Yes. The network effect is a huge part of console sales traditionally.
Sony has never required a subscription for free to play games on PlayStation.
Yeah the perspective is important here. From the Shareholder or Sony Employee perspective Sony’s decision surrounding crossplay is great since it increases revenue.
From a consumer perspective Sony’s policies/decisions here are bad and anti-consumer. Full stop.
https://twitter.com/tomwarren/status/1389638135215267840?s=20
In this exchange between Phil Spencer and Tim Sweeny, Tim says the following:
It’ll bring together current and potential gamers in real-world social groups: college dorms, hight school classes, even kids, as only Minecraft has done so far. We want to work with Microsoft to unblock all console-mandated interop restrictions in time for this launch. I’m confident we’ll achieve this with the other guys and, at any rate, platforms that block interop will be siloed.
While that is somewhat PR-speak Tim is right here. During the COVID Pandemic family members, school friends, and sports friends have been meeting up within games a lot more since that was the safest. My son has been attending birthday parties in Minecraft where they play Minecraft and have a Zoom window open to also chat with each other. Fortnite became a meetup spot for my son with friends and family where they talk and socialize while playing a few matches. In both cases participants are playing on all 3 consoles and even mobile devices if their family doesn’t own a console or gaming PC. Crossplay was critical here to be inclusive of everyone regardless of tech access or means. If we were limited to just one platform it would have sucked and been isolating to some participants.
I’m glad Tim was able to use the massive success of Fortnite to break the shitty Sony policies here. It made the COVID Pandemic much more tolerable for families and children.
That said, Microsoft’s previous policy of requiring an Xbox Live Gold subscription for F2P games was also bad, and anti-consumer. That was rightly criticized and thankfully changed.
Looking at the emails, Sony didn’t care about Fortnite’s massive success, it was cash that convinced them. Of course if nothing else comes out of this case, it made Sony look horrible to consumers.
Right. They didn’t break up their policies so much as pay them off.
Well, let’s just say it was both. Lots of other companies had approached Sony about cross-platform but had been turned away, and they might have agreed to pay if Sony had asked.
Fortnite’s scale forced Sony to offer a face-saving, revenue-generating solution.
The email chain indicates that Epic’s trouble was twofold: Fake accounts were easy to make, and it couldn’t deactivate games on other storefronts—the so-called “clawback” option—which meant that games remained playable through Uplay even when the associated Epic account was deactivated.
“We believe fraud to be due to account re-selling being viable,” Epic COO Daniel Vogel wrote at the time. “Fraudster creates Uplay account, uses stolen CC to purchase The Division, and then sells the account. While Epic account gets disabled by chargeback, without clawback with Ubisoft the game is still available on Uplay and sold account works.”
Epic’s Scott Adams was blunter in his criticism of the store. “Doesn’t help that we don’t currently verify email address or have good account security,” he wrote.
“In the past 48 hours, the rate of fraudulent transactions on Division 2 surpassed 70%, and was approaching 90%,” Sweeney wrote on May 11, 2019, the same day Epic halted purchases on Ubisoft games. "Sophisticated hackers were creating Epic accounts, buying Ubisoft games with stolen credit cards, and then selling the linked Uplay accounts faster than we were disabling linked Uplay purchases for fraud.
“Fraud rates for other Epic Games store titles are under 2% and Fortnite is under 1%. So 70% fraud was an extraordinary situation.”
Ars has a nice rundown of the Epic predictions for EGS
Capturing 35-50% of the total PC market by 2024 seems quite optimistic to me, but I’m not a market analyst.
Steam has like a 15 year lead on them and is heavily entrenched.
This is sort of like Google saying their cloud business with eclipse MS and Amazon in the near-future. Lots of eye-rolling.
Yeah, I bet they can’t even reach 20% by 2024. Even if they get some killer exclusive games, the “PC Market” is so big, consisting of so many games, it won’t be enough to get there.
I’m sure there’s some kind of distribution gaming curve where gamers “age out” and on average buy fewer games as time goes on. If the average age of Steam increases and Epic is much lower, they surely plan to be the “Steam 2.0” of the new generation of Fortnite kids who don’t have big investments into Steam. Or at least I assume that’s the hope.
Their projections must have been based on COVID19 killing off A LOT more of GenX than in reality, then.
What’s funny is the Gen X’ers are in their 40s now.
I wish.
If it was all based on sales, that could be true but it ignores brand loyalty, it ignores other factors that may be of value to consumers, for instance the badge system or reviews you submit to your catalog, or ties to curators; as these are NOT without value to these consumers. Any market analysis that doesn’t take this factors into some type of consideration isnt looking at the whole picture…
Would love to see the stats on their last sale, without the $10 coupons.
If the next sale makes a return of the $10 coupon, it may give us a clue.