Epic games store is still not profitable even after purchasing a lot of exclusives.

Source.

After all this time, the storefront is still a big pile of dung. No wonder it hasn't made profit. It's not about the games, it's about the service.

Isn't profitable yet. Key word being 'yet'.

Also, focus is on growth and not profit. When this is their business strategy going into it, I don't see what the big deal is. This is old news anyway.

They are burning money. Every week at least one free game. Sometimes AAA games.

Also many of their members never pay for games, only go to get the free games and then buy what they want on steam .

Hey, I'm all for free games and lower prices. Opening up another launcher takes a couple seconds with my 5900X, but I get it. Nobody ain't got the time to be opening up another launcher, much less, don't need another client that's barebone.

Tim Sweeney will never catch up to Gabe's Steam empire, not what he's trying to pull here. All these launchers split up the PC ecosystem, and the problem for EGS is that the only way to get users on their lame ass store is to do it. If a game is on Steam and Epic at the same time 99% of the sale will be on Steam because why do we need Epic? You don't need 5 launchers for games. Hell the reason why I'm mostly using Steam & GoG is because they are both good client stores, easy to navigate, both offer great refunds systems and I been using Steam since I joined PC back in 2007 & got into GoG in 2008.

All in all, I don't have bad experience using EGS, I only use it just to play a certain exclusive games if it's not on Steam till next year which at times I don't wanna wait...looking at you Alan Wake 2. But yeah, if Sweeney really wants to get PC players loving his client store, he needs spend the money and give the bells/whistles that Steam already has for the past decades cause securing exclusives isn't the way it works and either passing free games swaying PC gamers away from Steam.

Fun fact: This person on Reddit has never bought a single game on EGS which I find it amusing😅

Lol, Timmy was bitching about Steam monopoly all while wanting to replace it (EGS having half of PC market would mean them becoming bigger than Steam).

Neither have I, but I have a library of 370 games on EGS. Only tried Rage 2 so far. Have Subnautica installed but I'm yet to play it.

The Epic Games Store is a reminder why the quality of competition is important than quantity. It does not matter if Steam has many competitors if they are unable to effectively compete against it.

@pclover1980 said:

Source.

After all this time, the storefront is still a big pile of dung. No wonder it hasn't made profit. It's not about the games, it's about the service.

Whaaaaaaaaat?

Well honestly Epic is the only storefront on PC offering any kind of competition.

Uplay, EA app, Microsoft store don't offer any competition at all, just proprietary launchers to launch their own games.

GFWL, bethesda net, battle net all dead...

You want competition against Steam? Tell the other launchers to give us the bells/whistles Steam already has or they can just start crawling back to Steam and pay up 30%.

I mean, it should be easy to give us what Steam already has right? No excuse for the other launchers.

But yeah, there's no denying EGS is providing competition.

Yup. I've recently declared it a little while back: the Epic Games Store is a failure. It's burning money while being a "marketing black hole," where games that might have found an audience on Steam would disappear into. Meanwhile, Epic had to lay off a chunk of their company as their Fortnite money began to cool off. They recently got a surge with the return of their classic map, but it remains unclear if this will be sustained. Epic should assume it won't.

They can bleat about being in the "growth phase" as they like, but that "marketing black hole" reputation has already stuck, and it will continue to haunt them at every turn. Unless something changes, EGS is on its way to being just an Alan Wake 2/Rocket League launcher, at best.

Shame, really. Competition is good, and Steam certainly could use one, but I don't think they'll find one here.

@madrocketeer: Epic also lost more money on the Apple court case. Paying top lawyers ain't cheap either.

People who play launchers over games are as short sighted as those who limit themselves to one console for loyalty reasons... it's a joke. Just get a hub launcher that's consolidates all the games you have into a single scrollable screen...

I think most people dont prefer steam because of "service", they prefer Steam because they've already built up their libraries into a storefront and they dont want yet another launcher. They got used to steam because it was the first

I'm not even sad about COD and Bethesda games returning to Steam and Blizzard games now arriving on steam for the first time, it means one less useless launcher.

On the other hand I don't want a monopoly. Gaben won't be around forever, he is a nice guy but will the next CEO be?

Also Steam is crap in a lot of regards...

But it also has steam workshop, not a single other launcher supports mods on the same magnitude as Valve does.

And Steam has reviews. When I hover over the buy button on Epic I have zero idea what is liked about a game and what the issues people have with the game are.

Steam didn't just rest on their laurels, they kept improving. They provide valuable information to BOTH consumers and companies alike.

(I wish good games would stop being burrowed under an avalanche of crap but that's beside the point)

I'm looking forward to Steam showcasing wether a game supports Dualshock or Dualsense controllers for example.

Well, the "growth phase" isn't real either. There's almost no growth at all IIRC from their last numbers reveal. All the growth back then was also just Fortnite players and not the other customers.

It's a good thing that Fortnite is a thing or Epic would have pulled the plug on EGS by now. Let's see how long Fortnte lasts.

Lots of people do like me and just take the free games these idiots keep giving away. Whenever I buy a game, it's on Steam. Whenever a game I want is EGS exclusive, I wait for it to arrive on Steam. If it doesn't arrive on Steam, I don't play it.

The worst thing about this is they won't learn the right lesson from this, and will in fact probably double-down and go in the wrong direction (or, rather, go more in the wrong direction) and probably do more exclusives.

PC isn't about exclusives, it's about choice.

Same.

Steam or GoG or anything else, really.

I won't reward forced exclusivity, though. If it's exclusivity between hardware platforms that's one thing--there's not a huge market for realistic flight sims on console, for example--but forcing storefront exclusivity is just lame.

I prefer Steam because of the service, and I dislike EGS mainly in part due to their lack of service (but also because of their crooked forced exclusivity).

Steam has:

• Regular sales
• Built-in mod support
• Good customer service
• A huge selection of games
• Forums
• Community tools
• Really good search options, tag system, etc.
• Reliable

I also prefer other storefronts, namely GoG, for other reasons (specifically good sales, game selection, and their emphasis on older games).

EGS has none of that in my experience. Tencent-Epic just decided they wanted a slice of the digital-storefront pie, but they didn't want to put in any effort. And I can't reward that behavior with my patronage.

Exception to the rule. I dare say most steam users, like myself, dont care about 90% of steam's features. I use steam because I've built most of my PC library in there. EGS has been slowly improving upon its features. When Steam started it was also barebones compared to now.

Steam has:

• Regular sales = So does Epic
• Built-in mod support = Ok
• Good customer service = Whats exactly your experience with EGS costumer service?
• A huge selection of games = Sure, but again, Steam had the time to built it up. EGS is improving on its selection.
• Forums = meh
• Community tools = meh
• Really good search options, tag system, etc. = meh
• Reliable = Sure, with its amount of users, it better be. But improve upon that point further. What makes EGS not "reliable" exactly? If anything some games have been delisted from Steam already. Never heard about a game being delisted from EGS tbh

**** EGS. **** the lack of monopoly in PC gaming. I hope they go broke.

They attempted forced exclusives thinking PC gamers were sheep like console gamers, in collusion with deeply corrupt gaming media thinking we'd all jump aboard, not actually realizing we are intellectually superior.

Crazy.

- In the growth phase

- Giving away games to attract a larger audience

- Buying up exclusives

- Not profitable

This makes sense.

@BassMan: PC needs a unified platform so that your trophies, friends, hours, screenshots, etc. are all under the same single platform.

I think I'll just start pirating games like AW2 if they're not on Steam.

@Mozelleple112:

To be fair, it took a long time for Steam to be profitable as well.

Of course, at the time Steam wasn't throwing away millions on free games but I do appreciate that SOMEONE is providing competition.

Epic's problem is that they are giving away free stuff and signing exclusive content rather that investing that money into actually innovating in order to stand apart from Steam.

Steam takes 30% but you get access to tools that Epic hasn't even began to dream about yet like Steam Workshop

I'm guilty of grabbing every free game from EGS and I've never bought a single title from the platform. I'm not against playing on another platform other than Steam, it's just that Steam is the definitive gaming platform for PC. The user reviews, the community, the refund policy, wishlists for sales, and even big picture mode if you want a console experience. It's all there on one platform that has everything I need.

The timed exclusive games a tempting, but when I have built a vast catalog of games going back decades on one platform, it's easier for me to simply wait until the timed release is up and buy it on Steam anyway. I've got no problem with competition, but I'm also not going to buy the old 4 cylinder Honda over a super car just because the super car needs some competition.

Like 100% of the time people talk about it it's talking about those free games they get. Of course nobody is just going to ditch their Steam and GOG accounts.

I don't even have epic games installed, I like all my games on one launcher

You don't purchase exclusives to get profitable. You do that to expand your market share. Eventually that gives you the ability to expand or become profitable, but that takes time. Growth is often more important than profits when building (as long as your time to profitability is funded). I think Epic still has Fortnite money to spend.

I don't think I'm the exception to the rule; most gamers on the PC platform get their games from multiple sources. Steam is favored for the reason you listed (in addition to the multiple reasons I did), sure, but GoG is also incredibly successful, plus other publishers (EA, Ubisoft, etc) have their own storefronts as well.

It just reeks of minimal effort, of a get-rich quick scheme, of a cash grab. I won't support that when there are MULTIPLE options out there that do things better.

Fair enough.

It's kind of a big deal for a major publisher-developer to support mods when the industry tends to frown upon people modifying games.

That is a huuuuuuuuuuge perk to using Steam.

Well, they have abysmal ratings in terms of customer service on multiple ratings sites, including the Better Business Bureau.

As for my own experience, I've had multiple games fail to launch from the EGS storefront and after sending an email I never got a response. Too busy struggling to keep up with their Fortnite player complaints I reckon...

As for Valve/Steam, I got a defective base station for my Valve Index and after a quick email, I got a response in less than a few hours, without a replacement base station in the mail the next day. I've had replies to complaints and game issues in prompt time, the occasional refund despite playing beyond the 2-hour time limit, etc.

I've heard this before and, if this was a few years ago, fine. But Tencent-Epic is a monster multi-billion dollar corporation and the EGS has been around for more than a few years. There's no excuse not to have a catalog at this point that rivals GoG or Steam.

They're important for people that actually care about gaming. It's a good place to discuss games, see what people are doing. It's not critical to my experience, mind you, but it's an extra effort on Valve's part that I appreciate.

When you like a wide variety of games and some of those fall into very niche genres and sub-genres, it's very helpful to be able to get very, very specific.

If all you want to do is play the most recent and big-name titles, I can understand being indifferent, but for people such as myself that like specific types of games, it's very helpful to tag "resource management", "base building", and "strategy" to help filter results when I'm looking for a game similar to Factorio, for example.

Microsoft is unreliable. Epic is unreliable. Hell, World of Warcraft servers go offline at least once a week for hours on end. I try to log on to AT&T to look at my bill and it takes a few minutes to load. These are all huge corporations with resources and millions upon millions of customers.

I've rarely, to the point of not being able to recall the last time I had a problem, have an issue with Valve/Steam. Or GoG, for that matter. Or Uplay or EA Origin.

That's a big deal in this day and age when even huge corporations with large amount of users can't provide reliable service.

------------------

No disrespect, but your whole post reeks of indifference at what are good qualities and it sort of makes you look like you're hating on Steam because it's the best option, and supporting Tencent-Epic because they're...what? The underdog? The potential rival? Are you just a contrarian?

They're just greedy. They're not willing to put in the time and effort to make a quality service. They're publicly traded (unlike Valve) so they have to focus on growth, and profitability isn't enough for them (and so we suffer as a result).

@mrbojangles25: Yup. All the shit you wrote in this thread, very well put. Wish I could articulate like you.

Fair enough

And no, I'm not a contrarian. I dont like Tencent nor Epic, I just find that PC gamers overrate valve/steam way to much and give too much importance to things most people dont. Sometime they sound like valve/gabe w/e is like their personal god or something. For ex, I think GOG does a better job than Steam by offering DRM-free games, and yet I still do most of my PC shopping on steam only because I have built my library in there and I dont want to have to open another browser just to see my library of games. I believe many others are like me. But to each its own I guess

Instead of spending that money on timed exclusives they should have spent it on making the store not shit.

Epic's UE5 gives them royalties in games that use it. They should focus on their engine, and helping developers make better games that sell well, keep updating the engine to make it better and better. That can be their cash cow right there. Perhaps now they'll jump on that next.

Truth right here.

And lol at the bozos trying to underplay Steams features. It's 100% a big part of why people largely have 0 problem running games under Steam.

Here comes Epic, which many people forget now, was a company that abandoned PC gaming, told you PC gaming was dead for years. All of the sudden deciding they will now take on Steam by bitch slapping you in their direction with the help of Dorito Pope and all the other industry shills acting like it's good for you.

"wow mahn you'll help developers!"

Pretty much all of them people who have happily been trying to **** you for years like a moo moo cow. And even though are getting a bigger price cut, will not lower, but raise prices. Epic store being the first PC game prices at £69.99. (Final Fantasy garbage). All about them, you are nothing. Treat them with the upmost contempt and get whatever you can out of them.

Namely free games, never look at the fucking thing again. Thanks Dim.

Correct me if I am wrong but Epic currently gets a 12% cut while Steam is 30%. If that is true they already operating at less 50% of Steam's revenue per game.

Epic Games needs to add some extra social features to EGS. It doesn’t need to be on the same level as Steam, but a few extra features will be better than nothing. However I believe that Epic Games wants EGS to a store rather than a full platform. I think this is good for gamers because having a platform encourages vendor lock-in, while a mere store does not have vendor lock-in.

Either way, I hope Epic gains some market share. I love Steam, but I don’t like the idea of one company having too much power in the PC gaming market. Let’s cut the slices of the pie a bit more equally.