Epic's other other problem

When Epic announced that their digital storefront would be opening itself up to games from other publishers in a bid to eclipse Valve's Steam service, the general reaction from developer-friendly games media outlets was positive. People who spent a lot of time talking to developers, and none at all talking to average consumers, were convinced that Steam was desperately in need of a new competitor, one that would somehow succeed where GoG, Origin, Uplay, and even Microsoft's built-in Windows 10 storefront had not.

The assumption, one which even Epic seemed to share, was that Fortnite had given Epic a large enough base of customers that could be leveraged to take market share away from Steam, while their richer-for-developers revenue cut would necessarily pull disgruntled indie devs away from the more established platform. I have doubts about both points, of course, but it turns out that we're didn't need to wait all that long for the loyalty of Epic's customer base to be tested. The test has come in the form of a competing game: Apex Legends, which combines Battle Royale and Hero Shooter gameplay into a package that's become the top game on Twitch, dethroning Epic's Fortnite less than a week after its launch.

This is the customer base on whose loyalty the success of Epic's storefront depends, already abandoning Epic in favour of a newer, shinier game that is every bit as finished and polished as Fortnite, but with the more conventional look and gameplay of the Titanfall series. These are the customers that are supposed to abandon Steam, which they've been happily using for years, and buy into yet another ecosystem, even though that ecosystem offers nothing by way of features that are absent or inadequate on the platform they already use.

Flavour-of-the-week games are nothing new, of course. Last week's flavour-of-the-week games, Kingdom Hearts 3 is currently pulling 1300 viewers, putting it 64 places back of Fortnite; Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, which nobody would shut up about just a week ago, is pulling 1900 viewers, sitting 54 places back of Fortnite. Apex Legends' current #1 position could just be more of the same.

But this is the first time in nearly a year that any game has dethroned Fortnite from the top spot, a spot which Fortnite took from the previous juggernaut of Battle Royale, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, which also received tons of favourable media coverage... until it didn't. This is the nature of the video game business; the few games that achieve sustained success by serving a constant stream of customer updates to a loyal player base are the exceptions, and not the rule. With major AAA studios betting the farm on "games as a service," and Epic themselves betting their own future on the loyalty of their own GaaS customers, this timely reminder of just how fickle those customers can sometimes be couldn't be more timely.

Epic's new digital distribution channel has a lot of issues; a large and presumably loyal customer base, in the form of Fortnite players, was the one ace they had in the hole. Well, it turns out they may not even have that. Now what? Seriously... what Epic you do if shifting their focus away from their game and towards bootstrapping that game's customers into a digital distribution empire costs them the game, while failing to earn them the empire? What's the next play?

I have so many doubts about this enterprise.