https://www.fortnite.com/news/fortnite-v-bucks-price-increas...
Didn't Valve push Steam through HL2? It's a different kind of forcing of course, but still.
What? If the person writing the article is so unfamiliar with the subject they are writing about, they likely should not be writing about it.
Apparently, that wasn't enough, and the billions of dollars in revenue the game makes every year are simply too little to keep the lights on. So now they're laying off over a thousand people and cutting several official gamemodes, so they can continue paying hundreds of millions to the creators of AI slop modes like Steal the Brainrot [2].
It's becoming increasingly clear that Epic Games is a dysfunctional company that simply stumbled onto a golden goose by sheer luck, and now that the goose can't lay eggs any faster to keep the line going up, they're panicking.
[1] https://www.fortnite.com/news/fortnite-v-bucks-price-increas...
[2] https://www.fortnite.com/news/fortnite-developers-will-soon-...
Also I wonder if their low cut on EGS is doing part of these problems...
- Millions spent rushing out huge amounts of Fortnite content at a breakneck pace
- Millions spent organizing, designing and marketing 5 new Fortnite collabs every week
- Millions spent trying to wrangle Fortnite's spaghetti codebase as it crumbles under more than a decade of tech debt
- Millions spent trying and failing to keep the content pipeline flowing at a constant speed despite the tech debt
- Millions spent developing a failed Roblox competitor inside Fortnite
- Millions spent paying people to create awful AI generated games in their failed Roblox competitor
- Millions spent developing their own "metaverse" of brand-focused modes that nobody plays in their failed Roblox competitor
- Millions spent developing a failed Steam competitor
- Millions spent paying off developers to release their games exclusively on their failed Steam competitor
- Millions spent giving away free games every week on their failed Steam competitor
- Millions spent lining executives' pockets
It's really not hard to see where all that money is going.
But the contract can always change (look at Unity). That's a part of why it's best to own your tools if you're able to.
Epic has been pissing money away paying "creators" to churn out slop "red versus blue" modes/maps for Epic's meta-verse.
A lot of these maps are effectively hello world applications. Like the lowest of low quality. You add in a few weapon spawns, a few prefab buildings, and you're done. Time to get yourself a few thousand a month.
Changing that to a shooter with the Battle Royale mechanic was a $10 billion win. They have managed it pretty well, but it seems they just over extended without innovating to attract and retain players.
Revenue wise they might be down from the 6bn in 2025 to somewhere in the mid 5's, so might as well get rid of 1000 employees while handing out bigger bonuses to senior staff.
I like this choice of word, it seems fitting.
Rumor is Fortnite was stuck in development hell for a decade and was used as a punishment assignment for under-performing devs.
The Fortnite team added battle royal mode on a whim after a mediocre initial release and it has churned out five billion a year in revenue every year since.
Just to hazard a guess: the majority of this money went to investors and executives and now, when the pot is empty, the employees pay the price.
Sorry, HOW?!?
How can a company like Epic games with one of the most successful gaming products of the last few decades be losing money with a product that is so mature? Almost every other games developer would love to be in their position on Fortnite but they've somehow turned that into a loss making proposition?!? I'm baffled.
Epic's employees reaped the gains while it rained in the form of paychecks. While it sucks that people are losing their jobs, those individuals received (much of) the upside of this investment and their jobs never would have existed in the first place had the investment not been made. Their paychecks are not being clawed back. Shareholders (including executives who are largely paid via out-of-the money options) are bearing the costs. Consumers also benefit from increased competitive pressure on Valve and subsidized game prices.
Would it be "better" if Epic had not invested in the Epic Game Store and paid a dividend or conducted a share buyback?
Epic likely has talented devs and clearly invests a lot of money into all of this, but it took them years to finally implement a cart. It's not the end of the world to not have one, but not if you are a digital store!
It doesn't even have (or at least didn't the last time I checked) a review system. Steam isn't just a store anymore- it's closer to a social network with communities, discussions, mod workshop (which makes it stupid easy to install mods if a game supports this). With forums dying and reddit turning into whatever it is turning into, Steam forums is IT for a lot of gamers. If I see a game on sale the first thing I turn to is a review section- more often than not it's enough to gauge whether I'll buy this thing or not. And it's a nice place to ask whenever something in the game bugs our or doesn't work, or to just vent.
EGS is (or least was) really damn slow to start (never mind to launch an actual game). Linux support is non-existent.
Sure, it is extremely difficult to tackle a leader when a headstart is this large, and when people already have massive libraries of their own on Steam, but it's been what- 7 years of development? Epic had a clean slate, no compatibility to worry about and all the features their main competitor had, mapped out to copy- and they didn't even try to reach feature-parity.
Giving out free games only takes you so far when people lack the necessities to stay at your platform
Among other vanity projects, they hired Simon Peyton Jones, long the most prominent developer of Haskell, to build "Verse", Tim Sweeney's hobby language [1].
I'm sure SPJ isn't that expensive, but still, it's pretty far from Epic's "core mission."
Epic are trying to break into what is nearly a monopoly.
But instead of focusing, you know, in making their story desirable to use, they focused on shit like exclusives. And for that, they should fail.
I prefer GoG over Steam, even while I am super grateful for Steam making gaming on Linux possible. And GoG didn't need to rely on exclusives for this.
How on earth will epic win without exclusives? It's like launching some Facebook competitor "but you get two profile pictures". Noone would switch.
All these geeks singing steam and lamenting competition. Competition bad for me mkay, steam good.
/me shakes head
Neoliberalism at its finest. The world moving towards conservatism has left us with this model: The working class takes the hit of each crisis from small to big.
It is not a sustainable model.
I’ve been playing Fortnite a bit lately, after my nieces got me into it.
One thing is that although the player counts are high (always hundreds of thousands of players online, just in the main Battle Royale game), the average revenue per player can’t be that high.
For one thing, once you’ve bought the $10 battle pass once, you only need to average maybe 1 or 2 games per day to earn enough vbucks to buy the next season’s battle pass with vbucks. So if you stay active you can pay once then play the game free forever and still get access to a huge amount of free cosmetics. And much of the player base is kids who are just begging their parents/uncles to buy them stuff in the game rather than spend money themselves because they don’t have credit cards to link to their Epic accounts.
Compare this to something like Hearthstone which is similarly mature. They have a similar battle pass but there’s also a strong incentive to pay real $ for extra card packs and cosmetics. And there are clearly plenty of adult whales buying this stuff. For example, there’s a new mythic Deathwing skin on a gacha wheel that costs, on average, about $200 (!!) to get. It’s only been out a few days and I’ve run into multiple players who have it.
I lack the vocabulary to describe how fucking shit this is. Poor kids that have been sold into this versus the games we had that didn’t outright exploit.
Kinda shame on you for contributing in to this. It’s gross.
Probably the closest way to say "we're in a recession and gaming isn't resistant to this one" I've heard yet. But it makes sense: a "free" service that entices with cosmetics is easy to cut when parent money gets tight.
And if kids lose interest they will move to another game. Or more likely, TikTok and its medium. Just increasing the dopamine.
And anyways, the population who plays these kind of live service shooters is relatively constant imo, and there are new games on the block nowadays.
Actually what's an anomaly is how long Fortnite continued to be popular.
Roblox predates Fortnite by a decade and is only getting more popular over time
They are paying creators a lot. $220 million in 2023. [1]
That combined with trying to undercut Steam on royalties, the 2025 softening of their cash cow, the Apple legal wars, a number of R&D bets, giving away free games, and an absolutely MASSIVE marketing budget...it can go fast.
The chances this is accurate are extremely small. This is either anticipating AI coding goals, the CFO proved they were overloaded on developers, or they're just cutting to hit quarterly numbers.
As an indie dev, I generally like the guy's stance on shifting the PC gaming industry's support and financial incentive structures, so I'd be a bit surprised if he just did mass layoffs like Embracer and co.
That said, the article implies things that aren't necessarily canon: "cut jobs as Fortnite engagement falls" doesn't mean "cutting people because Fortnite is flagging". It's much more likely because the Epic Game Store struggles to push enough volume to recover the cost of developer acquisition on the platform.
I seriously hope that isn't true because Fortnite is a showcase of nearly everything wrong with modern gaming. It's an ad platform/casino that prays on children and is designed to make them feel like shit by pumping them full of anxiety/FOMO over their various passes, gambling, and vbucks balance. I think the only good thing you can say for Fortnite is that it's not often pay to win (although there have been skins that gave players advantages over others) and it isn't run on child labor like roblox is. If Fortnite is actually losing players that's great news.
I hope that most games developers would be ashamed to release a game like Fortnite and that the ads and predatory casino mechanics are something they'd choose to avoid in their own games.
It's me. I have accumulated several dozen free games over the years through the Epic Store. Sorry Tim Sweeney!
You can't just bet the farm on dropping a new $5B/year game.
Most game companies are a tiny fraction of that size. Even most AAA games are made by teams of hundreds. Not teams of thousands.
They also have their own Steam competitor (Epic Games Store) and, more importantly, they develop and support Unreal Engine used by tons of other game dev companies.
If you want an apples to apples comparison (i.e., other big live-service game companies) in terms of the employee count, you got:
Mihoyo (Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail) - ~5,000-6,000
Riot Games (League of Legends, Valorant) - 4,500
Roblox - 3,500
(Not saying this is justified, of course. I think Unity is pretty much doomed.)
I think the reality is that Epic got big because of Fortnite but nothing lasts forever. They would have been better off building a war chest and pulling a Valve (though I'm sure they'd hate hearing it that way): going silent and making whatever they wanted for a while, and then trying to repeat the cycle, rebuilding the chest, and then going on. Video games are the exact opposite of Infinite Growth Forever. People get bored and move on.
Meanwhile, Epic has many stable and valuable businesses - Unreal, the game store, etc. - which are perfectly capable of sustaining a sizable company. Just not one as sizable as Epic is. The best case for them is they figure that out, and manage to make a sustainable go of it doing that.
Yes, Unreal Engine keeps getting improved, more Fortnite content gets produced. But there is a general lack of innovation, one that I find personally painful when I look at Epic's recent-ish track record. Needing to fire this many employees is not just a result of market conditions, but also a straightforward consequence of not being able to leverage them for sufficiently lucrative outcomes.
Companies with this amount of capital are well positioned to take multiple strategic bets which aren't at all safe bets, but pose no real financial risk for the company in aggregate. Why do these bets end up being taken instead by indies with much more to lose? Well, partly because indies often _need_ to take riskier bets to carve a niche. But the other side of the coin is, what I can only surmise, a lack of imagination and adventurousness on the part of management. They could be funding many experiments and seek to have another hit like Fortnite, perhaps in a somewhat different market. Having to seek another hit while your finances are declining is less pleasant.
When a company loses its edge in this way, as long as it hasn't _really_ captured a demographic or created some very sticky ecosystem, it's bound to get whittled down repeatedly. I doubt that Epic will suddenly get more creative and adventurous at this point, but perhaps necessity will have its part to play.
(Aside from all of that, I agree with most commenters here that the layoff is being handled about as gracefully as one could reasonably hope.)
* Fortnight revenue was $5.5B in 2018 and $3.8B in 2019
* Employee counts in those years: 1063 and 1932
* Average "People" cost per employee: $141K, $142K (CPI adjusted is $182K in 2026).
* Average "Production & Hosting" cost per employee: $189K, $150K (CPI $248K, $194K)
* Platform royalty expenses were 25% of total game revenue
* Slightly under half their Operating Expenses were people
* Fortnight was >90% of revenue
I have a strong guess that "People" costs doesn't include all salaries, and that many employees are categorized under "Production & Hosting", although I expect that also includes other costs. I'll guess 75% is people, which makes total CPI adjusted average cost per employee somewhere around $320K-$370K, but I'll say $320K.
This means 5000 employees cost around $1.6B and cutting 1000 saved around $320M/year in addition to $500M of other costs.
Most estimates of Fortnight revenue claim it's roughly flat or falling between 2020 and 2025 fluctuating between $3B and $6B.
Unless Unreal Engine or EGS revenue took off, it's kind of weird to quadruple headcount while keeping revenue basically flat or falling. If fortnight only makes $2B next year, then they would be underwater on just royalties and salaries.
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/20696836/epic-apple-t...
Layoffs really, really suck, but at least there's not a whiff of the "we're doubling down on AI to boost productivity" cop out that we're seeing across the industry.
It's sad that a company being honest about a difficult decision is praiseworthy these days, but here we are.
I agree, though it might also be worth pointing out that for a game company there's some risk in that messaging that doesn't exist for a normal SaaS company. Investors might like to hear it (whether it is the truth or not), but the game-playing audience tends to be only slightly less anti-generative-AI than say the art community.
This.
https://insider-gaming.com/epic-games-store-give-away-662-mi...
In addition they've payed other game devs for Epic Game Store exclusivity so games would be available for 1 year before being released on Steam.
The whole company has been mismanaged into the side of a mountain.
>For example, in the U.S., they’ll receive paid coverage for 6 months. We’ll also accelerate their stock options vesting through January 2027 and extend equity exercise options for up to two years.
The wording of the announcement is better than the usual corporate non-speak too.
And still the overwhelming sentiment on HN is that unions are worthless.. When my company had layoffs the laws (thanks to the unions) made it favorable to us without needing the goodwill of the company. Additionally, representatives from the union were involved in all steps and made sure everything went as it should.
They've been pull about that much in per year since 2019 AFAIK.
I really hope this one have knock ons for Unreal Engine or lead to Unity like licensing. Their indie grants are also quite generous.
Does the company owe a living to those people that it doesn't actually benefit from having on board? Sometimes it sounds like people think so.
2. Given the economic conditions, I am more sympathetic. Normally a large severance would he good reassurance that they'd land on their feet. But I see more and more devs (especially game devs) going through year long gauntlets just to find something not as good. Tim, in comparison, will manage.
They just happened to hit the goldmine with Fortnite.
I suspect the popularity and ease of distribution/development on the platform makes it very attractive for developers with a dream.
But not just Roblox. People are spending their time and money elsewhere too. Polymarket and sports betting for one.
Executives care little about the stakeholders: the employees, the customers, the community. It's their company, too. They only care about investors and themselves. People who "own" pay a lower tax rate than those that "work". Let's fix that and make things great again.
It is just mismanagement of the money they earned with fortnite, they failed to keep the momentum and stopped taking risks. The technical incompetency doesn't stop with UE5, it shows in the store, which is laughably bad and inefficient since forever. I think its good these people get a new chance to start working for companies who can put their skills and time to good use and value their expertise. Long term nobody working there would be happy with the way the software portfolio is moving downwards.
This is a problem that infects all of the large studios now, from Epic to EA, Ubisoft, etc. My read on it is that it feels less risky to double-down on an exiting successful live service game like Fortnite or Rainbow Six Siege. That's probably true for ~5 years. After those ~5 years, it's far riskier to continue investing in the game than it is to start winding it down into maintenance mode while working on new titles or IP. The related risk is assuming that since the one title was huge that players are going to crave other titles in the same brand or franchise. For example, Ubisoft's assumption that Rainbow Six Extraction would naturally follow the success of Rainbow Six Siege.
These companies get addicted to the recurring revenue stream and pivot their businesses under the incorrect assumption they will last forever, at the expense of new projects.
I know someone in Epic and they told me that its no secret inside Epic that Roblox is killing them. Why? He told me a story where a neighbors kid came by and wanted to play Roblox but he told the kid he didn't have Roblox. The child replied "It's easy! I'll show you!" and this 8 year old sat at his PC, downloaded a few MB client, signs in, selects a game and is playing within minutes. The game was a brain dead platform jumping game where you jump to the top of a tower. No enemies. No items. No anything. Just get to the top. Yay. At one point the kid fell down and the game offered to move him back to where he was for $3. Yup a fucking game hit a kid up for hard cash. The people who makes these games are child predators. Scum really.
Epics problem is Unreal can't be easily deployed like Roblox. You want to play Lego star-wars? You need to first download the base Lego game of 30GB then the 20GB Star Wars pack. A Roblox user just downloads a small client, signs in and is ready to play a stupid simple game that isn't 50+ GB. Unfortunately most of those games are not games but attention stealers that entice users to spend real money on NOTHING.
Shame that everything has been boiled down to an attention and money milking scam.
(Also, eight year olds don't have $3 in Robux unless someone buys it for them, so blame the parents as well)
Roblox isn't killing Epic, Epic is killing itself by desperately trying to steal Roblox's players when they have no reason to stop playing Roblox. Even if they released a 50MB Fortnite client that streams low quality assets like Roblox, it would be no different because those kids would simply keep playing what everyone else is already playing. Tim Sweeney making another tweet about his metaverse or whatever isn't going to change that.
IMO investing in a marketplace was fine, but hemorrhaging money for 7 years on non-performant software + free game bundles is probably not defensible from an executive standpoint.
On one hand, I admire their chutzpah. The App Store model has weighed down the entire software industry and has prevented entire categories of new products from growing out of infancy due to anticompetitive practices. Everyone, Apple and Google included, would actually be better off without the App Stores in their present form, and I’d love to see them weakened or eliminated.
But on the other hand, Epic actually accomplished very little in their war, and nowhere near what being unavailable on mobile platforms for years cost them.
Additionally, their refusal to go after Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch never made any sense to anyone except for those with a financial interest in those arrangements. The rest of us were just confused — the console App Stores are the exact same model as the mobile App Stores.
I suspect Epic’s actual reason for not going after the consoles was a bit of realpolitik or cowardice depending on how you look at it. They couldn’t afford to be locked out of the mobile and console stores at the same time, so they invented some tortured rationale for why they could pay the console vendors their 30% but not the mobile vendors. But, this muddied their message and they came up mostly empty handed in the end, and here we are today.
Interestingly the pros and streamers have the exact opposite complaint: that they dumb the game down for casuals.
Can't please everyone/anyone.
Those all shuttered as companies went into maintenance mode. I'm sure Epic has similar reactions. I remember them going pretty hard on cinema and architecture, but those have been quieter over the years.
Are you seriously comparing running a PC app store vs App Store? One is the most open platform and the other has only one (1, uno, sole, single) app store.
Roblox, in contrast, has been extremely popular with 7-16 year olds for 20 years. They're funneling in new players faster than old players age out. It's pretty wild.
My personal theory is that Roblox largely stepped into the amateur game dev hole that Flash left.
This is exactly what happened with my niece, my nephew, and all of their friends.
Which isn't to say they've outgrown all of the games they played when they were younger. They still play minecraft, stardew valley, kirby, mario, etc. I don't know why, but they all bounced off of Fortnite after they hit a certain age. I wonder why.
Counter-Strike might be a exception. It seems to keep older players well while still getting enough new ones. And also have enough gacha mechanics to make lot of money...
Valve is making a killing over CS gambling and MTX as well, so not a good example. Steam is obviously making more but even CS itself would have made Valve a very successful and profitable company. Pretty much all of these build on predatory practices though.
If we are talking about games without MTX, yes that’s a very rough business.
> Video games are the exact opposite of Infinite Growth Forever. People get bored and move on.
To me, Epic Games were clearly trying to "pull a Valve" and capture the platform magic that allows Valve and other platforms like Roblox to be sustainably profitable. Obviously they have their own game store, but they also have a Fortnite Creative / UEFN (Unreal Editor for Fortnite) platform where people can create minigames inside Fortnite that work similarly to Roblox.
They even had the right idea for a while - refusing in-app transactions in their Fortnite Creative platform to encourage actually fun games rather than greedy games that prey on players. Unfortunately they had to walk back that system recently, which I now assume to be for the same financial reason as this new layoff.
I think their idea didn't work for two reasons. First, they locked down the UEFN platform too hard, leaving not a lot of options for developers to modify core gameplay features like movement and player controller. Devs like me who wanted more control over the player character and game mechanics were really severely restricted - if it was intentional, it was a bad call, and if it was unintentional then it shows that UEFN was too half-baked technically when they launched it. Second, Fortnite already had the reputation of being "just that Battle Royale game", so people didn't innovate too far beyond the game's base gameplay, rather than Roblox which was more like a true game engine / platform where every genre was possible. This kind of doomed their plan to compete head-to-head with Roblox from the start.
Valve have headcount of under 400 people. Obviously they have contractors working creating assets for CS / Data / etc, but company itself is swift and agile.
Epic was around 1000 people at Fortnite release then grown to over 4000.
I though my grievances with Epic are primarily because we never got Jazz Jackrabbit 3.
Someone is suing mojang because they break EU/Swedish law (It was a youtube video worth watching)
Minecraft bedrock is having some incredibly shitty tactics to move people towards their marketplace while community calling it bugrock
I don't think that many people who play Minecraft really appreciate Mojang being bought by Microsoft. Many are oblivious to the fact sure but overall, community's sentiment is negative towards Microsoft buying Mojang imo.
I don't think their approach is getting to stable, valuable businesses and keeping them that way. Their company name is Epic, not Mediocre BlueChipGameCo. I think their approach has been to make big investments into things, almost like Amazon's earlier approach where they would re-invest everything into the business and that might be where Epic now has to react to the market slowing for them and pull back.
I have to imagine AI is having an impact but not in the way people jump to about them using AI. How many people out there have ideas for games and can't execute them because they don't know the tech? How many people in the software industry were drawn to computing because of gaming?
If they built AI into Unreal Engine so that someone could approach it from a Game Producer/Designer role and not have to get deep into C++ programming or shaders and art assets, and produce games, games that go to the Epic Game Store and they take a cut? That would move the market in a way that would be more fitting for their company name.
Isn't that exactly what they were trying to do with the Epic Game Store?
Steam is the thing that has made Valve successful. They were great as a game company, but as you said, the games don't last. Steam does, and I don't think Valve would be that successful in a business sense without it.
Google has been a money printing machine for 20+ years almost unparalleled in human history. That's allowed Google to write bespoke software for everything, which has been useful because almost nobody has Google's problems. It's also allowed Google to contribute a bunch to open source and engage in vanity projects. They can afford it.
Then you see the likes of Twitter a decade or more ago who dedicated possibly hundreds of engineers to make Cassandra work. That's doing Google shit. But they aren't Google. And eventually those chickens come home to roost.
Games are like any content business where the owners and leadership are trying to create a formula that can be repeated infinitely. Content business actually hate the creative people who make their content because creativity doesn't scale. This is why movie studios churn out sequels and superhero movies. It's a formula.
Games eventually fall out of favor as genres get stale and new genres get created. Minecraft is an almost unique exception to this. There's a reason it sold for ~$2 billion. It's still popular. It's crazy. But that kind of example is so incredibly rare you should assume it's never going to happen.
The hubris at Epic was that they could challenge the Apple and Google app store monopolies. They were wrong. And they wasted an extraordinary amount of time, money and opportunity chasing that. That was a strategic mistake, even though I agree with their philosophical position.
I'm reminded of id software. John Carmack was legendary for years. Wolfenstein was groundbreaking. So was Doom then Quake. But eventually (IMHO) id games ceased to be games but because tech demos to sell engine licenses before ultimately being acquired and swallowed.
I feel like Epic is the same with the Unreal Engine. Fortnite is a success while it's popular and people buy cosmetics but when that popularity wanes, they have a huge revenue problem.
Isn't it the other way around? Using off-the-shelf solutions like Cassandra didn't work, so they had to resort to doing actual Google shit, a custom solution, to meet their needs.
It was Facebook/Meta that later open sourced Cassandra and a buncha other great open source stuff.
They tried, it's called the Epic Game Store
Re Tim the man: I have no opinion on him, but I follow gaming news closely and know that he is polarising. However, I saw this recently in PC Gamer and thought it was admirable: https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/epic-ceo-and-billion...
Some of it is real need for things like support, payments, and compliance in a bunch of languages and jurisdictions and across a bunch of platforms and combinations of platforms.
A lot of it's just that large businesses tend to be shockingly inefficient, often taking literally many hundreds of person-hours to do things that a small company or small team might do in low-tens. Coordination costs are high, processes are often really bad in ways that nobody who could fix them is empowered to, serious principal-agent problems are the norm rather than the exception, et c.
One of the weirdest things to me about the AI craze is that I don't see how it fixes organizational problems, and most big orgs are already burning more cash on waste due to those than they could possibly gain from fairly-optimistic LLM gains. Like, if they wanted to 5x development speed, they already can without a single LLM involved, by managing better. They could have done that ten years ago. All the more wild that they're flipping out over LLMs. You can't even come close to efficiently organizing the resources you already have...
True, but leaders of large organizations always want to fix inefficiencies and presumably failing to. Kinda like saying "if humans stopped fighting wars, most of them would have better quality of life" -- people whose life quality is better at peacetime are already trying to avoid wars, and there's not much more they can do.
OTOH, AI is a practical step a CTO (or CEO or Board or whoever) can take to make the company more efficient (assuming the hype works out).
TLDR the beauracracy is by design, in part to preserve what jobs are there, and in part to dilllute accountability when it comes up. You can see how these two factors can lead to a negative feedback loop of inefficiencies, where CYA is more important than actual productivity.
Each job is justified in isolation to do a specific thing, at least at the hiring time. I suspect there aren't a lot of people thinking at a high level as you are "we have this many gajillion dollars - what are we betting on?"
Remember that their success came from abandoning their original zombie game idea, and copying ideas from the new battle royale genre. With more polish, of course.
Nanite? Lumen? Metahuman?
They are bleeding edge when it comes to real-time rendering tech
And that's just rendering, there are a lot of other engine domains
1. More efficiencies makes for more quality products, and opens up opportunities for more initiatives which will also be higher quality than usual.
2. More efficiencies means companies become super leannin order to minimize labor and maximize costs, focusing on a few select profit centers.
I guess you fall under #2. Both are correct, depending on the economy. So you're rightm for now. #1 was the trend last decade despite horrible inefficiencies.
I think there's a good deal of wiggle room between being worked to death and teaching a manager that makes more than you how Jira works for the 10th time.
Twitter. I despise musk, ftr.
My favourite thing about GOG is that it uniquely does not demand that you install their software, instead letting you download installers straight from the website.
They're not fake netinstallers either, which doubles as a guarantee that I keep all of my games even if GOG goes bankrupt/bans my account/wipes my library/etc.
And people say C++ is dead and everything must be done in Electron because developers are expensive and computers are cheap.
This here, is the reason performance matters and fast development time is not always the answer if the competition is strong and their product is high quality.
(Rust and friends are also good solutions.)
Starting thinking of it as collection licenses to maybe install games, assuming the license is still valid when you finally get around to playing it. And your account is still valid. And the servers are still running. And your operating system will still run it. etc.
Maybe just get off the train. Your numbers add to the awful business model these games are built on.
It’s… fine. Unnecessary, if you ask me, but ok. OTOH, it is on a completely different scale compared to Steam and GOG. I am sure it would be a disaster otherwise, it really is not designed for that.
epic games doesn't know how to implement oauth (rant) : https://smileplease.mataroa.blog/blog/epic-games-doesnt-know...
All of the competition has missed either one or more of the features, making them feel like only a cash grab trying to avoid Valve's cut for providing these features.
Anway, it's not quixotic IMHO.
The reason is the highly successful competitor, in that case Steam, inspires a sort of megalomania in those aiming to compete with them, which leads to spectacular self destruction and consumer confusion as stores try to act big long before they are self sustaining.
You could spend a lot on developing a store to avoid paying $1b in fees!
Plus, your chance to launch a store is when you have a big product. Valve launched Steam with Half Life 2. It didn't really work that well at first but everyone wanted to play HL2.
Building a marketplace or AppStore isn't quixotic - it helps build distribution and gives Epic the power needed to drive studios to the Unreal Engine, though this strategy clearly went to the backburner due to Fortnite and it's entire ecosystem becoming the golden goose.
That said, Epic is also significantly more overstaffed than it's peers.
We are Legion.
Since game journos are completely woke and unreliable using Steam's game ratings from REAL players is a God-send.
Without it you simply wouldn't know if a game is any good or not.
Maybe he could destroy his wealth to keep the employees around a bit longer but it's better for everyone if they move on and the company has a legitimate opportunity to survive. Besides people don't want to be on corporate welfare anyways, they'd rather be part of a company where they can add meaningful value.
Funny. Those companies don't seem to be hiring. Everyone is doing layoffs. Maybe you said that wrong? People running companies don't feel obligated to employ, therefore everyone is now Someone Else's Problem.
a product line that is still expected to make $6B this year plus a bunch of other massive IPs. Come on, if he can't keep the team together with that budget then he should step aside and let someone in charge who can.
A company raking in 5-6 billion per year can't find any profitable bets to make? Possibilities to invest in? All they can do is cut?
LOL. If you're that bad at capitalism then please resign and let someone else give it a try.
Reminds me of PG&E. So bad at being a for-profit electric company they need constant state handouts to guarantee profits. They made bad contracts so they need a PCIA fee for not selling me electricity. Hedging? Severing contracts? Arbitrage? Forecasting? Never heard of those, now make with the free coin! My son... if you are that bad at capitalism shut it down!
I agree with Warren Buffet's take here. A company that cuts or can only pump dividends is basically saying "we can't figure out how to make productive use of people and/or cash". What an unbelievable joke.
I launched EGS just now to time some comparisons and it's a black rectangle on my screen with no GUI (probably self-updating). I had to kill the process and restart it.
The Look and Feel for the EGS client just feels slow. Not that Steam is always amazing in this regard either but it's way better than EGS. Go to your EGS library and click between "favorites" and "all games". Switching from favorites to all games takes me ~4 seconds, every time (if you have any meaningful number of games).
The search/sort is slow. Steam's feels instant.
The library list has a ton of wasted space. In terms of vertical space, the Steam library lists three games for every game EGS lists.
The EGS social features compared to Steam are downright anemic (and Steam is pretty bad compared to something like Discord). You can't even set an avatar in EGS. Even EA's Store app (whatever they call Origin now) lets you do that.
I'll stop there. I could rant for much longer.
if you have the time, try to find a game on nintendo vs on steam. Don't google for the pages, go to their base shop page and start from there. Try to avoid directly searching the title, instead search for keywords as if you're a gamer trying to recall a game suggestion you heard from a friend like 2 weeks ago. You'll notice the plethora of differences that combined puts steam on a whole other level of sales and content distribution if you go about it like that
Steam is always going to be my first choice because Linux support is better. If I buy on Steam I know it's going to work.
I fear for valve in a post gaben world, and they certainly aren't blameless. They also aren't a monopoly. Hell, steamOS is the opposite of a locked ecosystem.
It has 90% marketshare and has been shown to use its monopoly uncompetitively to force price parity on devs. Textbook definition.
>People would be excited for EGS just like they are for GoG,
People "like" GOG. I woildnt say they are "excited for it". The revenue of GOG these years don't reflect the supposed enthusiasm.
>EGS has a track record of anticonsumer behavior.
Anticonsumer isn't anti competitive. Especially not as a new player in the game. They can't brute force this stuff with money like a trillion dollar company could.
> Hell, steamOS is the opposite of a locked ecosystem.
I'll believe that when they release a full distro with all the feature the Steam Deck enjoys.
It is a monopoly but that can be a good thing sometimes. Steam is really good! Is it 30% cut good? Maybe not but I do think Valve has managed to keep Steam good for a very long time and if they lose their monopoly they're going to have a strong incentive to fuck things up.
Another example is WhatsApp. Sure, sucks for Google and Apple that WhatsApp have a watertight monopoly in most of Europe (and probably much of the rest of the world; I haven't checked). But it's pretty great for actually users. We've had at least a decade of totally free messaging that everyone has with no ads and e2e encryption.
Meta are just about starting to fuck it up but it's been a pretty great run.
Epic garnered a lot of ill will with all the early exclusives. If I have part 1 and part 2 of some franchise on Steam, and then part 3 comes out as an Epic exclusive, it's going to irritate me.
None of those languages were familiar to me, and there was no VPN/proxy/etc involved.
Considering that I'm gaming on Linux, the number of competitors is pretty small and close to zero, I'm not sure why I should be forced to switch operating systems to support the "better platform".
I say this as someone who's been running Vortex/Skyrim modding on Linux years before there was official support for it and I'm kind of shocked honestly to hear that people are cheering for something I did so long ago (5 years to be precise) I hardly remember the time doing it.
Looks like they have finally fixed lag and freeze jank that occured on every action, blocked scrolling, and etc.
Unfortunately just clicking on the "Featured Discounts" items on the store home page.. 3-4+(more like 4-5+ on further testing) FULL seconds of blank until the game details load. An ecommerce site where the items take 3-4 seconds to display!? I flipped over to Steam and everything in the store loads "instantly".
Sigh, I'll check back in 2028.
Edit: It boggles the mind and defies reason that they can't get a handle on table-stakes UX after all this time, energy, and hundreds of millions of dollars sunk into it. Nepotism; gotta be, yeah?
User reviews, guides, discussions, workshop and shared screenshots and videos: bold social features that are an incredible source of agony for mediocre and bad indie games.
No? Epic charges 12% (with the first $1m free) vs. Valve’s frankly extortionate (i.e. industry standard) 30%.
This is just wrong. You portray people as being irrational / "emotional", but Steam was actively bad when it first launched. The fact that people changed their opinions on it when it later became actually good is not emotional, that's in fact exactly rational.
The Epic Game Store doesn't need to fix "perception", they need to fix their actual product instead of trying to take shortcuts to gaining users by burning hundreds of millions of dollars per year on exclusivity deals, which are extremely anti-consumer, and will obviously result in rational backlash against somebody blowing money to attempt to force people to use their product for access to a completely unrelated product.
Steam with thousands of games, that regularly has (or had) massively deep sales that let you get games for cheap, barely uses resources (most players are not struggling now to run games), and run very smooth. Is a very different beat. Valve earned trust.
EGS is currently bad and trying to position themselves as a Steam alternative when they simply are not even close to the same quality.
For Sony, I get it. I want to play Demon Souls, I buy a PS5, now I own a PS5 I'm gonna buy more games for it.
But for EGS this doesn't make sense. It costs me nothing to install both stores on my PC. I buy Alan Wake 2 on EGS, great, that doesn't make me any more likely to buy the next game I want there. Nothing about the platform is sticky or requires a sunk cost.
Unless they're making enough money on the exclusive games to justify the deals on their own (which, given this announcement, seems unlikely) I don't see how they or you think it could work.
But you wouldn't bother unless you have a reason to. I put off buying games I wanted to for months because I'd've had to install a new store. No-one is going to install a store for nothing.
> I buy Alan Wake 2 on EGS, great, that doesn't make me any more likely to buy the next game I want there.
Now every time you launch Alan Wake 2 they get a chance to sell you another game. If you see a game you like, why wouldn't you buy it on EGS now that you've installed it and know it works? They've got your email address now and can send you recommendations or tell you when there's a sale on.
Sure, it's still going to be an uphill struggle. But if they can't get you to install the store then they can't even start.
Steam is sticky (social features, network effects, etc) and EGS is not, so EGS exclusives do not work. What part of this is "definitely wrong"?
Or at least, that's how it worked 20 years ago. Thing is, games got so diverse, as well as the rise of "forever games" that there's fee actual "systrlem sellers" these days. It's really just GTA that comes to mind now.
A good competitor would not come from a game publisher. It wouldn't collect any more data than it needs and wouldn't use your data for marketing or sell it to anyone else. It also wouldn't be able to remove your ability to access and play the games you've already purchased for any reason.
Bad products/services that are more trouble than they are worth do not magically become good because they might compete in some ways with something else.
GoG is the closest thing to a steam competitor right now and even in that case I have zero incentive to install their client.
Two anti-consumer products is probably better than one, but I also hate Epic as a company, so I would just prefer for Steam to win. At least I like half-life.
I don't agree. The reason I personally prefer Steam is that all my existing games are on Steam so if I keep buying on Steam I don't have to make and maintain accounts on other stores, if I keep buying my games on Steam I can keep using Steam as my only game launcher, and all my friends are on Steam so games with Steam multiplayer integration are easier to play if I too play it through Steam.
The Epic Games Store client and game integration could be significantly better from a technical perspective in every possible way, and I would not be interested in moving to it. Steam is good enough and switching has a massive cost. I can't really imagine much that would make me use the Epic Games Store other than exclusivity or the promise of free games. Though I would be more likely to just not play a particular game if it's only available through the Epic Games Store.
Steam isn't perfect: they initially had to be forced to offer refunds, and their item economy enables barely disguised gambling. But by and large they have behaved very predictably and consumer-friendly. Sometimes by outright consumer-friendly policies like generous refunds or labeling games with AI assets. But usually by just not doing anything greedy. Or as the meme goes: "Gabe does nothing. wins."
Even if you "buy" a physical "game", you are just buying a license.
It's definitely not about lock-in for me. It's everything from local streaming, to linux support, to cloud saving working properly, to 100s of other things that become apparent if you try to do anything other than launch a game in a bog standard way on a windows machine.
Epic have had decades to get any one of these right, and yet they refuse to meet us even half way on a single point.
I still prefer to buy on Steam if I can, because using the EGS sucks in every way possible compared to using Steam. If I want to sit to rest I can do it on a cold and irregular rock, but if there's a bench right next to it, then I'll use the bench.
That said, you can do a lot worse than EGS. MS Store I'm looking at you. In the above metaphor, you'd like sitting on the wet and muddy ground.
What you do need is to avoid tying your game socialisation to a _store_. Some day, Steam will be enshittified too.
The ideal number of app stores I want installed on my computer is ZERO. I don't want to have to load a damn "store" just to obtain and run your game. I am willing to angrily live with ONE store on my computer, Steam, but no way in hell am I going to tolerate having to have an Epic Store and a Microsoft Store and an Activision Store and a goddamn Rockstar Store and an Ubi Store and a fucking Adobe store for Photoshop. I don't want to have to install store after store for each damn app developer on my computer, yet that's the way the industry seems to be headed.
But other platforms really are rather pathetic in terms of feature set compared to Steam. Steam has a bajillion features, and it looks like other platforms aren't even trying to compete to provide a good user experience.
Haven’t you been paying attention? That’s not how we do things in business anymore…
Doing business is very simple, easy, and straightforward, but I suspect in a lot of cases the individual behavioral aspects of the executives get in the way of doing good business.
Direction and leadership is something that these companies never seem to get right.
And they're the ones making the most money and avoiding the layoffs.
I feel like this is good advice, and should still be a pillar of building a business: prioritize customer satisfaction, and your happy customers will become repeat customers. But I don't think it's enough. Epic tried to launch a store in 2018, 15 years after the launch of Steam. That's 15 years of customers buying their games on steam, building a friends list, and getting used to making Steam their PC gaming "home." How do you convince someone who might have hundreds of games tied to one online account, that it is in their interest to open a new online account with a new merchant and start over from scratch? Your experience can't just be nicer, it needs to have some level of appeal that convinces customers to peel themselves away from whatever platform is their current default.
I don't have a good answer for how to accomplish this. Epic tried it by paying devs for exclusives and freebies, litigation, and a PR campaign that Valve and Apple and Google were ripping people off. Their approach was hostile and didn't prioritize making a nice experience, and it seems to have failed. But I think these platforms are sticker than we give them credit for, and just making a nice experience isn't enough.
Any web browser can seem slow vs a native app, though.
For example. I search for "roguelike" and it brings up 1 single game (which is coming soon). There are few tags on games. No way to refine a search. In fact they have a category called "rogue-like" which has a lot of games, but somehow the search just misses them. There's no way to refine results by popularity or most sales.
I suspect this is all an intentional design philosophy of epic, a way to have a lot more control over what the user sees than steam, because its so bad it doesn't make any other sense.
Also for some reason their store takes a LOT longer to load than steam. The game library UI is much worse. Pretty sure there's no easy way to mod games through the epic store or see dev updates or talk on a forum or submit bugs. Just so bad.
The steam chat app is kind of terrible and there was a Linux UI bug that caused UI lag a few years ago. Epic Games just can't replicate the goodwill.
Could it surpass Steam? Probably not. But you don't need to surpass Steam to have a viable, profitable store. GoG is the alternative that proves the rule - it is smaller, but they have their niche offering.
EGS is shit, and relied on exclusives (which everyone typically hates, especially on PC).
The the lawsuit with apple:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Apple
The massive set of fines...
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/...
> Just make it a nice experience.
That might get in the way of greed and hubris.
> together with over $500 million of identified cost savings in contracting, marketing, and closing some open roles puts us in a more stable place.
I suspect that they would STILL be in the same boat that they are in. You see a silo where I see a service provider.
Does apple make money on doing what they do.. You bet.
But the lesson here is that they make that money because of scale, and without it replacing payment processing, fraud management, and the customer service you need with it is a HARD problem. Epic needs more than Fortnite to justify running all that on their own or it's going to turn into a black hole: because payment processing for "digital goods" is a nightmare.
I suspect that both apple and googles extension into payments at point of sale, has contractual ties to their App Store payment processing. Something Epic will always lack.
The real pain in the ass here is the incumbent card processors, and their fee structures.
I suspect that the industry is going to need to go back and re-visit micro transactions in the coming years.
But he still is a CEO. So there will naturally be some evils he seeps into to make the company (and himself) richer. He still has his own interests, but my second hand experience is that even these layoffs are relatively respectful compared to most of the industry.
I recognize that CEO side. But it's a real shame many people mostly turned on him in order to defend Steam. Steam sure isn't a saint either.
But they are the Amazon of gaming : it’s a no brainer to buy games because you know you won’t get issues being reimbursed if it’s needed. Also SteamOS/Proton/Steam Deck are nice.
And EPIC managed to do worse than that.
I do feel GOG Galaxy could become a threat to Steam someday if they added official Linux support and a full screen version but last time I tried it it was pretty buggy.
But once I saw the interview with the guy from epic or someone big there, I don't remember and they said the money for developers was from marketing campaigns which makes sense to me. They said that they wanted to make a better experience so the developers themselves would try to help being people to the platform but that never happened.
It seems that the technology behind the epic store is, epically broken, pun intended. I've read somewhere that they tried to decouple chunks of the store and restart but the thing was so poorly done that it would be more expensive than just let it fade away and at some point they had a new epic store 2 created from scratch but to develop it to the end would be too expensive.
As a swe myself, maybe they were trying to scale to steam level before being steam? I don't know.
My last experience trying to use epic was trying to buy a game. But being greeted by a store login, then a loader of a store then a initial store that tried very hard to sell me call of duty and EA stuff. I found whatever I was trying to buy but I couldn't due to some bug in the payment.
And never again. Not for any particular reason. I just didn't spend more time there.
And now, with these layoffs what are they going to do? Are they revoke all the licenses for the games they gave and sold?
Can't escape the feeling that Epic just want to sell games without engaging with their customers much.
Valve has created a kind of gaming Facebook.
You can't replace that.
If you don't sell your game on steam you are missing 90% of the market. So as long as Valve continue to make steam good enough, nobody has an incentive to switch.
It's an abusive monopoly. Steam take 30% of revenue from developers and Epic take 12%, but the prices can't be 18% cheaper for the consumer without giving up 90% of the market!
The "most favored nation" pricing you're complaining about being abusive refers to Steam key sales on third party platforms and that pricing exists for a blatantly obvious reason. How much of a percentage does Valve get from that sale? 0%. Absolutely nothing. The developer generated keys are free and Valve will still pay the distribution costs (storefront, downloads, multiplayer, etc) for you. If it was possible to sell a Steam key cheaper on another platform, then nobody would buy Steam keys from the Steam store anymore, which means their revenue would tank to zero, which in turn means they would have to cancel free steam key generation, duh. Valve is being extremely accommodating here and you're twisting it into its opposite, which is pretty disgusting.
At the same time there are articles like this https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2g1md0l23o on the bbc claiming a tribunal ruled a case can continue against Valve for "forcing game publishers to sign up to conditions which prevents them from selling their titles earlier or for less on rival platforms".
The website for the law firm clearly states the price parity is not just for steam keys https://steamyouoweus.co.uk/the-claim.
If there was no evidence it would be thrown out. But until it concludes who knows what the truth is.
But we'll see. I hope it doesn't come to that. That said, I'm trying to change my purchase habits over to GOG because even if Gabe's successor doesn't screw over the Steam customers, eventually someone will. With GOG there's no possibility of the games I pay for being taken away from me.
That being said, I believe that Gabe is taking his "succession planning" seriously, so I'd be fairly optimistic for the next decade at least.
He probably already has a will set up that details how ownership should be transferred.
[1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/trump-adm...
...because europe forced it to be...
https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/02/19/apples-new-rcs-st...
That globalization is a big reason many tech companies swell. When you need a team to work in and around every region's laws and regulations, you get big quickly.
But also, unity has slimmed down and scaled down on a lot of initiatives.
I've been laid off and I only get paid until the end of the week, and for healthcare the only thing I have access to is overpriced COBRA.
I live in NYC, and when I was laid off from a job in 2023. I looked into the COBRA options, and they wanted something like $3500/month, which is a lot of money. I called around around and I was eventually able to do a program through NYC where we got insurance for free. It actually worked great; we were able to get insurance within a week. NYC ain't perfect but every now and then they come through.
If I get laid off or fired, I will likely check this option again.
Just a small mom and pop shop that somehow seems to elude themselves from the typical braindead MBA playbook of ruining lives to justify their shitty business decisions.
Hopefully the beloved indie game studio can navigate these waters successfully! Lots of sharks out there that like to rat fuck the commons for personal gain, wouldn't want that to happen to the gaming company that helped normalize gambling to children.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ellison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walton_family https://www.forbes.com/profile/haas/
And the list goes on.
As it turns out for the vast majority of cases: yes. Just look at the ultra wealthy in today’s society and trace back their lineage.
No one would argue otherwise.
You may acquire property, but that is on you.
A job is a mutually beneficial agreement between two parties. Either side can generally sever the agreement if it's not viewed as beneficial.
Owning things like houses and companies is more about the compact between people and the government. People are entitled to "own shit", because that's how our government is set up.
The only way one could legally get UT99 is to buy physical. And it's been like that for many years prior to an event above, which also disabled the server browser after 22 years of running intact.
This applies to everything. If you see a product category where users are legitimately unhappy; then enter it, build something actually good, you'll be the biggest and richest in no-time.
It being a good service is secondary.
In what role-playing game?
Demanding it is how Steam came about!
If Epic games really wanted to start eating away at steams market share, they would do one thing. Make EGS not shitty for the user
There's so many people who aren't even your market, they are an "one game player". You can't target that realistically unless that one game shits the bed.
I haven't play a PC game in a long time, so don't have any experience with the modern game stores and playing downloadable games.
I understand that these stores are more than just places to buy games--they also include extensive social media aspects.
But surely you don't have to give up one store if you make another account on another store? If you are on Steam and have a large friends list there and want to try a game that is only on some other PC game store couldn't you send a message to your Steam friends saying you are going to try that other game and asking if anyone else wants to come play with you?
If you meet people in that new game and want to be online friends, just point them to your Steam account and say that's your main gaming social media site, or point them to some non-gaming social media if you actively use any and they aren't also on Steam.
I don't buy a lot of games, but when I do, I don't usually look at Epic. I'd rather buy on GOG or Steam. Steam is probably from inertia, but if Epic provided a better than Steam experience on the games I've gotten for free, than I might consider it. I don't really know what would qualify as better than steam though... maybe faster startup, less dumb prompts?
I don't even consider buying games on the Microsoft store though, so Epic has a leg up --- if it's sale season, I will look to see if Epic has a bigger sale than Steam.
No but it has to be at least nicer and they didn't manage that.
But it seems that gamble slowed as the economy did. Worse yet, China and Korea have gotten much more attractive to get people into their casinos. Competition is stiffer than ever.
It'll probably turn a division of Microsoft that usually loses money into one that loses...more money.
The SteamOS is capable of getting out of the way, which is something Microsoft is pathologically incapable of designing Windows to do. And these days I think Linux and the Linux desktop are just objectively better than Windows, and the days where Windows embodied what it meant to have when anything goes PC are long gone.
So you're left with limited options. I think a first class console experience for a wide range of storefronts is the best bet to out-steam Steam but it assumes a degree of execution capability that I don't trust Microsoft to have.
Having a separate company focus on distribution sounds more ideal.
Epic Games had an opportunity here to erode the app store margins through standardization, instead, they've become a copycat of what they resented with a slightly smaller cut.
Just install the damn game, ask if you want icons on the desktop as well as in the start menu.
OS handles it all for you.
Perhaps some multiplayer functionality and such makes sense to share cross-game, but I miss the bad old days of every game having a bunch of privately maintained servers and its own server browser list etc. You could eventually find a few servers that fit your playstyle and make online gamer friends that way.
The only benefit steam brings to the table as far as I can tell is making it easy to reinstall your library on a fresh PC.
Now though, proton/wine works more or less for everything, and the storefront is a web based one anyway.
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
The same rationale exists for Epic, and they have spent an enormous amount of resources fighting Google and Apple over this.
I think it's an ideological decision rather than a technical one.
Yes, it's not the most optimal business decision as a software company to invest in hardware. The clear move is to either grease Microsoft's palms, or let then outright acquire Steam (or Valve as a whole). Valve not doing that is either in part ideological, or part very long term thinking on the best financial path later, instead of now.
But at the same time: while the ends was "be independent from Microsoft", their means at first was very Microsoft esque. Partner up with hardware vendors, make some Pcs with Steam built in, and brand it as such. Didn't work. Their goal had to be to roll their own hardware because that's what was needed to get the ball rolling (as well as a form factor that accompanied a desktop instead of competed against).
Linux support may not be a huge deal in the overall market (although it's growing due to the steam os devices) but it's just one more element to Steam's moat.
I don't see it going down any differently with Steam. It may take a dent and open up a competitor, but it won't do a move so catastrophic that it losses its leader status from that alone.
We could also call those squeezers "optimists", and publicly traded implies ownership by the most optimistic (well, the most optimistic who have money to invest). Leading to behavior patterns that could be described as suicidally chasing the most unrealistic money making projections. (and founder majority stakes are surprisingly susceptible to falling in line with those optimists, because those owners still don't want to see their valuation going down, doubly so of they ever started borrowing against their stakes)
If steams fumbles as hard as microsoft did with internet explorer they too could be mostly gone in 3 years, replaced by a giant competitors product.
Roblox is in some ways there, I think Epic thought fortnite could have competed. IMO they made a strategic mistake in shackling their game-as-a-platform to Fortnite. I thought the music fortnite thing looked interesting, but I have negative interest in installing Fortnite.
Call it something else and make it literally the first thing you see on epicgames.com, have it work on mobile, and maybe things would be different today.
(Aside: Roblox wins because I can go from typing in roblox.com into my browser and be playing a game with a friend in under 20s)
Snapchat was a Facebook killer until Facebook bought a VPN service and tracked every user without consent then stole half its features
I guess you could say LoL is a DOTA killer since its significantly more popular now, although some of that is likely to do with the Russian/Ukraine war
Giving actual compelling reasons to get users on your platform is the only way and the best way and that isn't really a function of time. TeamSpeak, Ventrilo and Mumble got eaten up by Discord and also most game forums
One of the biggest issues with all these stores that are other than steam is that they suck in terms of UI/UX and they are HUGE resource hogs, I am more inclined to kill off the epic games launcher from running in the background because it taking up gigabytes of my system memory and that annoys me
>Giving actual compelling reasons to get users on your platform is the only way
And sometimes there is no compelling reason. People may only want 1 or 2 things and they bias towards what they are familiar with.i suspect that's why Twitter is still technically a market leader (despite falling apart behind the scenes).
I also think it's really funny that talk about offering a good platform then mention an example where the market leader just gobbles them up.
From Heroic's FAQ, that's the first step for adding support to the store.
https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher...
Not exactly first class, but one step away.
I know they're sponsoring a bunch of ARM and Linux projects as well.
Having skilled and happy employees that aren't constantly changing and do not spend all of their time on ways to fuck over customers and chase trends is simply impossible. Releasing a piece of hardware and leaving it open for customers to do with what they want? Linux? Not hiring people the second line goes up and then immediately firing them when line stagnates? Preposterous.
Though Unreal Engine does indeed need quite a few developers. Additionally, using UE is much cheaper (5% on games exceeding 1 milion USD gross revenue) than using Steam (30% on every game). So they not only need more developers than Valve, they also earn less money.
Then steam reviews are the most accurate reviews there are for how likely you are to be happy with the purchase. I am much more hesitant to spend money on a game where I can't see the steam reviews for, so there is basically no way I'll buy a game on epic store that doesn't exist on steam since I am basically buying it blind.
And all game controller even works!
Steam is a serious value add on Linux.
Simply getting installer would not be option for most games.
With the added downside of less choice and/or delayed releases
I started using Steam in 2007 and it was fine. In 2006 there was still some residual animosity towards it but I think the tide had well and truly turned since the early days (and I think there were a handful of third party games on it by then too which I guess was something of a vote of confidence - a few were Source engine titles so they may have got a discount or kick-back from Valve, but not all were).
I thought CSS was the first release on steam beta? I remember playing the crap out of it, then the actual steam release happened, and it somehow turned into a laggy buggy hunk of crap for months.
Counter-Strike Source was launched some time in 2004 and then Half-Life 2 came along in November 2004.
but it got a lot better.
Epic had more money and time compared to Valve. and their store is still worse.
sure, Steam has an enormous moat, but that won't be the case forever, Epic should be ready with a nice platform to exploit niches that Valve misses
instead they hemorrhage money on things that does not make their fundamental position any better.
Eventually like it comes to all of us, there will be time to a new generation of game stores, or gaming devices.
You need an email address to access it but it’s good, if bleak, reading.
Edit: Ah, maybe CD Projekt does own the rights completely? They may have bought the right completely from Andrzej? So Andrzej may not have been the primary party selling the rights? Or maybe not? Andrzej may have retained film/tv rights and not sold those to CD Projekt.
Afterwards depends on how they manage to keep surfing the success wave.
Basically.
Discretionary spending is the first victim in a recession.
Gamers love, love, love lootboxes. Can't get enough of them. There are many lootbox games with 10-100s of millions of players. The Reddit/HN vocal minority who hate lootboxes (myself included) probably represent <5%, if that.
Didn't know about the lawsuit though, I will give that a look.
They need that and the modding community to keep the game alive so that new players buy a copy on phone/console/etc.
Oh they sure wish that but the community loves java and for a good reason actually but their first step towards this was migrating mojang accounts into microsoft accounts as previously bedrock had microsoft accounts iirc and java had mojang accounts and microsoft accounts both but they have now blocked mojang accounts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_UF_4gZclI (Mojang screwed us, now we're suing them)
AFAIK Java Edition is still the actual development branch. Mojang develops new updates for Java Edition first, then lets another team port them to Bedrock.
A class action, where the EULA was updated without full consent being sought correctly.
[0] https://tribune.com.pk/story/2567759/minecraft-faces-a-class...
part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_UF_4gZclI (Mojang screwed us, now we're suing them)
I don't think "use MySQL" really means the same thing at that scale.
Twitter claimed they were using Cassandra (or at least planned to) for storing tweets [3] but had rolled something else entirely (called Manhattan) by 2014 [4][5].
So yes it was originally released by Facebook but it was Twitter who spent a massive effort trying to make it work in production. And failed.
[1]: https://www.informationweek.com/it-infrastructure/twitter-dr...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Cassandra
[3]: https://highscalability.com/so-why-is-twitter-really-not-usi...
[4]: https://blog.x.com/engineering/en_us/a/2014/manhattan-our-re...
All my games are still installed and still work.
But so far, Steam has been really good to/for me.
Although there is a slight (almost negligible) uptick in job postings, the salaries for those jobs is rapidly declining.
There must be some fundamental problem with either developers or management system or both...
And doing this requires including a near complete web browser with piles of added hooks, obviously.
The minimal here was to take the Unreal Launcher (which was always meh. But devs rarely interact with the launcher) and shove the tab into there. Any problems with that launcher were passed to the EGS, and amplified by being B2C.
If I have to be honest, it's also tribalism. Exclusives are not a new concept even on PC. But the reaction to some EGS exclusives was so extreme. The PR hit didn't do many favors.
2. Valve does have tiered shares, but it's based on publisher sales. And it's extremely high. I have to check again, but I believe the threshold was 25m yearly revenue for 25% and 50m for 20%.
Innsome ways it's more frustrating. It's basically a tax cut for the rich.
Re: value propositions: Steam's 30% reduces to 25% after $10M made, and 20% after $50M.
Did you use an LLM to generate this? Don't do that.
You asked why and I answered with the real reason. It's not that deep. People don't leave because people don't leave. If that's not a satisfying answer, I agree. But reality can be irrational.
And yes, chrome is a great example. That came right on the legs of Microsoft losing an anti trust case. For something that seems so quaint in 2026. I miss when regulations had teeth.
if not:
https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/jobs?job_id=113#:~:text=The...
Can you? Do you even know that number?
Mihoyo literally prints money with predatory gacha
Riot has had several layoffs in recent years
Roblox loses tons of money every year
https://hindenburgresearch.com/roblox/
To quote just a section of the report:
Core to the problem is that Roblox’s social media features allow pedophiles to efficiently target hundreds of children, with no up-front screening to prevent them from joining the platform.
For example, in 2018, prior to Roblox going public, a 29-year-old was caught by police with 175 hours of video footage of him grooming and engaging in explicit behavior with 150 minors using online platforms, namely Roblox.
Media and non-profit exposés from 2020 to July 2024 revealed digital strip clubs, red light districts, sex parties and child predators lurking on Roblox. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation in 2024 labeled Roblox “a tool for sexual predators, a threat for childrens’ safety”.
Numerous criminal indictments from 2019-2024 allege that sexual predators groomed children in-game, ranging from 8-14 years old, then kidnapped, raped or traded sexual content with them.
Following years of scandals, we performed our own checks to see if the platform had cleaned up its act. As a test, we attempted to set up an account under the name ‘Jeffrey Epstein’…only to see the name was taken, along with 900+ variations.
Many were Jeffrey Epstein fan accounts, including “JeffEpsteinSupporter” which had earned multiple badges for spending time in kid’s games. Other Jeff Epstein accounts had the usernames “@igruum_minors” [I groom minors], and “@RavpeTinyK1dsJE” [rape tiny kids].
We attempted to set up a Roblox account under the name of another notorious pedophile to see if Roblox had any up-front pedophile screening: Earl Brian Bradley was indicted on 471 charges of molesting, raping and exploiting 103 children. The username was taken, along with multiple variants like earlbrianbradley69.
After we found a username, we listed our age as “under 13” to see if children are being exposed to adult content. By merely plugging ‘adult’ into the Roblox search bar, we found a group called “Adult Studios” with 3,334 members openly trading child pornography and soliciting sexual acts from minors. We tracked some of the members of “Adult Studios” and easily found 38 Roblox groups – one with 103,000 members – openly soliciting sexual favors and trading child pornography.
The chatrooms trading in child pornography had no age restrictions. Roblox reports that 21% of its users are under the age of 9, a number that is likely underestimated given that Roblox has no age verification aside from users seeking 17+ experiences.
Registered as a child, we were also able to access games like “Escape to Epstein Island” and “Diddy Party”. We found over 600 “Diddy” games, including “Survive Diddy” and “Run From Diddy Simulator”.
Since September 2nd, 2024, third-party monitor ‘Moderation For Dummies’ has reported ~12,400 erotic roleplay accounts on Roblox. These include everything from “rape/forceful sex fetishes” to underage users “willing to do anything for Robux”.
Users seeking sexual experiences on Roblox are so pervasive that there are thousands of Roblox sex videos on porn sites, inviting users of unknown ages to make explicit content on the platform.
We tested out Roblox’s experiences to see what else kids were being exposed to. We quickly encountered images of male genitalia and hate speech in Roblox’s “school simulator” game, which had registered 28.9 million visits with no age restrictions.
A hardware company pivoting to the AI bubble has literally nothing to do with the profitability of software.
Epic doesn't have anything else besides the gaming market. And the gaming market is huge, it's more than music and movies combined, so please just stop spilling bullshit.
Independence of paying Windows licenses or Microsoft store taxes, sure.
Lots of new/recent native MacOS releases nowadays: https://store.steampowered.com/macos
There's tons and tons of older software that people still want to run that might never be ported to Linux. And that's fine, because there's no problem with building compatibility layers to make it work. Microsoft can't do anything about that.
We really did have a far better shot at it than even most insiders appreciated (to the point rival companies would tell me to my face how confused they were by the apparent failure to execute), however, the core team were more interested in fighting over who would take credit for it when it succeeded than ever ensuring that it would.
Outside of being forced to use a game launcher to launch their games, what was the real crime? Not enabling gambling on their platform like steam?
To me, this was the crime. Me and my friends played mass effect 3 multiplayer around launch, which was an EA Origin exclusive. It was a total pain! All of us needed to download and install the launcher, then buy & download the game through it. Then add each other as "EA origin friends". The whole process was riddled with bugs at the time - including payment problems and download problems. Origin would crash sometimes. Sometimes we couldn't see each other in multiplayer, and needed to restart origin to fix it. Sometimes another of our friends would join us - and it was always "oh god, what do I have to do to make this work??".
I really love mass effect 3. But the experience was traumatic enough that I never bought or played anything through EA Origin ever since then. The quality of Steam is table stakes now. And there's so many good games coming out that game exclusivity usually isn't enough to get you over that initial hump.
The biggest gripe I have with the origin launcher (and to a lesser extent, the epic launcher) other than "why does it exist at all?" is how laggy all UI actions are. Game developers can render a 3d world at 120+fps. Why on earth does it take multiple seconds for the UI to respond to a button press sometimes? Its completely inexcusable. The blizzard launcher is (IMO) the best launcher by this metric. You can tell competent people made it, because everything responds instantly. (The EA launcher might be good now, I wouldn't know. I mostly only play games that release on steam.)
At the same time Steam had polished a lot of the rough edges like this for their catalog and other publishers so there's really no excuse. I've never had to open support tickets with any other storefront because the DLC map pack for a game would stop loading while the base game kept working.
Gabe Newell is a billionaire and has shown no particular need to enshittify his brand just to extract more profit. May he blessed with health and a long life.
He is - the stakeholders are his shareholders, who don't want him to run a loss, and to whom he is responsible.
A minority of people (shareholders) holding the majority of people (employees) at gunpoint.
Proton as a project let's valve hedge on the heir apparent OS without upfront developer cost. If the Linux player base grows, developers will follow and valve is poised to remain dominant.