While the scope of layoffs has stunned employees, industry analysts have told IGN that cost-reduction within Epic Games was inevitable amid growing external pressures and costly industry battles.
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2 hoursI’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.worldEnglish28 minutes
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.
- MurrayL@lemmy.worldEnglish1 hour
That original version still exists - it’s called Save the World and iirc they recently revamped it and made it free for everyone (it used to be a standalone purchase).
Last time I played it I didn’t find it all that engaging, so it’s hardly surprising they stuck with BR as the lead mode once it took off. I guess my point is this: they didn’t ‘throw out’ StW, it just got eclipsed by a far more popular mode. Can’t really blame them for backing a winner.
it’s called Save the World and iirc they recently revamped it and made it free for everyone (it used to be a standalone purchase).
Oh wow, I might give it another shot…
Oh wait, it’s on epic store, fuck knows if it has linux support, definitely has spyware, if I didn’t interface with it before I sure as fuck won’t interface with it now.
I’m not getting the impression you genuinely want to hop back in, but in case you didn’t know about it, the Heroic games launcher is FOSS, cross platform, and can serve GoG, EGS and Amazon games.
I never use it for EGS because I don’t have an epic account, but it’s been wonderful for my GoG library on Fedora.
I don’t know about Save the World, but the other modes of Fortnite are barred by anti-cheat on Linux, no matter how you launch it.
you know what, I totally spaced on that. this is very likely the case for save the world as well, I’m not aware if anyone who’s played that on Linux.
- dis_da_mor@anarchist.nexusEnglish52 minutes
i really liked stw until they said no more content updates and stopped developing the story :(
- 3 hours
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.
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.worldEnglish1 hour
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
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.
- 45 minutes
And then they bitch. All. The time. About it.
We keep choosing the worst possible choices for the customer but the customers are going somewhere else! Why?!?!
Gonna need captain big brain over here for why Valve has a monopoly.
- BreakerSwitch@lemmy.worldEnglish15 minutes
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.
- yesman@lemmy.worldEnglish3 hours
Working people paying for the mistakes of the ownership class. What else is new?
