• okwhateverdude@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Epic gives a bigger share to devs and gives away a lot of free games, but they’re a publicly traded company trying to buy their way into the market so they can enshittify.

    220+ free games in the library. One paid game that was an exclusive that wasn’t worth it in the end. No other transactions. Haven’t done the math, but in retail prices, that’s a lot of money to piss away hoping I’ll spend anything more.

    • pory@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      They’re not giving away retail price games. They’re paying dev teams single payouts to make a game limited-time-claimable. Your copy of a $60 game didn’t cost Epic $60, it cost them “$400k divided by number of downloads within the promo period”. And the devs take the payout because they know it’s coming in addition to all the paying customers on Steam. Basically a guaranteed return on investment.

        • pory@lemmy.world
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          5 hours ago

          MS Gamepass uses the same model. Some percentage of a customer’s $30/mo doesn’t go to Sandfall Studios for “selling” Expedition 33 on Gamepass, Sandfall got a fat lump sum from MS in exchange for MS being allowed to distribute their game to subscribers.