When we had 0 interest rates companies could make a bunch of big long term bets because money was cheap (ZIRP - Zero interest-rate policy).
Epic also happened to be sitting on the Fortnite money hose, so taking on Steam (and this money hose) made total sense as a business.
But not we don’t have 0 interest rates and Epic have made a bunch of layoffs
- https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/layoffs-at-epic
And they’re still not profitable:
Best monthly numbers I can find are old (specifically for Epic)
- 132 million monthly players (https://www.demandsage.com/steam-statistics/)
- 10 million in 2019, but not clear what % is just Fortnite (https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/DX-3712.pdf)
It’s no longer cheap to take on Steam. Do you think at this point Epic still has a decent chance of making this a two player market?
Personally I don’t use it at all. How do people feel about it? Any loyalty or friends networks there outside free games and fortnite?
Epic has lost all the possible steam (hehe) for actually competing because they just spent their massive piles of cash for free games and exclusives and never bothered with using that money to create a platform that could rival the huge amount of feature Steam provides.
People use steam as a community, it’s more than a simple storefront. It was impossible to hope to compete without trying to provide a similar experience.