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.
We need to go back to the days where video games come to an end. All this live service forever game bullshit is a cancer for the industry, and just incentivizes overt monetization
i hate this statement, there are currently 543,275,322,871 games. i think fortnite is the only live service game i plau. (recent games i have ever played )
alan wake 2
baldurs gate 3
cyberpunk
doom dark ages
(i am not going to go on and on, but thosenwere some very popular games.)
Ironically live service games are the only ones guaranteed to end.
Most other games can be played just fine long after the majority of players have moved on.
Working people paying for the mistakes of the ownership class. What else is new?
I’ve said it before, and I will say it again:
Epic’s corporate overlords don’t have an original thought rattling around in their collective heads. Their entire business model is to flail around, copy anything that seems remotely successful with a reskin, and hope it sticks.
All that aside, I got to play test early forms of fortnite. It’s original inception was sort of like a plants vs zombies game, but with building. When PUBG blew up in popularity, EPIC completely threw out the original design of fortnite and reworked it into a battle royale game to jump on the PUBG hype train to make lots of moolah. Nothing about fortnite was original, and lots of the content that was added are just copies of games that were already amazing, (nod to guitar hero and rock band,) or reskins of fortnight assets into other things that are popular.
It’s felt like fortnight has been keeping epic alive for nearly a decade. 10 - 15 year olds that were playing fortnight and buying with mom and dad’s $ are grown up; AAAANNNNNNDDDD they don’t have disposable income. 20-24 year olds are experiencing 7.7% unemployment, if they have a college degree. Those numbers get worse the less education young people have. Avg unemployment is about 4.5% vs for highschool kids and kids working through college the unemployment rate is 13%. Epic’s entire profit model depends on a never ending supply of children with access to infinite disposable income.
So if Epic wants to do well financially it’s going to have to:
- Take risks (leading to the production of products that people outside of their usual customer base want to purchase.)
- Support policies that ensure plebs have $ to buy their reskinned bullshit.
Thanks for coming to my ted talk.
You forgot one more thing, they still have not changed their model. Instead of investing some of that money into attempting to create new good games, they only seem interested in buying other games that they feel will make them money. Instead of doing the work, they would rather just buy up properties that look promosing. Here’s looking at you Fall Guys.
They bought Rocket League and pulled it from the Steam store to make it a retroactive exclusive, then acted confused as to why players were upset.
That original version still exists - it’s called Save the World and iirc they recently revamped it and made it free for everyone (it used to be a standalone purchase).
Last time I played it I didn’t find it all that engaging, so it’s hardly surprising they stuck with BR as the lead mode once it took off. I guess my point is this: they didn’t ‘throw out’ StW, it just got eclipsed by a far more popular mode. Can’t really blame them for backing a winner.
it’s called Save the World and iirc they recently revamped it and made it free for everyone (it used to be a standalone purchase).
Oh wow, I might give it another shot…
Oh wait, it’s on epic store, fuck knows if it has linux support, definitely has spyware, if I didn’t interface with it before I sure as fuck won’t interface with it now.
I’m not getting the impression you genuinely want to hop back in, but in case you didn’t know about it, the Heroic games launcher is FOSS, cross platform, and can serve GoG, EGS and Amazon games.
I never use it for EGS because I don’t have an epic account, but it’s been wonderful for my GoG library on Fedora.
E: totally spaced on this, fortnite isn’t playable on PC outside of windows.
I don’t know about Save the World, but the other modes of Fortnite are barred by anti-cheat on Linux, no matter how you launch it.
you know what, I totally spaced on that. this is very likely the case for save the world as well, I’m not aware if anyone who’s played that on Linux.
Few ppl did
shame only in private server or with some kind of kernel patch for the live version
I checked out of Fortnite when the brand partnerships started. I really liked the first few seasons though…
It felt like the game had a strong identity that was challenging PUBG’s nonsense. No complicated inventory, just 5 slots. 1 or 2 weapons per category with very well defined playstyles, no incomprehensibly complicated weapon mod system on top. Building is very cool and raises the skill ceiling so high too !
And the style was cartoony and silly : you don’t get cars, you get shopping carts ! Characters have no voices, the “laugh” is a donkey sound !
But when the brand deals started coming, they started wilfully throwing away their identity to replace it with recognizable IP. So I quit.
I used to play it quite a bit in beta and early release, and then checked back in in 2021 when they had already done a lot of brand partnerships. You’re right on the dot. They completely removed the game’s identity. I found it funny you mention the golf carts, because when I played it, the first match my team of randoms landed next to some cars (from rocket league I think) and just spent the entire game doing stunts to earn points. There was zero interaction with the core gameplay loop. It was crazy.
How much longer can you keep a dead horse alive?
Did they ever make the actual gunplay not garbage?
Because the aiming mechanics were utter dogshit, I can’t imagine playing that game seriously.
Now it makes sense why Epic raised the prices for Fortnite Vbucks. I thought its greed, but looks like Epic is in trouble.
Good. Let them burn and maybe Timmy Tencent will finally shut the fuck up
Is it finally happening?
They still giving away free games?
Yep. New set every Thursday
