Back in February Epic Games told us about its plan to overhaul the Epic launcher, with an update in June mentioning it would start up five times faster on average. That technical overhaul will apparently be accompanied by changes to the storefront including personalized game recommendations, quick-access categories, and patch notes right there on the shop. All stuff that would have been nice to have at the end of 2018 when the Epic launcher arrived, but is it too late for a recovery? I asked Emmanuel Rosier, director of market intelligence at industry analysts Newzoo.
“I don’t really see how they can turn that around,” Rosier says, “because Steam has become so inevitable. The Epic Games Store, they get players by giving free games, but people just go, they log in, they get the free games, they don’t even play them. You know, it’s almost like collecting games rather than actually playing them.”
On a sample size of one I am the person who actually plays some of the free games I’ve been given by Epic over the years, and without that program I probably wouldn’t have tried Guardians of the Galaxy, Ghostwire: Tokyo, Vampyr, Control, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, or Kardboard Kings. But whether most people play them or not, it’s telling that a free giveaway can actually boost sales on Steam, as it did for Blood West, thanks to players not wanting to split their library.
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“The challenge I think Epic is facing is that they try to win everywhere in the past few years,” Rosier says. “They try to win against Steam, they try to win against Apple, against Google Play, and probably they run out of steam on where they cannot fight all these battles at the same time.”
Rosier is more positive about the outlook for Epic as a game developer than as a storefront. “They probably need to focus on what really matters,” he says, “which I think is Fortnite. You can see they put a lot of thought in Fortnite right now. They are doing everything they can, and I think it’s working better when you look at the state of Fortnite today compared to six months or one year ago.”
One shift in Fortnite has been a bigger push to incorporate cosmetics based on other companies’ videogames. While Epic’s own games and those of games that launched as exclusives like Borderlands 3 have a history of showing up in Fortnite, now you look at the current season and see Sonic the Hedgehog, Pac-Man, Crash Bandicoot, and Mega Man have joined the roster alongside Sora from Kingdom Hearts and Joker from Persona 5.
“I think that’s an important trend I see with Fortnite,” Rosier says, “they are not afraid of other games.” If it continues, expect to see less popstars and more platformer mascots. “It’s funny because it’s a gaming platform that’s not even competing any more with other games. Because if you are launching a game, it makes sense to do some marketing within Fortnite. I was thinking, I’m almost surprised that GTA 6 is not doing an event in Fortnite to show the trailer, you know? Why not at this point?”
Rosier’s also positive about recent additions to Fortnite like the collectible “sprites” that give players something else to do (“It’s not about winning that much; it’s about completing your collection of sprites,” he says), but remains less optimistic about Epic’s future as a competitor to Steam. “If you look at the Epic Games Store, I don’t see how they can recover at this point.”
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