Epic Games Store Faces at Least $330 Million in Unrecouped Costs, Won’t Be Profitable until 2023 at Earliest

[Tsing]

Image: Epic Games



Two years and four months after its inception on December 4, 2018, the Epic Games Store hasn’t done much for its parent company aside from being one of its biggest money losers. This is according to court documents shared by a ResetEra user, which reveal that the fledgling Steam competitor had cost Epic Games approximately $181 million and $273 million in losses in 2019 and 2020, respectively. The implication here is that Epic’s decision to throw truckloads of cash to secure exclusives for its game store isn’t going as well as the company might have hoped—Epic doesn’t expect to make any profit from its digital storefront until 2023 at the earliest.




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[Dan_D]

EPIC had to build the infrastructure for it and give away a ton of games just to get people to do anything with the platform. It's bad enough that many gamers are stuck with Steam, Origin and UConnect as it is. Without heavily incentivizing downloading EPIC, there isn't anything compelling about it. It brings nothing to the market over its competition.

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

Yep, and GOG has added quite a few AAA games over the last 24 months which means you don't even have to be online to enjoy what you own. I wish the best for all but EPIC will need make it to another level in order to be attractive for more customers. Free games is not the only answer.

 

[Armenius]

EPIC had to build the infrastructure for it and give away a ton of games just to get people to do anything with the platform. It's bad enough that many gamers are stuck with Steam, Origin and UConnect as it is. Without heavily incentivizing downloading EPIC, there isn't anything compelling about it. It brings nothing to the market over its competition.

And none or very few of those users getting the free games were converted into paying customers looking at their financial breakdown. As if exclusivity deals were not enough, Epic is also fostering a userbase of freeloaders. All their Twitter threads announcing a new release are full of people begging for the next free game or asking why the new game isn't being released for free.

 

[Niner51]

And none or very few of those users getting the free games were converted into paying customers looking at their financial breakdown. As if exclusivity deals were not enough, Epic is also fostering a userbase of freeloaders. All their Twitter threads announcing a new release are full of people begging for the next free game or asking why the new game isn't being released for free.

I have quite a few of their free games and bought a few (mainly a little out of guilt), but I rarely use Epic and don't have any games installed through there at the moment.

 

[MadMummy76]

LOL, the free games are a con not a pro. I buy every game I'm interested in. So if something crops up among the claimable games that I Actually like it's almost certain that I already own it.

I have a single game activated on epic, metro exodus, because they switched out the steam keys for epic keys before launch.

 

[GunShot]

This is a nothing burger and calling gamers freeloaders (sounds like a jelly Steam's fanatic) for not passing up on a deal is just straigt-up foolish and an embarrassment to themselves to be called a gamer after how much we have all put into this industry for decades to just to receive a little of APPRECIATION for our commitment!

Epic did not get into this "exclusives / free games" for its EGS without weighing in the cost and not knowing what the cost would be to achieve its goal before anyone else speculate its long-term plan.

The simple old phrase at play here and it is working by just looking at the last time Steam had a decent AAA game in months before Outriders:

"To make money you need to spend money"

Epic is not eating this costs alone, folks, as to the conspiracy theories "why questions" about the Tencent ceal with Epic. Well, now you know.

Sony has also invested in Epic (and we all know that Sony is very tight with its money) and many more, so, Epics long-term plan will change the game.

 

[Brian_B]

EGS has Fortnite, and that alone enough to get millions of people to at least install it.

Way back when it was the same store for Valve - you could only get Half Life via Steam.

EGS’s failure from that point has little to do with not enough free games or even exclusives: it has to do with having a good reason to keep using it beyond a Fortnite launcher, and Epic has done very little to get it up to par with other storefronts or cataloging apps.