While the scope of layoffs has stunned employees, industry analysts have told IGN that cost-reduction within Epic Games was inevitable amid growing external pressures and costly industry battles.
While the scope of layoffs has stunned employees, industry analysts have told IGN that cost-reduction within Epic Games was inevitable amid growing external pressures and costly industry battles.
They did have the wisdom to use Fortnite’s proceeds to make something like a Steam competitor that both takes a lot of startup capital and also has the potential to wildly exceed Fortnite’s future review, but they did not have the wisdom to make a store that customers would actually want to use for any reason except giveaways.
I’m still not over the statement that consumers shouldn’t need to know whether AI assets are in a game or not, and Epic won’t be doing that even if Steam does. Couldn’t help but get in their own way every step
Whenever Steam makes a controversial decision, Epic always takes the opposite stance, like on NFTs. Unfortunately, not once has Epic done this on something that I felt would be better for me as the consumer. Here’s some low-hanging fruit: being able to tell what kind of multiplayer a game has, or how much of a game I get to own with my purchase, is awful on every store, including GOG. Steam has a tag to indicate that a game has LAN multiplayer, but plenty of games have it and don’t list it. There is no tag to say, “you can host private servers for this game, whether on LAN or internet”. If a store took a stance to answer these kinds of questions for me, that store would fare better in my eyes. But of course Epic won’t be the ones to do it; their big cash cow is a live service game that must be run through them.