If I’m honest, I don’t disagree.
I would love for Steam to have **actual competition. Which is difficult, sure, but you could run a slightly less feature-rich store, take less of a cut, and pass the reduction fully on to consumers and you’d be an easy choice for many gamers.
But that’s not what Epic is after. They tried to go hard after the sellers, figuring that if they can corner enough fo the market with exclusives the buyers will have to come. But they underestimated that even their nigh-infinite coffers struggle to keep up with the raw amount of games releasing, and also the unpredictability of the indie market where you can’t really know what to buy as an exclusive.
Nevermind that buying one is a good way to make it forgotten.
So yeah, fully agreed. Compared to Epic, I vastly prefer Steam’s 30% cut. As the consumer I pay the same anyways, and Steam offers lots of stuff for it like forums, a client that boots before the heat death of the universe, in-house streaming, library sharing, cloud sync that sometimes works.
I think it was more so that they needed those devs on Fortnite to scale it… Then when they got some breathing room to look at other projects, Quake Champions had already released and flopped … as has since Halo Infinite and Diabotical (which Epic partially funded) … AFPS is a genre that isn’t getting much love from consumers.
So, I think Fortnite caused the project to get dropped, but it’s not the reason it wasn’t picked back up. I’d imagine Epic is working on other games, these things just take a while (and they’re going to want bigger profits than they expect UT4 could bring in).
I don’t think Epic is working on other games. If Fortnite wasn’t going to be their only brand, they wouldn’t have delisted Unreal and shutdown the master servers.