Ina year of drastic job cuts in the games industry, occurring through a devastating fusion of a floundering global economy with irresponsible corporate spending, Epic Games claims the ignominious crown. The gams publisherannounced last weekthat it was laying off “around 830 employees,” representing a 16% downsizing of the company.
There are many things that led to this fiasco. Their wars on multiple fronts against Apple and Google regarding in-app purchases for Fortnite, their massive investment into turning Fortnite into a Metaverse wonderland, and their attempts to create a competitor to the dominant Steam platform on PC via the Epic Games Store.
Fortnite’s breakout success in 2017 propelled Epic towards greater ambitions, as they launched the Epic Games Store in 2018, which they hoped would grow to eventually rival the long-dominant PC gaming platform, Steam.
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But five years on, the Epic Games Store still feels very much like, well, a storefront, rather than a fully-fledged games platform. Epic has spent unthinkable amounts of money on procuring third-party exclusives for the Epic Games Store.
While they’ve kept the figures hidden in recent years, we know fromcourt documentsin their costly case against Apple that Epic spent over $1 billion on procuring Epic exclusives in the years 2019 and 2020. In 2020, those third-party exclusives only clawed back $265 million of that investment.
We don’t know how this trend has looked in the last two years, because that information hasn’t been made public, but given the layoffs at Epic it’s evident that the numbers haven’t been adding up.
Again, a lot has played into Epic’s woes, with CEO Tim Sweeney admitting that “we’ve been spending way more than we earn” with the hopes of “growing Fortnite as a metaverse-inspired ecosystem for creators,” before concluding that “in retrospect I can see that this was unrealistic.” Sweeney reiterated his commitment to the metaverse, so despite the project being something of a disaster thus far, Epic is pushing on, bloodied and battered.
But amidst all this, the Epic Games Store continues to stagnate. Feature-wise it remains almost as barren as it did four years ago, with none of the community, explorability, user-friendly features like in-home streaming, Remote Play Together, or family sharing that make its ‘competitor’ Steam far more popular. It’s an ugly, flat, and uninviting user experience that absolutely does not—nor did it ever—signal that it seriously wants to become a go-to place for PC gamers to rival the chaotic and sordid, yet vibrant and feature-packed, platform that is Steam.
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Epic thought that by throwing unthinkable amounts of money into procuring (mostly timed) exclusives, not to mention the money it spent on giving away hundreds of often high-quality, high-profile free games, that it could earn some kind of player loyalty that way. I’m someone who currently has 278 games in my Epic library, eight of which I’ve paid for (usually heavily discounted through a combination of sales and generously given-away coupons). My purchases were also heavily skewed towards the earlier years of the Epic Games Store, when a) the deals were better, and b) I was giving Epic Games Store the benefit of doubt that it might become a viable gaming platform that makes the experience around playing the games I own on it somewhat passable.
But that never happened. Beyond the rudimentary feature of cloud saves, there’s been no meaningful evolution to the storefront in years—the kind of evolution that would’ve actually made the Epic Games Store a platform that actually compels gamers to spend time there. It’s absurd to think of the billion-plus dollars Epic has spent on exclusive and timed-exclusive games, when it would’ve been more valuable for the platform in the long run if they invested a small chunk of that money instead into designing and evolving the store over these past five years (crucially, far fewer jobs would’ve been lost).
Recent events at Epic, and Sweeney’s response to them (which, it’s worth noting, stops short of an apology), feel like something of a death knell for the Epic Games Store. Yes, there’s more to Epic’s restructuring than its profligate policy of hoovering up exclusives, but there’s something symbolic about the storefront’s ruthless strategy and its failure. Sweeney’s letter notably neglected to mention the Epic Games Store and its futureat all, instead shifting the foundation for Epic’s ‘platform’ over to Fortnite and the metaverse.
If it hasn’t been evident for years that the idea of Epic being able to bullrush its way into competing with Steam was always a pipedream, then it’s certainly evident now. Clearly, that’s no longer a priority for Sweeney, and if you needed any proof just go and open up Epic Games Store and look for yourself. It remains a shell of a space. Yes, it happens to feature plenty of high-profile games, but this isnota platform on which you actually want to play them.
Because it’s so threadbare, there remains the thin hope that something may yet be done with the Epic Games Store, and initiatives like the newly launched ‘First Run’ program (viaKitGuru), which offers developers 100% of revenue for a game’s first six months on Epic, suggest that Epic hasn’t entirely given up on the platform. But again, it’s all just throwing money at a situation rather than thoughtfully working through it. Five years on, the Epic Games Store feels like a totally unnecessary fragmentation of the PC gaming space, rather than an appealing option or meaningful competition.
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