It only took Epic three years of R&D to add the single most basic ecommerce feature of all to their digital store front. Mazel tov, Tim Sweeney! You did it!
the fact that the EGS finally got its long-delayed shopping cart, just days after I'd finally resigned myself to the fact that it wasn't ever going to happen;
the fact that it look Epic Games three years to get this done; or
the fact that they're shouting it to the whole world on YouTube, instead of burying it in a blog post, or something.
No, really, who at Epic thought this YouTube video was a good idea? Are really they so out of touch that they think this is some of flex? They even call this a "giant leap" for Epic Games! The shopping cart itself seems to have been a "Friday night news dump" situation, because it wasn't there on Thursday; why drop the feature in the dead of night on a weekend, only to then make a point of drawing attention to its existence?
BTW, the like:dislike ratio on that video is currently sitting at 68:400 -- that won't be visible for too much longer, though, because YouTube, so clearly what Epic should have done is hold this announcement until YouTube removed the dislike count for them, to at least avoid the public humiliation of being so brutally, publicly ratioed. Why drop the video now?
Also, the comment section of the video is amazeballs:
Seriously, though, knowing that I can finally add both free games of the week to a cart, and then "buy" them with one transaction rather than two, is one for the win column, as far as I'm concerned. All I need now is for Epic to release a Linux-native client, complete with (Valve's) Proton compatibility layer, so that I can actually run some of those free games on my Pop!_OS PC, and I'll finally be able to play some of those games that I've payed absolutely nothing for, and didn't care about enough to buy on Steam.
I still have zero intention of paying money for anything on the EGS, incidentally. With Valve releasing their own Linux-based gaming system next year, and Epic only just having barely managed to add a feature to their store that's been standard on web stores since the 1990s (seriously, the 1990s), I somehow don't think that Valve are checking their rear view for EGS.
Sleep easy, GabeN. You're still definitely winning this one.
Much as Activision Blizzard have deservedly dominated video gaming news for the past few weeks (and look like they'll continue to do so), it bears remembering that ABK aren't the only video game company behaving badly. Tim Sweeney's Epic Games, who:
Now, this is the part where I say, for the record, that I am not a lawyer. Even if I were a lawyer, it would Canadian law I'd be practicing, not California contract law. That said... that looks pretty devastating to me, as far as Epic's case goes.
As I said at the top of this post, I have serious problems with the way Epic went about bringing this suit in the first place. The obvious bad faith that preceded their removal from Apple's App Store just rubbed me raw; the fact that a PR campaign, aimed squarely at Fortnite players, for some reason, was all prepped and ready to go before the removal had even happened speaks pretty clearly to what their intentions had been right off the jump. As a matter of principle, I don't think the courts should be rewarding Epic for that behaviour.
The second problem deals with Epic's creative definition of the word "monopoly" in this context, one which even they admit is on shaky legal ground... while also admitting that current anti-trust law in the U.S. probably doesn't cover the App Store in its current form. So bringing an an anti-trust suit against Apple is, essentially, legally frivolous, since Epic knew from the outset that the law wasn't on their side.
That left only the claim that Apple's 30% cut of the proceeds of App Store sales was excessive and unfair... a claim for which Epic also had no evidence, unless one counts their own Game Store... which, yes, only takes a 12% cut, but is losing money hand-over-fist, with no end in sight for at least another six years. I can see why Epic want the California court system to order Apple, and Google, and Valve to chop their own revenues by two-thirds, reducing them from profitable businesses to money-losing enterprises that the EGS might hope to catch up to, but again, I don't think the courts should be rewarding Epic that richly for bringing what looks like an utterly frivolous, money-and-time-wasting legal action.
Ethically, Epic have acted in bad faith and deserve to lose this one. Legally, it looks like Epic have no case, and deserve to lose this one. And, given how weak Epic's case has looked so far, especially compared to the can of whoop-ass that Apple's legal team just opened up on them... I have a feeling that they're going to lose this one.
Prognostication
I'm calling it now: In the matter Epic v. Apple, the latter will prevail, and Epic will end up adding Apple's legal and court costs to their non-stop Game Store losses. The only reason Tim Sweeney isn't sweating the outcome of this doomed legal adventure is that he is Epic's majority shareholder, and thus can't be fired or reigned in by Epic's board of directors in any meaningful way.
Incidentally... Epic's suit against Google? It's probably weaker that their suit against Apple, since Google only allow the installation of apps outside of Google Play (Apple don't); Epic actually went that route, initially bypassing Google entirely, with no restrictions or retribution from Google over the matter. It's tough to argue monopoly when the alleged monopolist have gone out of their way to create and maintain Android as an open platform, on which users can do basically anything they want. I predict that Epic will lose that case, too.
And, yes, that thought does make me just a little bit happy.
#FuckEpicGames
Updated Aug. 29th, 2021
We're still waiting for the judge to decide Epic v Apple, but in the meantime, and for people who find my layman's take on these matters less than satisfying, here's a much more expert opinion, from an actual lawyer:
Now, whether or not you agree with Richard Hoeg (I don't always), I did find it interesting that he had all the same problems with the details of Epic's case, and the ethics of Epic's approach to this matter, that I did. The "pot calls kettle black" nature of Epic, whose own Game Store has been profoundly anticompetitive from its inception, arguing that Apple's App Store is anticompetitive for doing much, much less, feels like hyperbole at the very least, if not outright hypocrisy, and I can't recall if ever I called that out, specifically.
Suffice it to say that I am not at all surprised to learn that Epic are losing money on the EGS; given how much money they were spending to basically bribe both developers and consumers into adopting it, I would have been far more surprised to learn that they were turning a profit. Interestingly, Epic's exclusivity agreements appear to work exactly the
way I always thought they did: like the royalty advances of book
publishing and other, similar industries, but even I did not predict losses on this scale; apparently even Fortnite's huge haul isn't enough to keep pace.
I'm also a little surprised that we're learning about these losses at all; I was expecting this information to remain well-buried for a long, long time. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, though, given the broad extent of Apple's document pulls from all and sundry in the matter of their legal battle with Epic Games; the California judge overseeing the proceedings described it as Apple having "salted the Earth with subpoenas" from a variety of industry players, including Valve Software. This likely means that Friday's bombshell is likely only the first of many; there are a lot of previously confidential, behind-the-scenes dealings which are about to become part of the public record. That's very exciting. Consumers could be on the verge of learning a lot about the workings of an industry that we previously could only guess at.
For now, though, we can only shake our heads in mock disbelief at the extent to which Epic's Game Store has flopped. Given that the service launched in 2018, and is still hemorrhaging money with no end in sight, I have doubts as to whether Epic can actually turn this around. The brand damage here may just be too deep, and the stench of flop sweat and failure is unlikely to attract new business partners eager to associate their valuable brands with Epic's radioactive one.
Even worse for Epic: the Fortnite revenue which has been funding the EGS to this point is also down, from $1.8 billion in 2019 to less than $500 million in 2020:
No wonder Sweeney has resorted to litigation! At this point, the EGS's only hope may be to find a sympathetic judge who'd be willing to "flip the board," disruptive the game of the entire video games business on their behalf. Given how much room to run Judge Hixon is affording to Apple, though, I would recommend that Sweeney not count too heavily on the tree of that particular lawsuit bearing the sort of lucrative fruit that the EGS needs in order to stave of death by starvation, especially since their entire legal argument is that the 30% cut is unnecessary. Apple can now counter that argument by simply pointing out that Epic's 12% cut is losing them money hand over first, and clearly not a sustainable business model. Look for that lawsuit to badly for Epic.
Will Epic's epic-scale Game Store losses cause the company to course-correct?
Probably not, alas. Sweeney is still Epic's majority shareholder, which means that he's basically able to do whatever he wants with the company. Epic's next-largest shareholder, Tencent Holdings, who own 40% of Epic, do have the sort of resources required to put pressure on Sweeney, but they can't simply vote him out as CEO, or off Epic's board of governors, which will limit their options... assuming they're even inclines to intervene here, which is far from certain. For all the suspicion that surrounds any Tencent acquisition, their management style has so far been pretty hands-off, at least with their interests outside of China.
Of course, even Epic Games can't sustain this kind of burn rate forever; eventually, they're going to have to make changes in order the stop the bleeding, and put in place some sort of plan to "return to profitability" (corporate code of mass layoffs). Given that their legal battle with Apple has only served to make the industry-standard 30% cut to the platform look more essential than ever, and that Epic has done almost nothing to earn back the trust and good will of the Steam community (which, at this point, includes basically all of the PC gaming community), and also given that efforts to repair their brand and rebuild their business can't even start until the Apple lawsuit, at least, is either dropped or settled, I'm starting to have serious doubts about Epic's long-term prospects. I beginning to wonder if Epic will be able to survive at all, in the medium-to-long term.
In the near term, however, while Epic still have a fat war chest and a loyal Fortnite fan base, I expect that the PC gaming industry news is going to be very, very interesting. Watch this space...
And, yes, it has been only that long since Epic Games announced the very first EGS-exclusive title: Supergiant's Hades, an early-access game that announced at the Game Awards in December of 2018, and released the same night. That was only a few months after Epic declared that Fortnite: Battle Royale for Android would be side-loadable only from their own digital distribution channel, rather than just making the game available on Google Play like every other developer with an Android app to flog.
Tim Sweeney's Epic Games would go on from there to declare themselves to be so deeply opposed, on principle, to everything about Valve Software's Steam service that they just had to launch a competing service... which offered absolutely nothing to consumers that Steam didn't, and was actually missing a whole bunch of stuff that Steam users were used to. No worries, though, because Tim Sweeney had a plan: to embrace exactly the same platform exclusivity deals that he'd once called evil, back when Microsoft and Sony were profiting from them, and not him.
The message from Epic to gamers was crystal clear: fuck you, pay me. And gamers got the message; they heard Epic loud and clear... and, en masse, gamers refused to pay.
