The Epic Game Store should give Steam a run for its money. This is costing the company behind Fortnite millions. Is that profitable? Apparently not, as the boss now revealed on the witness stand.
What is the situation? The Epic Game Store launched on December 6, 2018. Since then, no expense or effort has been spared to wrest a piece of the PC gaming pie from the top dog, Steam:
All of these efforts don’t seem to be paying off so far, because as The Verge reports, the Epic Game Store is still in the red almost 5 years later.
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Boss says under oath that the store is not running
Where does the information come from? Epic, the company behind Fortnite and the Epic Game Store, is currently in a legal dispute with Google over fees on in-game purchases in the Google Play Store. At the start of the trial on Monday, November 6, 2023, both sides delivered opening statements.
The first witnesses were then heard. Steve Allison, the head of the Epic Game Store, testified under oath that the Steam competitor was not yet profitable even 5 years after launch. The goal is continued growth.
In 2021, a document from October 2019 became known in the course of a similar legal dispute with Apple. As a result, it was hoped that an aggressive strategy (“Aggressive Pursuit Model”) would be able to secure a 50% market share in PC games if Steam did not react.
According to Allison’s statement, Epic currently seems to be a long way from that.
The lack of profit seems to be slowly having an impact on Epic. While in 2021 people were still confident that they would definitely make a profit in 2023, the situation now looks more tense. At the end of September there was a large wave of cancellations, which was accompanied by a completely inappropriate emote:
Steam rival Epic fires 830 employees and sells a windfall in Fortnite on the same day