Epic Games Admits In Court That Its PC Store Still Isn't Profitable

In my eyes, part of the reason for this is that they forgot a key element of penetrating a market... you need a potential customer base that is actually displeased with the current available solutions and is actually looking for an alternative. And, by and large, the current storefronts had done a good enough work of pleasing their customer base that, when the Epic Store rolled out, few people were actively looking for a switch, to the point that no bonuses or goodies or exclusives that Epic offered could outweight the friction of moving from a platform that was perfectly serviceable, please and thank you.

The whole thing was just mistimed. They should have waited to see if Steam committed some sort of fuck up. They should have waited for some type of negative sentiment. I don't know. I know that developers did feel displeased with some of the conditions on Steam, but Epic could only do so much to win them over with 88%'s and paid guarantees and what have you, when they couldn't offer them the most important thing: a paying customer base.

There are problems with Steam that a competitor could win customers from by solving those problems, but they didn't bother. They only went after the people producing games, not buying games.
- People who don't like Steam already have GoG. To most people Epic Games is the fortnite launcher, and fortnite is in rapid decline:
  
  https://www.statista.com/statistics/1108992/fortnite-number-viewers/
- Yep. I have not and will not give epic store money because they didn't try to make a better product.
  In fact they attacked me as a customer, in essence, by offering a worse product but then paying for exclusivity on various games. And in exchange they try to bribe me with free games.
  Well, I'll take the bribes, as I try to remember to collect my free games each week, but I'm not giving them money.
- but at the same time steam have a fuckton of features, it take tine to implement everything
I was never happy with Steam. It always seemed bloated with unwanted features that had nothing to do with playing a game, constantly wanted to run in the background and update, launched at a snail's pace.
I've found myself liking EGS a lot more because it's clean and simple.
Both are owned by big gross corporations, so really I'd prefer no launcher at all.
- launched at a snail’s pace.
  If speed is a problem, The EGS is painfully slow. I don't use is because it needs like 15 seconds to load the library (and it's just the part that is on screen if you scroll, it needs more time to load the games), in the rest of the launchers is practically instant

They started out pissing off Steam users with Metro Exodus going exclusives and pulling it from Steam. Not a great first impression and a lasting one at that. Not everyone will care and will buy from epic, but alienating a whole bunch of Steam's core users off the bat is probably going to ensure they'll never win them over.

I claim games from epic and have bought from even origin and uplay, but I'll probably never spend any money at epic.

Hopefully this becomes a case study of how not to antagonize your customers when launching a product.

I'm not surprised.

I'm surprised since I'd assume most people don't care where games are from and just buy it from whatever launcher. At least that's what people claimed throughout the years.
- I don't think anyone has claimed that ever. Having all my games spread across 8 different libraries is a pain in the ass. Having Steam plus Blizzard's Battlenet launcher was already pushing it in my opinion and I dropped them too after Overwatch 2. (Which, hilariously, is also now available on steam anyway).

I think I'd be more surprised if it was profitable. Anecdotal, but I (and most people I know) exclusively use Epic for free games.

They gave away so many good games ... and in doing so taught their target group not to spend money to buy games on their platform. Outstanding move!
- When I saw Alan Wake 2 was an epic exclusive my immediate thought was I can just wait for a giveaway like they did for Control.

Have to wonder if they would actually be totally fine if they just didn’t have to pay out such huge legal expenses in lawsuits, and for enormous settlements, and had just played it straight with customers, and just accepted Apple and Google’s fees.

Epic do not has economic issues, they earn a shitton of money between Unreal Engine licenses and Fortnite. It's only the Epic Game store and the issue is not the legal expenses is that nobody spends money in their store
IIRC the data they show every year says on average each users spends like $15 per year

Thanks for the reminder to claim my free game. Never going to buy shit from the Epic store as long as they pay developers for "exclusives".

With the way they've been handling things it won't ever be profitable.

This is good, 30% cut is only possible because of monopolistic behavior.

Why would this be good, for that reason...?
- I could be wrong, but I believe Epic or Sweeney threw something like that around about Steam's pricing model. Or maybe it was just an Internet thing. Regardless, the idea floated was that the only reason Steam took such a cut was it's monopolistic powers. What I believe jaden is trying to say is that that line of reasoning is being shown to be bullshit and that Steam takes that much so it can be profitable.