Battlefront 2 is probably my favorite trash game right now, and possibly the only shooter i play. But thanks to the setting it looks and sounds great and doesn’t sound like the brown and olive wannabe milsim shooter that dominates FPS gaming. It also has a huge number of modes, a reasonably ok single player campaign, and the ability to play with all the toys, including Bosck, the famous non-speaking part side character made into a toy in the 80s.
It’s also free on gamepass for those who have that.
I will say that the campaign ended for me at a certain point… when the campaign started to incorporate the … other set of characters, let’s say without trying to spoil things, i felt like saying “too soon”, and kind of stopped. Before that it was great though, but way too fast of a tonal shift.
But, yea, i play this almost every night for a match or two, it’s that much fun. Online and vs AI, both fun (the nice thing about vs AI is that it unlocks all the silly “cards” and weapons that are locked behind… whatever they’re locked behind in online play). The transactional/store aspect of some of the side content is the only thing about Battlefront 2 that’s… more puzzling than frustrating, because it’s not clear to me how you get unlocks. I mean i don’t even see a way to pay Real Cash Money for unlocks. I don’t see a way to buy any unlocks, just skins. It’s… weird. As far as i can tell, you randomly do stuff and eventually weapons unlock, somehow.
Galciv 3 is free now.
That’s a lot of free Battlefront games to give away. I know people complain about Epic, and I don’t know the pro and con arguments, but I have a bunch of free games from them so thanks for that, at least.
I’ve been playing and enjoying Solitairia (sic) the last few days. Fun game, but maybe a bit too much RNG for my taste to solve it. Free from Epic, so cool.
Mark, the key with Solitairica is really finding ways to mitigate that randomness, whether by turtling, damaging cards, altering cards, peeking/revealing hidden cards/etc.
Look for ways to extend card streaks as long as possible (E.g. randomizing cards). That will give you plenty of gold to buy spells and items with.
There is a lot of randomness. You can absolutely get massively screwed, especially at the very start of battles, but I love it regardless.
The best card I’ve seen is the one for $120 that reveals the second row of cards. I can get long card runs with that and have more money than I can spend.
My strategy with a deck is to unlock the extra slots for the boosts (stuff like +2 energy, etc) so I have more of those.
It does seem like near the end the RNG plays a major role. The deepest run I’ve had was two from the end. The last trio of baddies seem so tough you do need a bit of luck to beat them. Bad luck dooms you and good luck may get you through.
Fun game though. I like these card games that are quick and you win or lose in 30 minutes.
I always make it a point to get one of the trampoline/mirror type abilities before you hit that last stretch. There’s one guy in particular that will occasionally use an attack that is liable to one-shot you otherwise.
Hah. 30 minutes. I’ve spent hours on a run. I’m so slow 🤪
I enjoyed Solitairica, but the animations are aggravatingly slow even on “fast” mode.
https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/news/epic-games-store-2020-year-in-review
There are now over 160 million Epic Games Store PC users. Daily active users are up 192% to 31.3 million daily active players, with a peak CCU 13 million concurrent players this year (up from 7M in 2019). Monthly active users in December rose from 32 million in 2019 to 56 million.
This surge in player growth has also led to an increase in purchasing and play time! In 2020, PC customers on the Epic Games Store spent over $700M of which third party games represented 37% at $265M. Last year, the Epic Games Store community played 70% more hours with a total playtime of 5.70 billion hours in 2020 compared to 3.35 billion hours in 2019.
Well sure, they gave away a metric shitton of free games. Real question is profits, not revenue. I suspect profits remain sharply negative.
700 million, 37% on third party games. That basically means everything but Fortnite right?
That’s 265 million spent on other games… by those 160 million PC users. $1.65 per user.
Wasn’t it around $2 per last year?
But I’m guessing a decent chunk of those 160 million users are Fortnite players so the real number to lookout would be how much non Fortnite players are spending per year. That would bring the $1.65 up.
So Epic made 32 million USD in profit from third party digital games during a pandemic year. I wonder how much they paid for exclusivities and free games, but I doubt they would be in the black, without Fortnite subsidizing it. It does not seem like their strategy is particularly successful, as far as converting free-game-people into paying customers goes.
And I doubt that will change for as long as actual service - EGS client and platform - is so utterly, vastly inferior to its competition.
Given our best understanding of Epic’s exclusivity contracts is that they are minimum revenue guarantees, assuming they managed to pick winners, there would have been no cost. The freebies are harder to reason about (indie games that have been out for years probably cost nothing, launch day freebie on a Total War game must have been a pretty penny). And there is no hint on what those deals look like. I think the place where they would have lost the most money is the $10 coupons.
That said, they did not make 32M after paying the devs, since it is Epic who has to pay the variable costs like credit card fees, hosting, etc. IIRC the estimate was that about half of Epic’s cut went to cover that. Definitely losing money.
Anyway, the part that should worry them is that the third party revenue basically did not grow vs. 2019. Making a loss at this point is fine, even expected. Not growing by at least 50% is really bad. Not growing at all while the competitors grow massively due to the pandemic. That is a disaster.
I wonder how much was given away in the form of $10 dollar sale coupons
For the King is available for free now. It is a very enjoyable board game-ish party based rogue-lite with significant FreeLC.
Metro: Last Light is free too.
Was For the King a previous giveaway? I seem to already have a copy and I don’t remember buying it.