I’ve said it before, and I will say it again:
Epic’s corporate overlords don’t have an original thought rattling around in their collective heads. Their entire business model is to flail around, copy anything that seems remotely successful with a reskin, and hope it sticks.
All that aside, I got to play test early forms of fortnite. It’s original inception was sort of like a plants vs zombies game, but with building. When PUBG blew up in popularity, EPIC completely threw out the original design of fortnite and reworked it into a battle royale game to jump on the PUBG hype train to make lots of moolah. Nothing about fortnite was original, and lots of the content that was added are just copies of games that were already amazing, (nod to guitar hero and rock band,) or reskins of fortnight assets into other things that are popular.
It’s felt like fortnight has been keeping epic alive for nearly a decade. 10 - 15 year olds that were playing fortnight and buying with mom and dad’s $ are grown up; AAAANNNNNNDDDD they don’t have disposable income. 20-24 year olds are experiencing 7.7% unemployment, if they have a college degree. Those numbers get worse the less education young people have. Avg unemployment is about 4.5% vs for highschool kids and kids working through college the unemployment rate is 13%. Epic’s entire profit model depends on a never ending supply of children with access to infinite disposable income.
So if Epic wants to do well financially it’s going to have to:
- Take risks (leading to the production of products that people outside of their usual customer base want to purchase.)
- Support policies that ensure plebs have $ to buy their reskinned bullshit.
Thanks for coming to my ted talk.
HeyJoe@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
You forgot one more thing, they still have not changed their model. Instead of investing some of that money into attempting to create new good games, they only seem interested in buying other games that they feel will make them money. Instead of doing the work, they would rather just buy up properties that look promosing. Here’s looking at you Fall Guys.
Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
They bought Rocket League and pulled it from the Steam store to make it a retroactive exclusive, then acted confused as to why players were upset.