SNL gets in on it.
F2P for the PvE side delayed to next year.
Looks like giant changes to STW. A hero system may be the right direction but reading the description sound a bit limiting…
Kinda shocking. I thought the plan was to release STW on F2P in 2018.
I guess they have made WAY more than enough money from their battle royal side to push it out.
(I’d imagine a bit of cross sales as well)
Yeah, I am waiting for the F2P save the world to hop back in. I think I got my fill of Royale games with PUBG.
A co-op zombie shooter with building and progression sounds fun.
It’s cool that they’re taking the time to get things right. Their explanations around needing to get to the right designs to handle the scale they expect make complete sense.
No point in forcing their employees to crunch away over the impending holidays just to meet a deadline which was set fairly arbitrarily anyway.
So why is Epic doing this when they’re already printing gobs of money each month?
This does seem odd. For a company that is making so much that it can give away $100 million in prizes, what do they need with all that debt?
Very, very odd. The game must be making so much money what could the possibly want to make with an extra billion? I have no idea.
I wonder if they’re trying to turn their Epic Games site that sells only their own games into its own Steam competitor based on the captive audience they have right now.
It would take a lot of investment to build a proper competitor right now, and Sweeney is on record as being very anti-Microsoft store and the Windows restrictions included.
Even more pie in the sky… an x86 OS competitor?
I don’t know why Epic would want to get into the OS business. I don’t see any money there. A Steam competitor is something I could see, but seems a little late in the game for that kind of cash layout. I can’t come up with anything else, though, so who knows? It’s certainly piqued my curiosity.
I mean, why not take the funding? People want in on the hot ticket, and Epic itself remains majority stakeholder, so this doesn’t change things business wise.
But I don’t know why you would be investing in Fortnite now. This has to be money proposed for something new. It is kind of crazy to think of venture capital companies tossing money at Epic now, as I don’t think the Unreal engine licensing was a huge deal before? Is it possible they have a new game in the works? This feels like a bit of a Goldrush, how much bigger can this get? It is already on every platform known to man, the massive expansion has already happened at this point.
Either way, clearly Epic is doing something right, so probably not the worst place to invest in.
Well, if Sweeney is as paranoid about Microsoft as he seems to be, maybe he’s thinking that he can change the scene for gaming by somehow co-opting the OS into something less proprietary without just making another Unix clone?
The guy is rather brilliant, so if anyone could wake up one day and say, “I’m going to make a general purpose operating system that is focused on gaming instead of business. Let’s get capital to take on Microsoft!” then it’s him.
I could see Epic using the money to spin off what they’ve built for Fortnite into a Gamespy-style multiplayer service. A cross-platform identity / friend / matchmaking / voice chat service at minimal cost or free along with your Unreal engine license would be a big selling point for a lot of developers.
The best time to raise money is when you don’t need it. Epic probably assumes that they are likely at the peak of their value and now is the time to cash in some of it. They need to work on what comes next.
Would love for a Vulkan renderer supported OS that was better suited for games than Windows, especially with all their Win10 malfeasance.
I guess SteamOS is dead in the water?
I think Valve stopped caring much about SteamOS once Microsoft’s overt attempt to turn Windows 8 into curated-only blew up in their faces.
Microsoft’s still kind of pushing it with Windows Store, but with Win10 features not reliant on it nobody cares and it’s not an immediate threat to anybody.
Maybe Epic Games is going to buy Epic healthcare software because they’re tired of getting confused with them.
Because there is interest to be paid for said funding. If if the interest rate is low, its still interest on 1.25 billion dollars. Unless you have a plan for that money, it would be a terrible idea to take out a loan just because you can.
In other news, did they release an update that expanded on the next area, the one that has the wild-west homestead or is that still in the works?
It’s not a loan. It’s investment. That means it was in exchange for shares; there’s no interest but instead profit sharing.