Company was ‘spending way more than we earn,’ CEO said in memo
It needs a genius to see that. All those contracts for timed exclusivity, all those games given for free. Most people just play free to play games on the platform and get the games for free. I thought the idea was to eat the cost and spend more money than to earn, so they can build a loyal customer base. If that wasn’t the entire goal, what was it then? Why punish the staff (holy cow its 870 employees!) by cutting them off the company now? The store and launcher of Epic games already struggle to get better.
Unfortunately I can’t read the article on Bloomberg, as it requires an account.
I’m guessing it was the goal but it didn’t work as well as they’d hoped. I’ve got a couple of the freebies but I’ve stuck mostly with Valve because most of my games are already on Steam and they haven’t seriously fucked up yet.
They made enticing incentives for developers and publishers, but what incentive would I have as a customer to buy a game from EGS rather than Steam or GOG or even Humble?
I’m guessing here because I don’t sit on Epic’s board of directors, but I would imagine their angle for consumers was mostly to grab new markets with the appeal of free games, which would also establish a library that would be a pain point if they ever wanted to move away, coupled with some of those one-year exclusives that would peel people away from Valve if they wanted to play them day-of.
