Yeah, obviously they’d want to earn it back and yeah, obviously from customers. You make that sound malicious. Steam is doing the same thing. With the amount of money Steam makes, they could drop their share in half and still make a killing. Epic wouldn’t have to do anything that Steam isn’t to recoup costs if they were competitive with Steam.
That said, Epic does take less revenue from developers, which is nice. This doesn’t translate to less for the end user though because Valve uses their market dominance to force the same price across marketplaces or you aren’t allowed on Steam. It’s fucked up.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It burned money on exclusives. The free games are a much cheaper marketing tool than advertising.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
They burn a ton of money on free games too. They’re only free to us. Epic pays for them at wholesale rates.
voracitude@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yes, and at wholesale rates it’s a pretty good bang-for-your-buck, as an advertising scheme. I know I actively check for free games on the Epic launcher most weeks.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
“Even if I don’t ever buy anything” is why I doubt it’s going to work out. Epic is publicly right now saying that it’s great at acquiring users. Yeah, I’ll bet it is. People love free stuff. Is it great at turning those users into paying customers? Even at wholesale rates, I’ve gotten hundreds of games for free from Epic, which means they spent thousands of dollars on me, and I can’t foresee an instance where I’ll ever give them a cent back.