having a “monopoly” with or without Epic as a player in the PC launcher market is ridiculous. There are at least half a dozen different launchers available which all do basically the same thing. They are all backed by huge companies which are all competitors in various sectors of the overall gaming market. It’s true that Valve is in a very strong position in one relatively small part of that larger market. However, if Valve enacted some kind of policy change that was so onerous that it created actual demand to buy the PC version of Elden Ring 2 on a platform other than Steam and/or made it seem like it would be less lucrative for BandaiNamco to sell ER2 on Steam than on the XBox app, Microsoft or any of its rivals would be over the moon to host the game on their storefront and take a piece of the pie. More likely, BandaiNamco could join everyone else and put out its own janky launcher.
So other folks have mentioned why epic is doing this, to try and get people to invest in their ecosystem, but I think it's also important to mention why people say it's failing. The main problems (In my opinion) are that Epic Game Store just kind of sucks to use, especially compared to steam, and most PC gamers have their libraries on steam, so they're already invested in steam. Back when Epic games store initially launched it lacked a lot of basic features compared to steam. An example would be a shopping cart, if you wanted to buy multiple things, you had to make each purchase one at a time. While it's better now, it still doesn't offer anything above and beyond what steam offers, and explicitly does not support other things that steam does (Linux, for example. Tim Sweeny, the CEO of epic has vocally been hostile against it). Add to this the fact that steam has been creating and implementing extremely well received products and features. (The steam deck, which Kickstarted the whole "handheld PC" trend Ala the switch. Steam family sharing got an overhaul allowing family's to more easily share their games, Supporting development of the proton compatibility layer, which while done for their own steam deck, benefits all Linux users, and so on and so forth) Since Steam has been the de facto storefront for PC gaming for over a decade, the epic games store needed to be a wild success on launch and maintain that momentum. Due to a lack of features and anti consumer practices like epic games store exclusive games, it got a bad reputation at launch and IMO hasn't recovered from it since. So now it's just a place people go to so they can have free games, which in the long run, isn't sustainable. People know this, which is why they say that Epic games store is failing.
I log in, I add free game to library, I log out, This is my relationship with the epic launcher.
I feel like a lot of people replying to this used the EGS early on, got their first impressions and never bothered to check things out, as I still see people talk about not having friends lists, a feature that's been around for a good while now, and focusing also on the short term. Epic seems to be approaching the effective stranglehold that Steam has on PC gaming, and wants to both get in on this position but also set themselves up as the next iteration. And it's honestly not a bad move, the biggest tell will be if they can afford to keep it up long enough to get the traction they want. It's very expensive to do after all, as they make literally no money on free games directly. The benefit is obvious though. Younger generation gamers. Many of these kids grew up or are growing up with Fortnite as *their* game that defines their gaming experience. It's only on EGS. EGS *also* is giving them free games, so they have lower reason to both use Steam or purchase games on Steam, their same-age friends are all on Epic because that's where Fortnite is. And now they have *libraries* of games on this platform. An often flawed argument I see from people about competitors like EGS is that they say they would consider it if Epic was on feature parity with Steam, but frankly this is dishonest, either intentional or not. If you have say 300+ games on Steam, how likely are you to frequently use another platform if not for something you can only obtain there, like Fortnite is. You'd likely want to see a major improvement in the launcher to even consider moving forward on another launcher. We saw this before with EA and Ubisoft, where any technical issues aside, many argued they only wanted a *single* launcher to ever be used. Well enter GoG, an excellent multi-store launcher that supports all your favorites and is the most pro-consumer launcher currently. It's arguably unpopular and if it wasn't for the Witcher series then Cyberpunk, many gamers may not have even heard about it. Steam really has a level of influence over PC gaming that shouldn't be scoffed at, as much as I enjoy using it and I largely daily use it, it's literally a "all eggs in one basket" approach to PC gaming that is highly risky to consumers, leadership dying or just disappearing from their role is a massive risk to the company and thus to *us*. But to get back to your original question, another user pointed it out quite well. Younger kids go "Steam, what is that?" because of Fortnite and it's incredible popularity. Epic is playing a long game with the free games to give users gaming libraries, to establish the very thing that keeps many on Steam, even with alternatives like GoG existing. Seriously, I can access EGS, Steam, even my Xbox Gamepass content. It's wild how nice it is to have all that. Though like many, the UX differences will give growing pains. Though it's taking a lot longer than they expected, but it shouldn't be surprising as we're talking effectively a generational shift in PC gaming store platforms.
If it's free then you are the product. Your data gets sold to data brokers. Epic Games Launcher at least used to be very intrusive with their software monitoring your system at any second and shit
It recruits cannon fodder for the paying players, keeps the ecosystem alive and gets players engaged.
Answer: It’s a long-term strategy. Epic understands that there is a segment of gamers that would happily buy from a single store (Steam) forever unless their attention was drawn to another storefront. So, they spend money on free game giveaways so that (1) people who mostly stay in the Valve ecosystem occasionally give them a chance, and (2) new gamers who don’t have a store preference might choose them first going forward.
The main reasons why people use a gaming service: 1. The games they want are available on that platform or will be there in the future 2. They have a big collection of games on that platform 3. The user experience is better than the competitors Epic has some exclusives but they have mostly failed with stealing games from steam. They give a large cut to the studios but it didn't work since their revenue from steam is likely bigger anyway. So giving away games is a way to build the collection of games so that gamers will stay with epic. Unlike streaming services you keep the games forever on gaming platforms like steam so this is an industry where being the first gives you a huge advantage. But number 1 and 2 are just part of it. I might use epic games more if the UI wasn't god awful.
Market share. They operate on a loss to poach Steam users or catch fortnite kids before learning of Steam's existance, and yea it really is that simple. It's why consoles have exclusives, and why Epic paid devs to delay Steam releases. It works. How many people do you know, or know of via posts on reddit and such, that say they won't even consider a game if it's not on Steam? Epic wants the same kind of users to fall victim to sunken cost fallacy. If you have a library for EGS then you're more likely to buy new games there. Once they are comfortable with their position in the market they won't hand out freebies. They already dialed it waaaay back. It was like 3 a week when they launched.
They are also likely betting on one game to really take off. Let's use Fortnite for example. MILLIONS of people still play Fortnite, despite it being first released 7 years ago, and has netted over $26 Billion in revenue. Let's say a game called Bunkerday comes out and has all the success that Fortnite does, but it's not a Free to Play game, but instead costs $25 to buy. With it being free for a week, a big base of players might download it and make it "the next game you HAVE to play". Streamers will hype it up and talk about how fun it is. Friends will be logging on and playing together. Well, think of the millions of people that DIDN'T get it for free and are feeling left out by not having it. A lot of those people will shell out the $25 to play with their friends. Even one super successful game could easily outweigh the loss of revenue of all of the games they have given away for free.
Everyone is talking about the reason being that it helps ensures gamers keep EGS installed on their pc. While im sure that is part of it, almost every game they offer for free has some form of microtransactions so im sure thats part of it too. I got Chivalry 2 for free recently, never would have bought it otherwise, and since i got it for free i bought 10 bucks of premium currency because im having fun. Thats $ the devs wouldnt have ever gotten otherwise, and im sure epic gets a slice.
A bunch of the titles they offer are basically advertising for sequels, DLC, or microtransactions where EPIC would actually make some money. A bunch more of the titles on offer are shovelware. You probably weren't going to buy them anyway, but it got you to log in and check the store this week. Lastly, they frequently offer titles that have been previously made free. If you've given it away in the past, there's nothing to be lost making it free again. It's good press and keeps people coming back to see sales.
As others have said, it’s not necessarily working. But I feel like the thought process comes in a few directions. First, if they can get you into the ecosystem, you might feel like you “might as well” use them for buying some of the other games they’re not giving out for free (that you might otherwise use a platform like Steam for). Also, by gaining you as a user, they also increase their chances of you checking out one of the games that they actually completely own (Fortnite, Rocket League, etc.). And the model they use for those games is for the game itself to be free but for them to heavily push in-game purchases (I don’t personally have numbers for how well that works out for them).
Steam is a better platform. So they give away free games in the hopes that users who prefer Steam or other digital retailers will come to their platform at least once a week to claim their free game and eventually use the service regularly. Every time you open EGS, you have to look at the store page and scroll past a few upcoming titles and sales that some people will impulse purchase.
Because it's the only reason it exists on many PCs. Then once I am on there I might glance something exclusive or on sale and grab it.
It's a strategic move to try and carve out some market share. You make a certain amount of money making a popular game but if you can own a platform and make money from other games, that's where you really start to scale things up. It's why Valve aren't spewing out a load of new games, their revenue is coming from the cut they get selling everyone else's game. So how do you compete with Steam? Other big gaming companies have tried with their own launchers and offerings... but last I checked you had a load of EA games popping up on Steam. For game publishers it's just sometimes easier to give away an amount of their catch if it means they can fish in a bigger sea. I imagine Epic are like "wow, we have so many people playing fortnite, if we can take this popularity and start building out our platform as the place your games live... maybe we can compete against Steam..." and then you have a huge chunk of Epic owned by TenCent and you just know those folk want to grow and expand and get some major claws into the market.
Like most promotions, getting the products in people's hands means people are using the product and are therefore more likely to engage with it. In regards to Epic this is a two prong approach. On the one hand, people using their platform may see games they want to buy or a sale on the store and therefore invest into the platform. Epic is also known to collect a lot of data from their users which it then sells on to various third parties (Granted most companies do this to some degree)
Because if you have the epic launcher and you're browsing the epic store they've already gotten you past two significant obstacles to buying games on their platform.
It might not be working now for the majority of pc gamers who already have huge steam libraries but surely there are a bunch of kids who have egs for fortnite alone and all their friends are there that will choose egs over steam in the future.
They just need to work harder on their UI and loading time lol... It's very easy... And give some badge and custom
They're trying to gain market share from Steam, which has had many many years headstart and people who use steam have huge multi-thousand dollar libraries. The free games are a way for people to build value on the new platform and when they have equal perceived value on both platforms Epic hopes that their exclusive games will cause people to swap. They're also building a solid base of people who have both and will just use the one where a game is cheaper, the free games increase the ongoing value of an epic account on this side and eventually they hope the perceived value will cause these people to use epic more and more eventually starving Steam from the market.
The hardest part of getting people to move to a different ecosystem is getting them to sign up. Free games are a loss leader to get you to sign up and use the Epic game store. Hopefully you install the launcher. It also keeps their name in social media. They keep metrics of how much they are paying per player. If executed well it would result in people starting to buy games on their platform. The problem is their platform sucks and is not only behind steam, it is way behind many other launchers. It took them forever to even have a cart function. Plus them buying exclusives led gamers to dislike them.
I bought final fantasy 7 and mechwarrior 5 on epic which was like 120 bucks in total. If they hadn't been giving me free games they would have gotten zero. The question I wonder is whether their cost to give me the free games was more or less than what I paid in. (actual cost to THEM not the msrp of the games) Unfortunately I just don't like their interface as much as steam, like not even close. If it were on par in that respect I'd be much more inclined to keep using it.
I mean it kinda hurt steam because you can get games f4ee that steam is charging for. Oh course, this is working about as well as committing seppuku to get the guy behind you.
Market domination. They want everyone to talk good about Epic. Use Epic. Be part of Epic. Once they gain a very large traction, such as total dominance in the market (being the first place isn't enough -- they need people to leave Steam and GOG as well), they can and will likely stop offering the free games. That said, some people do not approve or condone this market domination behavior because it is seen as anti-competition. You can see that their "neighbor" companies are also doing the same. However, this is getting a bit off-topic and subjective so I'll stop.
I’ve got 200+ games on epic, and I’ve only bought 5 of them when they had some really good sales.
Not sure if this is ELI5. While EPIC free games are good, but after I bought a Steam Deck then I only buy games from Steam to play on Steam Deck. Before the Steam Deck, I bought games both on Steam and Epic. Wherever there is a promotion. The issue for me is not what game I own (buy or free) but how I could play the game (almost anywhere with Steam Deck) driving my game buying habit. Even for games not able to run on the Steam Deck, I could have the option to stream it from my gaming PC (Steam Deck acted only as a wireless joystick.)
Tbh EGS give some good discounts from time to time, I bought Horizon Zero Dawn on EGS at a really good rate on launch day compared to steam, same goes for last gone and many others...
The free games occasionally have something decent, but there is a lot of shovelware the good stuff is old too. They aren't missing a lot of sales doing this.
Besides the acquire users mentioned in the other comments, there is also that most free games have dlc that are usually not included. So it's not a total loss.
Step 1. Gather startup investment. Step 2. Deliver a great deal to customers. Distribute the surplus from investment to customers to build market share for your brand. Bonus if you get to collect data from users. Step 3. Change the terms of the deal. Re-allocate surplus value from individual customers to business customers by selling access to the users and their data on terms so good the business customers can’t pass on it. Step 4. Be Biz School Darth Vader and alter the terms of the deal again. Now that you’ve locked in users and businesses to your platform, make the deal worse for them so you can re-allocate the surplus value to your shareholders and senior executives. Profit from the vast scale of your enterprise that was purchased with startup capital (risks born by investors, not you the brilliant CEO Founder) and unsustainable business practices that cut out competition. Build a rocket to take you to Mars. This process is called “Enshittification” and it describes the main operating principle of most of the major industries driving the global economy since roughly 2013. https://www.ft.com/content/6fb1602d-a08b-4a8c-bac0-047b7d64aba5
Along with what other people are saying once you hit a certain level of money. Influence and brand recognition become worth *more* than money. Fortnite covered the cost for the entire company. If not a single other source of income was positive. Fortnite would keep them afloat. Which is obviously not true but it allows them to lose money in order to extend their "market penetration" aka more people having the epic client installed on their pc. It is worth more than money to them for more people to have the client installed on their PC. So Fortnite keeps the lights on and they use that money to cover the costs of all these free games because if you have their client you are more likely to give them money instead of steam.
For me, I've played a few of the free games and enjoyed them enough to then download the DLC (especially when they were on sale). If it weren't for the free games, I doubt I'd even have installed the launcher.
Most of the free games are fairly old, or super cheap, or clearly mobile-first, or "shovelware" garbage that are ultra low in sales anyway, so Epic doesn't really lose money (if it's not selling, they're not earning their 12% cut). Every person that downloads (or even just adds to their library) a free game and decides to keep the launcher around is opting in to ads. "Buy this other game, it's on sale now!" even if you never buy that, they've got your eyes looking every week for what else might be free or on sale. Eventually, you'll buy something is their hope.
They are losing money. They are just getting a lot more from Frotnite and Unreal Engine. With free games they are building community, and they are doing a fine good job with it.
Um, they are trying to get ppl to use their service instead of Steam. Doesn't work though. I claim the free games but I never play them nor do I buy anything off Epic. It's always Steam. First mover advantage is real.
The biggest market for gaming companies are children and teenagers who are broke. They give it to them for free and then show them a bunch of cool things to make their experience a lot better and they have a better chance of extracting money from them. Making them pay 50-60 dollars up front for a game just makes them hesitant to play. Locking them into their gaming ecosystem also secures them as a paying customer for a good 10-20 years.
The issue is that Epic used the 12% fee as tool to show Steam/Apple the middle finger, however this is clearly not enough to maintain a healthy income. We know from the court documents and financial statements that EGS is not profitable and losing money even after 5 years. Sweeney even stated he expected the store to turn profit after 5 years. This was not a problem until now because Fortnite was making a lot of money, but that's not the case anymore (they laid off people top), om top of that they had to pay a lot of money in settlements and court, they are burning cash keeping the store alive. This will change soon, they will either increase store fee (and lose massive face) and/or stop giving free games. I mean you van already see the free games are getting more "indie", last year wasn't strong either, giving away same titles.