It was understood that the EGS was going to be a loss leader the problem is they are not achieving the growth goals. I think the big problem is they needed to wrap up the freebies a while back so that the userbase would actually spend money.
New court filing shows Epic has lost more than $450 Million on the EGS in the past 2 years and other interesting facts
- Thread starter CommodoreKong
- Start date
Yeah, if anyone at Epic thinks the EGS is going to be breaking even by 2023, they're going to be in for a shock when the free games stop and their MAUs drop like a stone. I think they've completely snookered themselves, they've failed to attract a paying audience and I don't think there's any viable way to turn the store around unless they get extremely lucky with one of their exclusives.
Thankfully a fair amount of games are DRM free copies on EGS, should it ever evaporate.
Epic has been trying to force its way into the PC marketplace because they know that while the Fortnite money is enormous, (almost) nothing is permanent. Not surprised to see a new player having staggering entry costs, especially with them giving out free shit all the time.
But that's literally the case right now and it's not working in their favor. They're going to need significantly more users purchasing IAP, or the same percentage of users purchasing more expensive IAP, or more users buying games on the EGS
Correction: It's been happening forever in consoles. Why is it different now? Because it's never happened on PC, until Epic came along and tried to strong arm users to use their inferior storefront.
This has been talked about to death. People welcome competition, but it's got to be competition that benefits the customer. Free games are great, but that doesn't make me forget that Epic literally paid to take games away from Steam. In the early goings these were games that were due to release on Steam, and got pulled, because they paid off big publishers. You think that's not going to leave a sour taste in the mouths of players?
When in 2020, your sales amount for barely 265 millions dollars in a year of a pandemic which made the entire sector sees huge growth, that is a terrible result. On top of that, during the very same year, their MAU number dropped by 5 millions.
Also in the span of 2 years and a half, that means they lost nearly 600 millions dollars so far. Yet their growth is laughable. Yet they cant even get people to buy games on their store.
People aren't buying shit on their store and its completely understandable. Take the free games, maybe buy a few games when they are dirt cheap with those coupons, and otherwise wait on the games exclusive to the store to hit Steam a year later so you can use a platform that doesn't fuckin suck. Its clear them brute forcing their way into the PC market ain't working. I don't see their trajectory changing when people just aren't spending money on their store. They aren't magically gonna start getting those customers if they couldn't with the free games and deep discounts.
Last edited:
They've had some very good sales and coupons over the years. If that can't attract repeat customers, what will? A better store and client, maybe?
Also GamePass gave microsoft a lot of goodwill. That and also putting their games on Steam. Meanwhile Epic still is in a bad light.
Eh, it's new and heavily subsidized.
Not saying it's doing gangbusters or even particularly well, but these numbers aren't crazy.
The app itself is awful and very limited. Instead of wasting money on exclusives work on the basics functions and interface first...
As you said, it's heavily subsidized:
Free games every week, 10 dollars coupons every time. And yet they have a huge issue to convert those people into buyers.
Looking at their top selling chart, when you see months old low profile releases charting without any discounts, it tells you everything about their fairly low sale volume.
They expect EGS to have its first profitable year in 2023. They don't expect EGS to have been profitable until 2027.
I don't. I like my gaming being consolidated into one comfy platform. Steam is the PC platform. I wouldn't want multiple storefronts on my Xbox and I don't like it on my PC.
Having games I'm interested in locked outside of the comfy Steam bubble is, in fact, annoying.
If people don't care about where they play and "games are games" etc then good for them. Games are even better when they're supported by a good platform.
Yeah, I don't disagree that it's a new store that is spending heavily and losing money.
I prefer steam and find the strong arm tactics of Epic to be dubious at best, especially their actions against Google/Apple over the same issue. Had they simply delivered a good product i'd be inclined to check them out. This is a classic case of just brute forcing yourself into a market. Losing half a billion is when it's all said and done, peanuts.
That's what a lot of people have been awaiting, but the issue now is compounded as there is far far less trust that they will maintain such an endeavour based on all they've said and managed to do so far. Personally, it would take years of consistent demonstrable improvement and iteration for me to actually decided to buy there - to have trust that the purchases I make will have the level of service, utility and additive value over time from their platform. (And it would probably help if some of the free games I received were actually retrievable in the first place and not locked behind an error that they haven't resolved)
I haven't spent a single cent on their store, I just log in every week to get my free game that I'll probably never play.
From what I know it's normal for them to be bleeding money but I wonder if that will actually change in 2 years.
From what I know it's normal for them to be bleeding money but I wonder if that will actually change in 2 years.
Issue is that they are spending huge amount of money and not moving needle at all. If we ignore their loses they don't have results to show either. They are growing userbase but that userbase is not spending money at all. Just check 202 vs. 2019. Huge user base growth, barely any spending on 3rd party games growth. That is big issue because they will need to stop paying developers in advance and developers will need to earn money from the Store by actually selling their games to customers and not to Epic.
That is all coming out of a predetermined marketing budget. They consider it an investment.
Not really. Avg revenue per user is significantly higher for the big 3.
yeah the dont improve the store at all. still no social feature. oh wait they actually removed the user status option lately...
Almost no growth in revenue from 2019 to 2020. I think they'd be down in revenue if it wasn't for Covid.
I could see it paying off in the end. I know there are tons of awesome features and research that steam does, but I honestly rarely take advantage of any of it outside of Steam workshop. Epic has done a good job of beefing up my library were I'm way less resistant to only buying steam than I was pre EGS. I'm sure there are a lot of people who love all the awesome extra things steam does that are cringing reading this, but I'm willing to bet there are a lot of people like me too.
If game is sold on both stores at the same date for the same price why would you pic Epic Store version? That is what will happen in the end (there will probably be few exclusives that are published by Epic like new Remedy game or Playdead one).
Interesting data these court documents dredged up. The tidbit about "unrecouped costs" is pretty damning... if the sales are that bad, they're gonna have to keep offering pubs and indie devs a sizable bag in order to secure exclusives. I'm sure they were hoping that they'd be able to lower that amount as the MAUs went up (as the lower cut would help subsidize the difference in sales between Steam and EGS), but too many people are just mooching and not buying much of anything.
This thread reminded me that I should go redeem the weekly EGS free game... I've been slacking, haven't done so for a while. Help an indie dev get paid, and burn a tiny bit of Sweeney's money!
This thread reminded me that I should go redeem the weekly EGS free game... I've been slacking, haven't done so for a while. Help an indie dev get paid, and burn a tiny bit of Sweeney's money!
So I did some napkin math on this, it seems like Fortnite generates $437,654,510 each month in revenue when they still had iOS. Insanity.Consoles are where profits come from
I would pick steam. I just mean like if there is a nice sale like when I picked up Hades even tho it was available on steam I don't mind biting on those now.
Edit: Before EGS I never got invested into a library because I simply refused to buy any where else, but EGS gave me a library so its like well I already got a ton of games here and I'm already using 2 launchers to play them as well so what does it matter.
Playerbase was what I meant, although I'm surprised the iOS revenue was as low as it was tbh
Issue is that prices are the same as on Steam without coupons. So when they remove all things that lose them money they will end up being just another store. And that is their biggest issue. You need to be able to attract users after you stop wasting money and so far beside funding exclusives via Epic Publishing program they have nothing.
Steet Fighter V on PC is using the free* Steamworks backend for all of its multiplayer features like matchmaking, networks, leaderboards and all other online elements.
Yep. Console users are prone to spending more on mtxs for certain genres. All we need to do is look at EA, Take Two and Activision's revenue numbers over the last 7 to 8 years.
I think epic kinda fucked themself at the start, if they had just been giving out free games, making good sales, including their 10$ and funded their own games, alot of pc gamers would have accepted them, but they went ahead and pissed off the whole pc community with taking games off steam and gog and making them exclusive for a year and they will probably never get those people to buy on their store.
Still wondering how this loss-heavy approach doesn't qualify as an anti-competitive practice. They are literally pushing an unsustainable model to cannibalize market share from the competitors.
If Steam wasn't around as the "big fish in the pond" they'd be literally pushing any other store out of business to keep up with their massive spending.
EDIT: I mean, it's a textbook case of "dumping" or "predatory pricing" that is listed as the very first issue:
en.wikipedia.org
If Steam wasn't around as the "big fish in the pond" they'd be literally pushing any other store out of business to keep up with their massive spending.
EDIT: I mean, it's a textbook case of "dumping" or "predatory pricing" that is listed as the very first issue:
Anti-competitive practices - Wikipedia
That's debatable. Yes, Epic makes a few games, but Unreal Engine is so much more than just gaming.
Even then, game usually fall under the umbrella of tech.