I’m a little surprised they didn’t wait until after all of the Valve monopoly suits to play out first, as if this is successful it will just undercut the argument against Valve.
If it’s successful it might under cut the claims against Valve but they can just claim the press from the lawsuit helped break the monopoly – and besides the lawsuit was just for PR and to try to get Valve to break financially. It was always a longshot that it’d do anything else. If it’s unsuccessful, however, it can be blamed entirely on Valve and can be used to get the lawsuit to actually do something as “look we implemented everything Steam did and didn’t get any more market share.”
But Epic kinda doesn’t have a choice. They’re bleeding money, Fortnite is waning, they have no popular properties on the horizon, they’re hard into AI for customer service and moderation which is only getting more expensive, and they keep doing the sweetheart deals to devs for their game giveaways which haven’t really brought any paying users to the platform.
It’s either attempt feature parity or start cutting the consumer facing part of the business, and for one of the industry’s oldest and most prominent players that’s really not a choice they want to make.
I’m a little surprised they didn’t wait until after all of the Valve monopoly suits to play out first, as if this is successful it will just undercut the argument against Valve.
If it’s successful it might under cut the claims against Valve but they can just claim the press from the lawsuit helped break the monopoly – and besides the lawsuit was just for PR and to try to get Valve to break financially. It was always a longshot that it’d do anything else. If it’s unsuccessful, however, it can be blamed entirely on Valve and can be used to get the lawsuit to actually do something as “look we implemented everything Steam did and didn’t get any more market share.”
But Epic kinda doesn’t have a choice. They’re bleeding money, Fortnite is waning, they have no popular properties on the horizon, they’re hard into AI for customer service and moderation which is only getting more expensive, and they keep doing the sweetheart deals to devs for their game giveaways which haven’t really brought any paying users to the platform.
It’s either attempt feature parity or start cutting the consumer facing part of the business, and for one of the industry’s oldest and most prominent players that’s really not a choice they want to make.