Comment on Fewer People Playing Fortnite Is Just One of Epic's Many Problems, Analysts Say
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 12 hours ago
I just don’t understand. Their engine powers the vast majority of AAA games, and a huge chunk of non-AAA. I know they charge for this engine. How the hell are they strapped for cash. And before you comment, I know the answer unfortunately.
They had fortnight. A competent executive team would see that as a fluke that is great, but not dependable long term, and plan for investing that money back into the business but always prepared for the popularity of Fortnight could dip, but it wouldn’t matter because the core of their business would carry it.
Instead, it sounds like they had a standard executive team, where they thought the money from fortnight would last forever, it would never die, and line would only ever go up. They stupidly made a bunch of wrong decisions, and are now all shocked pikachu that Fortnight’s popularity is waning after almost a decade. So of course it’s the workers who should be fired now, not the executives, no of course not.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
They did have the wisdom to use Fortnite’s proceeds to make something like a Steam competitor that both takes a lot of startup capital and also has the potential to wildly exceed Fortnite’s future review, but they did not have the wisdom to make a store that customers would actually want to use for any reason except giveaways.
BreakerSwitch@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
I’m still not over the statement that consumers shouldn’t need to know whether AI assets are in a game or not, and Epic won’t be doing that even if Steam does. Couldn’t help but get in their own way every step
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Whenever Steam makes a controversial decision, Epic always takes the opposite stance, like on NFTs. Unfortunately, not once has Epic done this on something that I felt would be better for me as the consumer. Here’s some low-hanging fruit: being able to tell what kind of multiplayer a game has, or how much of a game I get to own with my purchase, is awful on every store, including GOG. Steam has a tag to indicate that a game has LAN multiplayer, but plenty of games have it and don’t list it. There is no tag to say, “you can host private servers for this game, whether on LAN or internet”. If a store took a stance to answer these kinds of questions for me, that store would fare better in my eyes. But of course Epic won’t be the ones to do it; their big cash cow is a live service game that must be run through them.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 10 hours ago
Ad then they bitch. All. The time. About it.
Gonna need captain big brain over here for why Valve has a monopoly.
BreakerSwitch@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
I wish cooptimus was better maintained. The “Online multiplayer: x-y players, LAN multiplayer: z-n players, combo multiplayer? Yes/no” is so simple and easy to execute and yet nowhere else does it.
Idk if this is the case on modern console physical releases, but having these numbers on the box, and correctly represented, used to be a hard requirement for getting your game onto a platform. N64 games had it on the front of box. PS2 games in a set of details on the back. It’s such a nice quality of life informational feature that falls between the cracks on steam because of how tags are done.