The company behind Fortnite is currently in a legal fight against Google over in-app fees
In my eyes, part of the reason for this is that they forgot a key element of penetrating a market… you need a potential customer base that is actually displeased with the current available solutions and is actually looking for an alternative. And, by and large, the current storefronts had done a good enough work of pleasing their customer base that, when the Epic Store rolled out, few people were actively looking for a switch, to the point that no bonuses or goodies or exclusives that Epic offered could outweight the friction of moving from a platform that was perfectly serviceable, please and thank you.
There are problems with Steam that a competitor could win customers from by solving those problems, but they didn’t bother. They only went after the people producing games, not buying games.
People who don’t like Steam already have GoG. To most people Epic Games is the fortnite launcher, and fortnite is in rapid decline:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1108992/fortnite-number-viewers/As much as I like GoG, it doesn’t really solve any problems that Steam has that I can think of. In fact, in several ways it seems like they’ve gone backwards in the last several years, imo (as a launcher/storefront alternative)
but at the same time steam have a fuckton of features, it take tine to implement everything
It does take time, but when you launch a product that’s missing basic features (like a shopping cart, something almost every online store in existence has) you tell on yourself to your customers, and let them know they’re not a priority.
I don’t disagree that Steam’s feature rich platform makes it hard to compete with on that level… but for fuck’s sake, at least try a little bit. Especially if your first move is to say they’re unfairly gaming the market by… providing something people want.
Hopefully this becomes a case study of how not to antagonize your customers when launching a product.
I think I’d be more surprised if it was profitable. Anecdotal, but I (and most people I know) exclusively use Epic for free games.
They gave away so many good games … and in doing so taught their target group not to spend money to buy games on their platform. Outstanding move!
Have to wonder if they would actually be totally fine if they just didn’t have to pay out such huge legal expenses in lawsuits, and for enormous settlements, and had just played it straight with customers, and just accepted Apple and Google’s fees.
With the way they’ve been handling things it won’t ever be profitable.
