Gamers hate the Epic Game Store but spent $680 million there anyway.

glad for them, but keep in mind, steam probably has made 200 million alone from GTA5.... so the stakes are pretty huge
 
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How much money in free games have they given away for their 680 million in income?

My buddy was just telling me a couple weeks ago he’s bought one game from their client, but got 72 games free as the weekly promotions and seasonal gifts.
 
How much money in free games have they given away for their 680 million in income?

My buddy was just telling me a couple weeks ago he’s bought one game from their client, but got 72 games free as the weekly promotions and seasonal gifts.

Yeah, I'm sure that isn't Net Income: they have to pay both for the Exclusives payment, plus the cost of giving games away. It's more than paid for by the 1.2 Billion gamers spent on the gaping hole that is Fortnight.
 
I wonder how much of that 680 million is fortnite money. I can't see the article it's paywalled.
 
Yeah, I'm sure that isn't Net Income: they have to pay both for the Exclusives payment, plus the cost of giving games away. It's more than paid for by the 1.2 Billion gamers spent on the gaping hole that is Fortnight.
If they really want to twist facts they count the money they paid on free games as income as well. Since the devs get paid some money after the games they use as bait too.
 
I have never cared one way or the other because, if that is where the game is then that is where it is.


I do care. I'm not going to buy my games through their terrible storefront; I created an Epic account just so I could try out the Unreal Beta back in 2016, an got bored within a day. Then I tried Fortnight Battle Royal, and got bored within a week. I then decided to uninstall their client, and never look back.

They don't deserve my time or money. The success of Fortnight was lucky-as-hell, after them not having a successful game since the previous decade.

RIP, Epic Megagames
 
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I dont hate them, just prefer to buy from any other store. I got most of the free games, but probably only played a few of them.
 
Gamers as a whole seem to be some of the whiniest but least committed people out there. I see a lot of hate and angry for things the game industry does from people, but rarely are they willing to back any of that up with the simple action of voting with their wallet. I remember that shit from back in the early MMO days when people would "protest" in various ways because the game sucked, etc, etc. My question was always "Why not protest in the one way that matters: Cancel your subscription and send them an e-mail telling them why you did." Nope, wouldn't do that, but would bitch to no end. Or back when COD2 had no dedicated servers, people were furious, going to boycott, started a Steam group where you could show them you were boycotting. Then release day happened and most of the group was playing the game.

Same shit with the EGS. It seems people love to hate it, but then give the "But I HAVE to buy from it because I want to play a game that is on there!" crap. They aren't willing to stick with it. To be clear: I have no issue with people who buy from the EGS and just aren't bothered with the whole situation. I don't presume to tell people what is important to them. What I get annoyed with are the people who kick up a fit, talk about how anti-competitive Epic is being (they very much are) how poor the store is in comparison to others (it is) and so on, yet then buy from it and act like they have "no choice" as if there aren't TONS of games out there to play.
 
Gamers as a whole seem to be some of the whiniest but least committed people out there. I see a lot of hate and angry for things the game industry does from people, but rarely are they willing to back any of that up with the simple action of voting with their wallet. I remember that shit from back in the early MMO days when people would "protest" in various ways because the game sucked, etc, etc. My question was always "Why not protest in the one way that matters: Cancel your subscription and send them an e-mail telling them why you did." Nope, wouldn't do that, but would bitch to no end. Or back when COD2 had no dedicated servers, people were furious, going to boycott, started a Steam group where you could show them you were boycotting. Then release day happened and most of the group was playing the game.

Same shit with the EGS. It seems people love to hate it, but then give the "But I HAVE to buy from it because I want to play a game that is on there!" crap. They aren't willing to stick with it. To be clear: I have no issue with people who buy from the EGS and just aren't bothered with the whole situation. I don't presume to tell people what is important to them. What I get annoyed with are the people who kick up a fit, talk about how anti-competitive Epic is being (they very much are) how poor the store is in comparison to others (it is) and so on, yet then buy from it and act like they have "no choice" as if there aren't TONS of games out there to play.

There are over 1 billion gamers around the world. You can't just lump them all together as if they're one hive-mind.
 
I like them because I got Shadow Tactics for free two weeks ago. Plus I played Detriot become Human which you cant play anywhere else except console. I wish I could move installs anywhere and wish didn't have to back up my save files. If you uninstall the client everything will delete. So I have a backup folder with all the Epic games.
 
Read the details and it says that only $251 million was from third-party games.

I wonder if that's what Epic made from the store (so their 12% take or whatever it is) or total sales on the store. If it's total sales that's really really bad considering the high profile titles they paid for.
 
I've spent ZERO there but got the freebies (totaling 69)... haven't really touched them, am I allowed to sleep well at night?
 
I hated steam on launch, since grew to love it.
Grateful for free games on EGS, always look on there to see if they have a game I'm interested in first but often don't have it.

Don't get the hate, some of you are childish as hell lol.
 
I think the objective in the piece is that money talks, bullshit walks.
 
Gamers as a whole seem to be some of the whiniest but least committed people out there. I see a lot of hate and angry for things the game industry does from people, but rarely are they willing to back any of that up with the simple action of voting with their wallet. I remember that shit from back in the early MMO days when people would "protest" in various ways because the game sucked, etc, etc. My question was always "Why not protest in the one way that matters: Cancel your subscription and send them an e-mail telling them why you did." Nope, wouldn't do that, but would bitch to no end. Or back when COD2 had no dedicated servers, people were furious, going to boycott, started a Steam group where you could show them you were boycotting. Then release day happened and most of the group was playing the game.

Same shit with the EGS. It seems people love to hate it, but then give the "But I HAVE to buy from it because I want to play a game that is on there!" crap. They aren't willing to stick with it. To be clear: I have no issue with people who buy from the EGS and just aren't bothered with the whole situation. I don't presume to tell people what is important to them. What I get annoyed with are the people who kick up a fit, talk about how anti-competitive Epic is being (they very much are) how poor the store is in comparison to others (it is) and so on, yet then buy from it and act like they have "no choice" as if there aren't TONS of games out there to play.

Even worse, they sell the same damn game to the same people every year with unwavering success.

There are over 1 billion gamers around the world. You can't just lump them all together as if they're one hive-mind.

But yeah, this^, and this topic is about a digital store, not a specific game with a specific audience. The existence of a subreddit filled with hate memes hasn't persuaded me or anyone I know from buying from EGS, just as my opinion of COD hasn't stopped the masses from buying and enjoying those games. No point in me dedicating a bunch of energy to getting upset, I just simply don't buy COD games and move on with my day.
 
I purchased Red Dead Redemption 2 on the Epic Store because it was on sale and I had a coupon code that they e-mailed me when I redeemed my promo code for The Outer Worlds from my CPU. I spent almost a week trying to get the game to run without crashing before figuring out that as long as the Epic Games client was running on the system, even in the background, the game would crash on startup. I was able to get the game to launch and play through the introduction by Alt-Tabbing to Task Manager to kill the Epic Games client executable immediately after launching the game. Needless to say, I ended up just getting a refund. I'll buy the game directly from Rockstar when it goes on sale in the future, mabye.

This was after learning the hard way that there is no backup and restore feature in the Epic Games client, nor can you start a game download, pause it, then copy the files and resume (with or without exiting the Epic Games client completely) like mentioned everywhere on the Internet. I had to download The Outer Worlds all over again from scratch on my limited data plan at home despite having downloaded it at the office where we do not have a data cap. At least The Outer Worlds can be launched by running the game's executable directly without having the Epic Games client running in the background blasting random advertisements at max audio volume while I'm trying to play my game...

Edit - I forgot the obligatory "get off my lawn" statement.
 
I don't care about or necessarily understand the hate either. If I want something on EGS and it's a good deal, I'll get it on EGS. It's been fine so far and I have a TON of nice games in my library that I either got a great deal on ($5) or were free. The only thing I dislike about Epic (or ANY store) are "exclusives" but that is not going to go away anytime soon and it's not something only EGS does. I'm also not really a Sweeney fan either. But none of that affects me nearly at all.

So, sure, I gave Epic some money, I don't think anyone should feel guilty for doing so. I will buy and play games wherever they are if I want to play them enough, bottom line. I dislike EA but I use Origin.... etc.I don't understand why buying and enjoying a game on EGS "makes OP sick"... that seems unnecessarily hostile.

Maybe there are reasons that I don't know about that could persuade me, but I don't know that it matters. Completely understandable if people don't want to give EGS money and vote with their dollar, but I was someone who initially had similar emotional reactions to EGS, then over time realized it's fine. Same thing happened with other storefronts for me.
 
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I do care. I'm not going to buy my games through their terrible storefront; I created an Epic account just so I could try out the Unreal Beta back in 2016, an got bored within a day. Then I tried Fortnight Battle Royal, and got bored within a week. I then decided to uninstall their client, and never look back.

They don't deserve my time or money.
Your argument is pretty unclear. Basically you got bored with a couple of games = the storefront is terrible = every game from them from now on is crap? :rolleyes:

I like them because I got Shadow Tactics for free two weeks ago. Plus I played Detriot become Human which you cant play anywhere else except console. I wish I could move installs anywhere and wish didn't have to back up my save files. If you uninstall the client everything will delete. So I have a backup folder with all the Epic games.
You can move the games, it just isn't a simple copy/paste.

.........purchased Red Dead Redemption 2 Needless to say, I ended up just getting a refund. I'll buy the game directly from Rockstar when it goes on sale in the future, mabye.
You know Rockstar has a game launcher now too right?

I'm not an Epic fanboy......the launcher needs polish. I don't know why there's no cart; every purchase has to be done separately. But hey, it's just another store. As long as I can find it, buy it, and play it I don't care too much.
 
Not sure how they derive the $251 million. I'll assume they just take the sold price of the game, not the profit margin (around 3-4%). That would be around 4.2 million games at a full $60 USD. Actually 4.2 million games at $60 is $252 million, but just approximating. Obviously, not all games are $60 and probably half of all sales are less than that due to regional pricing. We know that World War Z sold 700,000 copies on Epic alone. I think that was $30 at launch in the US. Considering all that, maybe 7 or so million games sold? Impossible to get proper numbers because we won't know the per cost break down of each transaction. Doubt we ever will.

This is an entire guess on my part. I'm going to assume almost half of that $251 was from BL3.
 
Yes, including me. I can, however, point out general trends I see in the community.

General trend among, what, a few thousand people? A tiny niche does not define the mindset of an entire demographic bigger than several countries.
 
OMG, the store which I will never use sucks, they HAVE NO SHOPPING CART!!
THAT means although I will never BUY any games, the weeks they have TWO free games I need to make TWO different orders.

Steam figured out a long time ago that there was vastly more money to be made from collecting 30% revenue from a lot of games vs 100% revenue from one game every 5 years.
Result: They abandoned game development. But VR you say... Well, that is not about games but about expanding the market. Same with linux/steam box.

The main problem with EGS is that sweeny has a dumbass mouth. Luckily he has learned to STFU the past few months. All you guys that would rather enrichen Gaben, LOL Gaben appreciates it, and will continue with his model as he collects 30% of everything.
 
I have spent $0 on the EGS and plan to continue for the forseeable future.
 
Lol, I bought one game from them. It was 14.99 and I used the $10 off coupon. I have 57 games in my Epic library......
 
I hated steam on launch, since grew to love it.
Grateful for free games on EGS, always look on there to see if they have a game I'm interested in first but often don't have it.

Don't get the hate, some of you are childish as hell lol.
Hate comes from the exclusivity deals. A 6 months wait is somewhat tolerable, but waiting a full year for those games to release on Steam sucks.
 
So apparently they also pay/compensate the studios for the free games they give out. They are saying 200 million free games have been claimed so far, who knows how much per game they pay out, but even if it was only 1$ (which it would be much higher probably) that would be minimum $200 million yikes.
 
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