its not about making better product for epic. its about removing competition so they dont have to.
fartsparkles@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
If Epic spent half as much money as they are suing organisations and instead funded developing their shop into a gaming community platform like Steam, they’d probably have caught up by now.
reksas@sopuli.xyz 16 hours ago
Lfrith@lemmy.ca 5 hours ago
Epic approach is the typical venture capitalist run company approach of running at loss then once they get market share start jacking up the prices.
Can’t really trust a company until they are actually profitable with a functioning sustainable business model. We’ve seen it time and time again where even Facebook launched without ads and look at it now.
BilboBargains@lemmy.world 16 minutes ago
There’s an argument for using these services in the early stages because they often operate at a loss in the hope that they will secure a monopoly in the future. The trick is to immediately abandon them when they jack the price up. I recently heard that in the food delivery space virtually no one is turning a profit.
Stern@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
If they didn’t have fortnite and unreal engine money propping them up it would have closed by now. Hasn’t been profitable since it opened in 2018.
SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
If they didn’t have Fortnite they probably wouldn’t even have the money to dump into Unreal Engine to make it where it is today. They probably would ask Tencent for more money and Tencent would have bought the rest of the company. The game engine business is just not as profitable as Fortnite, just look at Unity.
M137@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
They could remove that competition by making a better product, but that is somehow always the last thing they’d ever think about. It never stops being so fucking weird with all these business people who go to great lengths to do shitty stuff and always end up making it worse for everyone except a quick buck for themselves, even though they could easily make a lot more for a longer time by simply doing a good job. But no, that would require anything other than immediate greed. Absolutely vile people.
Lfrith@lemmy.ca 5 hours ago
Their approach feels like how lot of companies are currently focusing on AI to market to investors and AI data centers directly, and ignoring what consumers want assuming their opinions are of little relevance. Like how Microsoft doesn’t care if people dont want copilot, and keeps talking up the corporate side with the assumption that they know people will use Microsoft no matter what.
Which is much like Epic with them focusing more on giving money to publishers to lock up titles in the past like Final Fantasy 7 Remake from Square Enix over concerning themselves with the demographic of people buying the product.
Its not a consumer focused business model, because the idea of consumers not buying it is impossible to comprehend. Their headlines never seem to be around how its better for the consumer and the benefits to using them over the competition.
boonhet@sopuli.xyz 13 hours ago
Sweeney is legit delulu tbh.
He literally said Epic’s launcher/store is ready as is, doesn’t need more development. It also runs in Unreal Engine, so you get Chromium (CEF) + Unreal Engine running just for one launcher/store.
At least on Linux you can run Unreal Editor without EGS (because it doesn’t exist on Linux) and if you’ve claimed any free games on Epic, you can use Heroic launcher to manage them easily.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
if you’ve claimed any free games on Epic, you can use Heroic launcher to manage them easily.
Oooh. This is interesting. I wonder how much of the epic library is Linux compatible.
Benaaasaaas@group.lt 13 hours ago
Everything except fortnite and a few other kernel level anticheat games
Korkki@lemmy.ml 19 hours ago
it’s often more risky and expensive to hire, train and develop systems and communities like that, especially when doing it against the tide, than to just try to trip up the competition. It’s not just that it’s dificult and it costs money, but it’s not preferred because investors abhor risks.
Isn’t this seen in global politics all the time. When US says China is too dominant in X and we need to fight it. They are not saying that US will invest in shit that will help them compete. All or 90% of the actions is to try to trip up, sabotage and sanction the competition.
Typhoon@lemmy.ca 17 hours ago
Just a bunch of crabs in a bucket.
LifeLikeLady@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
I wish they’d just focus on fixing Unreal. It’s a shit show.
warm@kbin.earth 15 hours ago
You dont like games that look like you have grease smeared over your monitor?
Baggie@lemmy.zip 8 hours ago
Every time someone uses lumen the frame rate drops by roughly 2/3rds, it’s nuts.
yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 hours ago
“Gaming community.”
Steam and Epic are both malware.
Agent_Karyo@piefed.world 2 hours ago
I wouldn’t call them malware, but both Valve and Epic are not your friends and they have done a lot of bad shit (Valve was huge in enabling lootbox gameplay).
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
To be honest, Epic is doing a good job of tearing down walled gardens in places like mobile, and we’ll probably be better off for it. But yeah, they’ve done a terrible job of competing with Steam.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 17 hours ago
They only did that because they wanted their walled garden to be there too. Tim Sweeney is just butthurt his walled garden isn’t the biggest
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Of course, but…broken clock, you know? A large percentage of personal computers will be freed from Windows in large part because of Valve, even though they profit off of legalized child gambling addiction. And walled gardens in mobile will be broken down in large part because of Epic, which uses dark patterns to trick people out of their money in pursuit of a cultural hodge podge of nonsense that won’t even exist in a few decades.
doublah@sopuli.xyz 11 hours ago
The problem there comes from Epic taking secret deals to settle those cases instead of let any precedent be set that would actually benefit customers.
evol@lemmy.today 13 hours ago
I don’t understand this I use it for rocket league occasionally and it all just works ™ ? I prefer Valve 100% to slopnite developers but the launcher seems fine to me. (On Linux Heroic is unlikely better than steam which has a bunch of random bugs every few weeks)
warm@kbin.earth 19 hours ago
Epic Games Launcher would always end up a pile of shit anyway. Tim Sweeney is a fuckhead and he has lots of investors to please.
fyrilsol@kbin.melroy.org 16 hours ago
He's also Tencent's bitch too.