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Epic Games Store: hundreds of millions of dollars in losses per year

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The Epic Games Store posted a loss of around $ 181 million in 2019, an expected loss of $ 273 million in 2020, and projected to lose around $ 139 million in 2021.
This is evident from documents in the Apple versus Epic Games lawsuit.

A major expense for Epic Games is the minimum guarantees; amounts of money that Epic Games gives as a sales advance to publishers or developers in exchange for an Epic Games Store Exclusive.
In 2020, for example, 444 million dollars went there. This is evident from published court documents that Eurogamer has searched through.

Epic states that "at this early stage in the life of the EGS, it deliberately spent a lot of money on marketing and bringing in new users to gain market share."
Epic expects its digital store to be profitable by 2023. The 12 percent that Epic Games collects from every transaction would be enough for the store's daily costs.


Thanks for all the free games EGS! :D
Till sofar I've only been collecting the free games, haven't bought any game of the EGS.
 
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Nothing new here in terms of business. Amazon took almost five years to turn a profit. I worked for a new company once that lost a lot of money the initial year, a good mount of money the second year, broke even the third year. Then the owners sold the company to a conglomerate for the equivalent of what most mega million jack pots are. The first year with new ownership we were extremely profitable.
 

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That's the problem with EGS. So many people only get the free games or maybe buy the exclusives. If not for the revenue from Fortnite their store would be a dismal failure.
 

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I've picked only the free games there. I'll rather be without a game than buy that exclusive title from there.
 

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Funny, I thought most of the reason most people didn't want to use EGS was because they didn't want yet another launcher/account. Yet here we are with people having another launcher/account, but only to collect free games and never buy.
 
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I don't really believe in exclusives. Instead, they should be competing in trying to get prices reduced on games and offer other services like possibly software that helps gamers and developers both.

I bought a few titles. And I enjoy them. Got them cheaper on EGS. It's not a bad platform. They have all pros and cons.
 
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i wont touch that store. when they stole metro, i decided i was done with metro & whatever epic was
for me, metro ended at last light, & epic emerged in to the market by serving ultimatums to players, i dont like being told where i must buy, so im good.
not being a 8 year old helps, since ive never played fart-night.

i dont care if it succeeds or flops
 

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i wont touch that store. when they stole metro, i decided i was done with metro & whatever epic was
for me, metro ended at last light, & epic emerged in to the market by serving ultimatums to players, i dont like being told where i must buy, so im good.
not being a 8 year old helps, since ive never played fart-night.

i dont care if it succeeds or flops
Sucks that they managed to grab Kingdom Hearts PC ports on their store. I rather play KH I & II on my good old PS2 than buy those from Epic.
 
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Well epic launcher is a epic fail. It's in my opinion the worst of all the game launchers, so I try to avoid buying games from there.

The metro exodus was an aw full experience.
I cut not predownload the game, I had to wait for launch day and then all at the same time wanted to get the game. How do you think that ended?
Yes downloading was slow and unstable = no gaming on launch day.

This year I had a problem so I cut not type in "@". Support was no help, I had to reinstall epic launcher before it worked again. But the worst thing is metro exodus vanished from my epic game library this year. Wtf and once again there support was useless. Ended up buying the game again but for steam.

Other launchers have given me a few problems over the years, but nothing line the epic launcher. Yes I am so done with epic now. At least I only buy two games for epic while one of them is gone, the rest is free games.

If others are experience what I have, no wunder they lose money and people getting upset and tired of this bullshit.
 

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I remember when EGS went online a couple of years ago Sweeney said that EGS would one day rival Steam. Well, it looks like that vision has been dropped for the most part.

When Epic made Metro Exodus an EGS exclusive people got so angry that the review bombed it on Steam. They even review bombed The first 2 Metro games as well.

Funny, I thought most of the reason most people didn't want to use EGS was because they didn't want yet another launcher/account. Yet here we are with people having another launcher/account, but only to collect free games and never buy.

Also if you frequent game sites you will see the recurring myth that Tencent owns Epic. They do own a 40% stake in Epic but not controlling interest. Some people believe that China is using Tencent to spy on people.
 

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bringing in new users to gain market share.

Not me, free games or not EGS is not for me. I hope egs continues to bleed money for Epic.
 
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They wont ever make money out of it. As long as STEAM and GOG exists, they done. Market for mostly PC games isnt that big.
 

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Not me, free games or not EGS is not for me. I hope egs continues to bleed money for Epic.

As long as Epic has revenue in the billions of dollars from microtransactions sales in Fortnite they can continue the free games and occasional exclusives.

They wont ever make money out of it. As long as STEAM and GOG exists, they done. Market for mostly PC games isnt that big.

GOG is barely making any money but Steam certainly is.
 

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Personally I'm fine with Epic Games and the launcher. I follow the prices.
 
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I hope Epic meets their profitability goal. They're still missing a couple important features for me personally, but they're coming. Steam needs the competition and Epic does still pay more to publishers.
 

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I have a feeling that EGS will die when Fortnite dies.
 
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As long as Epic has revenue in the billions of dollars from microtransactions sales in Fortnite they can continue the free games and occasional exclusives.



GOG is barely making any money but Steam certainly is.

But its in green and GOG is excellent thing for gamers. Unlike ton of things that wont work without launcher, which are definitely not good for anyone really. Often including companies that make those games.
 
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Steam went thru this too...
 
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Epic also has Unreal Engine 5 which should be coming out some time this year. This should bring in some funds as there are a number of developers interested.
 
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Well epic launcher is a epic fail. It's in my opinion the worst of all the game launchers, so I try to avoid buying games from there.

The metro exodus was an aw full experience.
I cut not predownload the game, I had to wait for launch day and then all at the same time wanted to get the game. How do you think that ended?
Yes downloading was slow and unstable = no gaming on launch day.

This year I had a problem so I cut not type in "@". Support was no help, I had to reinstall epic launcher before it worked again. But the worst thing is metro exodus vanished from my epic game library this year. Wtf and once again there support was useless. Ended up buying the game again but for steam.

Other launchers have given me a few problems over the years, but nothing line the epic launcher. Yes I am so done with epic now. At least I only buy two games for epic while one of them is gone, the rest is free games.

If others are experience what I have, no wunder they lose money and people getting upset and tired of this bullshit.
im sorry some of this is blatant lies
the download is directly related to YOUR network
Metro did not just "Disappear from your acount" you did somthing and probably removed it
I have used epic for 2 years its no where near as good as steam but its not terrible
Also their support is great im assume you pretended you dident do the thing that removed it
 

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Epic also has Unreal Engine 5 which should be coming out some time this year. This should bring in some funds as there are a number of developers interested.

Unreal is the most popular engine among Developers. Overall Epic is making a nice profit. It's just the store that is posting losses.
 
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It's surprising how many people haven't figured out yet that a lot of games on EGS (including the many decent freebies) have been released there DRM-Free, ie, once you've downloaded them for the first time, you can zip them up & back them up like a GOG offline installer and not need any client at all to play at any time in the future. I certainly don't regret grabbing quite a few decent freebies on that list. There's an open-source (Legendary and Heroic) alternative to the official client too.
 
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We give you games for free, then we hope you pay for over priced DLC's, Yeah right.
 
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