6339

Their biggest hurdle is that there is nothing like playing an Epic Store game to remind you how awesome Steam is these days.

6340

Counting a bit more, 250 million, of which Epic gets 12%, so 30 million. Of that, they spent 23 million on voucher coupons and 9 million on Control exclusivity, so they are 2 million in red, and then there are exclusivities of Borderlands 3, RDR2, Outer Worlds and all the other games, as well as the payouts to indie devs for free games.

So all in all Epic’s nonFortnite part of EGS might be some what, 50-80 million in the red?

Well, as long as parents of Fortnite kids are paying for it :)

I suppose it is a nice gravy train for now. Unless it teaches people to stop buying indie games because why buy when you can just wait to get them free. Might be harmful in longterm.

6341

You got to balance that out with the chance that the market moves to a more equalitable split for developers, which I think is necessary for the health of the market as a whole.

6342

And also that many of the exclusivity deals are in the form of guaranteed sales, so they should really be counted in the 12% figure (or whatever value for the given engine).

6343

I don’t understand this comment. I’ve not bought anything on Epic, but have played a bunch of the free games and while playing them have never noticed a difference between steam or Epic.

6344

Lucky you. :)

6345

Cloud Sync that works, Steam overlay, Steam Input, etc. You can get some of these by adding the game to Steam but that’s a pain and for somethings doesn’t work nearly as well.

So if Epic is doing it for you, then congratulations! It’s just annoyed me every time and made me appreciate Steam more.

6346

The overlay?
I assume that syncing saves now works since I haven’t had any issues with it.

6347

These are not great numbers, but I am sure they don’t expect many to do… math.

6348

Sure they did. They have been very open about the fact that they’re buying customers and exclusives, and only a fool would expect them to be in the black year 1 hemorrhaging money like that.

Now what will be more interesting is their numbers in year 2 if they stop throwing piles of money everywhere.

6349

That’s great news for customers that they’re going to continue to give away games through 2020.

At least 52 more free games, you guys!

6350

I don’t think anyone who says those numbers aren’t great actually said they should be making bank like Amazon. It’s just way low for the customer base they have.

6351

Even as someone Epic Skeptical, this is true. It is hard to look at their strategy in year 1 as intentionally being a loss leader in order to gain market share. I very much expected leadership and all expected to run red this year, and probably even next.

What happens once the userbase is there and invested is the question.

6352

You can still have a large loss on customer acquisition but have a lot higher revenue. We’re not talking profit here. This is their revenue, and that revenue for their number of customers acquired is not good. To talk about red in the first place implies profit to begin with which no one is really talking about. Revenue is not profit.

6353

Sure, but I wonder what the user trend line and sales lines look like.

EGS did not have the full 100+ million users all year, so the question is what was the growth rate in users versus revenue. With more full data, such as a user over time chart, you could do some math to annualize revenue per user. Because someone signing up in November and someone signing up in January would have different expected revenue values.

6354

Don’t you dare get me started, Mr. Lego. Don’t you dare. :)

6355

Sure. I am not making it what it is not, again I said nothing about profit. We know how this kind of works. Etsy has a shit ton of users who don’t buy anything too. It’s not something Etsy actually wants though. I mean it’s fine that they share this, but apparently the bulk of their users are not buying anything. It’s less than 3 bucks each.

6356

Right, it means they succeeded in enticing tons of people to sign up and provide their credit card to get free games, but converted very few of them to paying customers. And again, I’m not particularly surprised by that. I’d bet nearly all of the people they did convert did so for a specific exclusive or a crazy-good sale, and both of those things are loss-leaders too.

6357

Well enticing people who are presumably still buying their games somewhere else.

Well you don’t’ have to be surprised. 3 bucks though, that’s way lower considering they have the exclusives they have. Nearly every customer they have right now would cost more than their acquisition cost, but you can’t even discount that… because they already had a huge Fornite following. Some of those customers weren’t, you know, really acquired. They were already there. That group is still buying of course, but not really their third parties.

6358

I assume all the first-party revenue is fortnite, yes, and only looked at the 3rd party number. Epic doesn’t have any other modern games in their store, other than Shadow Complex Remastered and I can’t imagine that selling through millions of dollars.