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Epic Games, the Creator of Fortnite, Banked a $3 Billion Profit in 2018: Report (techcrunch.com)
This year Fortnite became the world's most popular game, growing its parent company, Epic Games' valuation to $15 billion. It also helped the company pile up cash. Epic grossed a $3 billion profit for this year fueled by the continued success of Fortnite, TechCrunch reported Thursday, citing a person with knowledge of the business. From the report: Fortnite, which is free to play but makes money selling digital items, has popularized the battle royale category -- think Lord of the Flies meets Hunger Games -- almost single-handedly, and it has been the standout title for the U.S.-based game publisher. Founded way back in 1991, Epic hasn't given revenue figures for its smash hit -- which has 125 million players -- but this new profit milestone, combined with other pieces of data, gives an idea of the success the company is seeing as a result of a prescient change in strategy made six years ago.
I literally never heard of it
Gog, Steam, Origin, Uplay, Battle.net, whatever the heck Bethesda calls theirs and now Epic's. If I got less DRM (especially Denuvo, which has been shown to kill frame times) or better prices maybe. But so far it's just more logins and more hassle. At least with Gog I can save the games to a DVD and be done with it.
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I'm pretty sure a large portion of that $3billion came from licensing the Unreal Engine, AKA the engine that powers almost every game on the market not being made in Unity.
spending four years memorizing Maxwell's Equations to get an EE degree so I can fight for crumbs against a billion Chinese and a billion Indians sure seems like a good idea!
Great
This is going to be happening more and more now. Even with the failure that is FO76
The AAA games are going no where, and indies are an incestuous mess.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
Think about the billions they could make if it was for real.
People would pay to be partof it.
Gamers have been served such derivative sub-par shit as games for 18 years - crap like StarWars Battlefront - that utter mediocrity like Fortnite excites them big time. I'm glad I was around in the first golden years of computer gaming. Today's games look nice but play like a 5 year old designed them.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Fortnite was a flop. The Battle Royale mode was a slap dash add on to a failed game. They snuck into a market niche that was wide open: Free BR game with an approachable aesthetic. They monitized it very well without cries of "Pay to Win". PubG is only now starting to catch up in terms of functional sustaining revenue, and they have already lost the majority of their player base.
Battle Royale mode is like a pickup basketball game. Drop in for a few. The preteens use it to hang out when too geographically distant for non-school hang time. Lots of non-shooting games. And they buy skins. It's great looking for a free game. Though I'm on the hook for battle passes and skins so ...
Part of the games continued success is the dances particularly the floss witch really appeals to young children. My wife a wedding photographer was wondering why all the kids were doing this one dance at every wedding.
They pulled devs from UT4 to help with the mega-successful Fortnite, but it's making so much money I don't understand how they can't afford to triple or quadruple the size of their team and pursue many passion projects like UT4 without any fear of insolvency. UT is such an awesome game (and whatever Quake's status, it doesn't have the game-defining shock rifle) that has appeased hardcore gamers for decades, and now they can well afford to give it some love again, so I hope they do.
Actually, GOG Connect is exactly what all those stores should do. Buy it in one place, share it across accounts.
Isn't PUBG the reason Fortnite is enjoying this level of success?
From what I understand, PUBG was created by former Fortnite team members. Then the Fortnite devs looked over and saw "hey, that PUBG game is gaining a lot of traction... we need to add our own battle royale mode into Fortnite" and -boom- the rest was history.
Maybe it's because Fortnite's battle royale is free to play (I'm not sure if PUBG charges money), or maybe it was because PUBG tried to sue Fortnite for "taking their battle royale idea" and that gave Fortnite the exposure it needed.
All that on top of the fact that Fortnite is playable on damn near -any- device and this is to be expected. My family CANNOT pull my little nephew away from this (okay okay, they could if they had a spine), but it's also a "digital commons" of sorts where people just hang with their friends... you don't necessarily have to be gaming.
Made $3B profit selling digital stuff to make it âoe fun âoe.
Should tell you all you need to know about the Free to Play model.
And the owner of Epic Games is a pretty good guy it seems. I have little respect for Valve, Zenimax, and some others. They're either dishonest and greedy, or they don't give a shit about cheaters, because the cheaters are also customers.
Best of luck to Epic Games!
I'm calling bullshit. For TV, whether via a Cable Company or direct content provider subscription, amazon, etc. I can watch on almost any device or platform. Same with movies.
For games, yes it's more limited by platform but that makes sense because games have to be ported, which takes time and effort.
What bothers me about your post is your entitled attitude. Just because you WANT something doesn't mean you are entitled to have it that way. And you're still in the wrong, both morally and legally, when you go out and find ways to get out of paying for a feature or service.
Fortnite is almost like a new Facebook. A place where kids can go without adult supervision and be themselves. At least with Fortnite you can actually do something as opposed to just scrolling up and down someone's page and leaving snarky comments.
And that's not to say there isn't plenty of snark to be seen on Fortnite, just that it's a new social network of sorts.
People of all ages like to dress a way they like. Fortnite offers that in the game (sort of).
People would like to be able to dance. Fortnite offers this (and my kids dance better as a result, I still suck).
Either of those facets could be a successful game (many aimed at young girls are regarding clothes/looks).
Now they have Playground mode (hunt your friends), Creative mode (similar to Minecraft), and all of the other regular modes, it's a pretty cool game.
They have aced 4 player co-op as well. And completely cross platform.
It's a rather incredible game, I just watch my kids (boy and girl) play, I'm not good enough at this point.
I do enjoy the updates. Keeps the game fresh.
BlameBillCosby.com
Lord of the Flies is about a bunch of schoolkids who start out trying to cooperate and end up turning on each other, so I don't know what it has to do with a game where the explicit goal is for everyone to kill each other. Because they both take place on an island?
that makes sense because games have to be ported, which takes time and effort.
That in itself is an outdated excuse. It made sense back in the 80s and 90s because the architecture of different systems was vastly different (and they still did it because they realized that more people are willing to buy a game on a system they own than buy a whole extra system for one game). Nowadays, the architecture is almost all x86 and x64, porting has become next to trivial unless you're Japanese (somehow they manage to screw it up most times), and the only reason exclusives exist is because there wouldn't be a reason to buy consoles otherwise.
Fuck your blind support of walled gardens and artificial exclusivity.
Who the fuck writes this shit?
They are enjoying their profits in the real world.
That's because FO76 is a terrible game. I had a preorder, played the B.E.T.A. while it was online and promptly canceled. It's a shit attempt to multiplayer a decidedly single player game.
depending on how it's used. That's what kills an SSD. Lots of reads and writes to obfuscate what it's doing.
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Trivial or not, shit ports still exist and so long as shit ports keep getting made, i wont support the multi platform games culture. Fuck you and your support of shitty ports and higher distribution cost of games.
All that money and they still couldn't keep Paragon alive!
...they have a popular product that is FREE TO PLAY and people are (to me, crazily) spending shit-tons of cash on vanity items.
It's literally the most ephemeral, non-utilitarian way someone can spend money and is entirely voluntary - it's certainly no more stupid than buying "3 more turns" on Kandy Krush, and King has been raking in >$1bn a year for a while now.
Pretty sure we've nailed down the new opiate of the masses, though.
-Styopa
Imagine, with 3 billion dollars, they could easily develop an anti-cheat system that actually DOESN'T boot you off just for using Linux!
CAP = blockade
I know a couple of people who have been at Epic for the better part of a decade now - we used to be colleagues at another studio in a former life where I wasn't burnt out on games.
Anyway, they're basically like the people who get lucky being among the first few employees at startups that go on to become successful and IPO. Some of my other former colleagues from my gamedev days have also done incredibly well at other top-tier studios.
Me though, I can't remember the last time I played a game. I long ago joined the well-remunerated world of business software. I'm not fabulously wealthy, but I make many times more than what I did in gamedev, and while I like to gripe about bad management, the standard of management aka work-life-balance is far higher compared to what I used to put up with in gamedev.