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Epic Games Store 2020 Year in Review
- Thread starter dex3108
- Start date
Yeah i dont get it why they would ever publish these stats... No publisher would ever think these are good stats and skip steam for EGS.
Yeah, I turned them off entirely. Maybe fixing it will be part of their "social overhaul" in 2021, who knows?
thats what amazes me
no one is holding them to that image format
they can massage and present these numbers in any way they want to at least attempt to make them look good
and they didnt even bother to do that. put as much effort into it as features on their store i guess
yeah... it's not like anyone was expecting updated numbers from them. these don't really paint them in a good light.
So basically next to no growth in an entire year?
Bold of them to be this open when the numbers are pretty bad.
Bold of them to be this open when the numbers are pretty bad.
Game Pass has definitely had an effect on my spending for several types of games. My wishlist is pretty much down to strategy/sim/builder games that don't really come to console or play well on console. Anything that doesn't really fit into those buckets and can be played just fine on console I have just been waiting for them to show up on GP.
Oof, that is very poor growth. Going from 680 million to 700 million in the year with Covid and people at home?
Just for comparison's sake and because other users are mentioning Game Pass, with 18 million subscribers Game Pass should be making 2.7 billion dollars per year in revenue if 50% of people have Ultimate, obviously it's less than that now because of the Gold convertion and special offers so maybe only 2 billion but still, those are very poor numbers for a digital storefront.
They must be bleeding money like crazy.
Edit: hold up the second figure is basically revenue taking Fortnite out of the picture. From 251 million to 265 million, even worse, yikes.
Just for comparison's sake and because other users are mentioning Game Pass, with 18 million subscribers Game Pass should be making 2.7 billion dollars per year in revenue if 50% of people have Ultimate, obviously it's less than that now because of the Gold convertion and special offers so maybe only 2 billion but still, those are very poor numbers for a digital storefront.
They must be bleeding money like crazy.
Edit: hold up the second figure is basically revenue taking Fortnite out of the picture. From 251 million to 265 million, even worse, yikes.
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I gotta give them credit for even publishing these numbers. It's seems a bit dire, like I imagine their total 3rd party revenue is what other platforms get from just a few combined AAA games. It just isn't much growth, even if there wasn't a pandemic that is making every piece of online entertainment skyrocket.
Edit: Just so I'm clear is the difference between their total revenue and third party revenue basically just Fortnite?
Edit 2: I wonder if the reason they didn't include the money saved from coupon stats this year was because it had a huge increase while total revenue did not.
Edit: Just so I'm clear is the difference between their total revenue and third party revenue basically just Fortnite?
Edit 2: I wonder if the reason they didn't include the money saved from coupon stats this year was because it had a huge increase while total revenue did not.
Not publishing numbers after doing so last year would probably make people speculate that the results were really bad. Flat growth is not great but it's not a disaster either.
....How do you figure?
The paltry growth % numbers (especially for third-party games), even with the lowered 'cost' of less 6-7 digit payouts for exclusivity windows, are.....not encouraging.....not to mention the amount of 'losses' they're getting from the free games, coupons, etc....
If/when the fortnite money dries up, I could see the EGS going into skeleton crew mode.
Depends on how much money Tim wants to throw away on it, sure, but....I dunno if I see this experiment lasting any longer than a year or two more.
Especially because a lot of their studio acquisitions have recently(ish) put out games, and aren't going to be have another release ready for 2+ years, especially with COVID delays.
I had one exprience with EGS during Total War Tory and this exprience was so bad and painful that I will never use EGS again, not even if a game i like is free.
Thats true, everyone would probably think they had done worse last year, but i gotta wonder how this would have looked if they never gave out those 10$ coupons in all their sales.
Epic Games is trying to take on Steam ands defeat them, I can't imagine that they can truck on like this.
More or less. Well, Fortnite and whatever half a year of Rocket League mustered.
I don't think GP PC is as successful as you think because Microsoft games (particularly Halo MCC and Sea of Thieves) are doing incredibly well on Steam. It's the Steam release of Sea of Thieves that finally put its PC player count above the console player count.
And I'm glad that Microsoft's terrible store isn't taking over and killing modding on PC with its awful folder-lock system. Worse than anything Epic has done.
Just some basic, unscientific napkin math:
So they gave away 749M free games. I honestly have no idea how much they pay devs for them, but I imagine it varies wildly. Something like Yooka Laylee and the Impossible Lair can't be cheap, but some indie games might be. I'll say they pay $1 on average per copy they give out. Take that with a mountain of salt.
From this, they earned $265M in third party sales. I'll even give them the benefit of the doubt and not merely give them credit for the YoY increase. I'll give them the whole $265M.
Plus last year they paid out $23M in coupons and vouchers. It probably increased, but I'll keep it static.
So, in theory, they spent $749M plus $23M (so $772M) to get a return of... $265M.
And it's actually worse than that, as this doesn't include their payouts for exclusives.
And it's really even worse, as their cut is actually only 12% of that $265M, so... $31.8M.
Tl;dr, my napkin math has Epic spending $772M (not counting exclusivity deals or upkeep) to get a return of $31.8M.
Jeeeeeezus.
So they gave away 749M free games. I honestly have no idea how much they pay devs for them, but I imagine it varies wildly. Something like Yooka Laylee and the Impossible Lair can't be cheap, but some indie games might be. I'll say they pay $1 on average per copy they give out. Take that with a mountain of salt.
From this, they earned $265M in third party sales. I'll even give them the benefit of the doubt and not merely give them credit for the YoY increase. I'll give them the whole $265M.
Plus last year they paid out $23M in coupons and vouchers. It probably increased, but I'll keep it static.
So, in theory, they spent $749M plus $23M (so $772M) to get a return of... $265M.
And it's actually worse than that, as this doesn't include their payouts for exclusives.
And it's really even worse, as their cut is actually only 12% of that $265M, so... $31.8M.
Tl;dr, my napkin math has Epic spending $772M (not counting exclusivity deals or upkeep) to get a return of $31.8M.
Jeeeeeezus.
I don't mind spreading my PC purchases across multiple storefronts, and EGS still barely makes the cut. It's feature poor compared to Steam and GOG. Without exclusivity (Hades early access) or screaming good deals, there's no reason to choose it over the competition.
I wonder how many others there are like me. I have claimed the majority of the free games, but have yet to even install the launcher, nevermind actually buy something on there. I'm just adding them to my account for a rainy day.
You forgot that inside that 12% they still pay the 5%+ of transaction fees.
Not good at all, I imagine. Back when EGS launched I argued that Epic has to make a case for why customers should buy a game on EGS instead of Steam. Two years later there is still no reason to buy from EGS unless you can buy a game cheaper. Take coupons away and you are left with nothing.
Didn't they give that away for free? Or are you meaning something else?
Nah. It's the revenue generated for 3rd parties.
It's the total money made from game sales in a year on the store. It's abysmal.
Nope. It literally says "$265M spent by players on third party PC games on Epic Games Store."
I'm no business expert, but it sure seems like a business model built around giving away free stuff instead of building a platform people want to use is not at all sustainable.
They've had multiple repeat free games over the course of the last couple years.
Lol, no one can blame you. Those figures being that low, you'd think it'd be THEIR revenue. Nah, it's actually the revenue for the store.
That's not new really. They have had several repeats over the last year.
They've repeated multiple free games before now.
Honestly, them going out of their way to not include how much Epic had to shell out for those 10 dollar coupons (when every other element of the chart is the same) is IMO pretty telling.
However, did I miss it, or does your napkin math not count the fortnite bux (approx. 435 million)?
Epic only pays first 3% of transaction fees, devs pay the rest.
Hmm. That's...not really too much to brag about. Terrible YOY growth during a year where everyone famously turned to videogames to escape.
I have never played a single EGS game online, nor have I given out my EGS username to anyone, but still I get friend requests from god-knows-who. I even look them up on Steam/PSN/XBL/etc. and there's never a match.
Yes! I thought I was the only one with this problem.
I have never played a single EGS game online, nor have I given out my EGS username to anyone, but still I get friend requests from god-knows-who. I even look them up on Steam/PSN/XBL/etc. and there's never a match.
It doesn't, because the free games and coupons aren't there to increase Fortnite income. Fortnite is its own beast. They're there explicitly to create interest in the store itself and make people use EGS over something like Steam.
Hence my (likely pretty off, one way or the other) math having them invest $772M on a $31.8M return.
I'm glad PC users are not using the EGS much.
I hope this pushes the EGS to change from their current low effort to starting innovation so that EGS fight for the costumer attention.
I specifically had problem with downloading the first DLC where i had to re-install the game because the DLC didn't install correctly.
I hope this pushes the EGS to change from their current low effort to starting innovation so that EGS fight for the costumer attention.
+1.
I specifically had problem with downloading the first DLC where i had to re-install the game because the DLC didn't install correctly.
I don't know much about this kinda stuff but those numbers... Kinda seem absolutely horrible? Nobody wants to spend money on EGS. They just take free games and move on, probably going on Steam to actually spend their money considering how well Steam did this past year. You would think it would be even a little higher considering the pandemic has increased digital spending but nope.
