
Epic Games banked a $3B profit in 2018 - bdz
https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/27/epic-fortnite-3-billion-profit/
======
aphextron
I don't really like Fortnite, but I'm really really happy for Epic's success.
PUBG was a flaming dumpster heap that only caught on because the Battle Royale
mechanic is naturally fun and people were clamoring for that type of game. But
it was an unqualified mess from a subpar developer, and that always annoyed me
because gamers deserved better. Now Epic has been rescued from sliding into
obscurity _and_ they've got massive coffers to continue working on Unreal 4.
Couldn't have worked out better.

~~~
lghh
While I agree that PUBG is a dumpster heap technically, it really is a
legitimately fun game. I enjoy it much more than Fortnite, and if it performed
halfway decently it would be one of my favorite games of all time. I think
Fortnite's success is great and it is very clear why it is more popular than
PUBG could have ever hoped to be, but I will always be partial to the slow,
suffocating, horror of feeling alone in that giant world. Not seeing someone
for 10 minutes, but always wondering who is around the next corner is
thrilling to me and it's something that Fortnite intentionally lacks.

~~~
kaoD
I'd like to add gun mechanics. PUBG has the best gunplay I've ever played. For
me PUBG fights are thrilling, like I was there getting shot at, while
Fortnite's (or any other game for that matter) are plain old arcadey. I
dislike the building mechanic too.

I'd genuinely love for a developer to step up and do a better milsim BR but so
far PUBG is king in that niche.

~~~
elif
cod blackout is significantly better mechanically, and just as much of a
'milsim.' twitch has largely pivoted already.. CSGO has a BR now, too.

PUBG doesn't have much special left, and its new peers haven't been very
successful at unseating fortnite for popularity.

The building mechanic you dislike, seems to me to be a crucial ingredient that
makes so many love it [0]. The continually evolving meta-game and diverse game
modes also help elevate it above the chaff.

[0] At the time of writing, fornite has ~10x as many twitch viewers as pubg.

~~~
gameswithgo
Fortnite is free, pubg isn’t. Keep that in mind when comparing.

~~~
lwansbrough
Tell that to anyone who has a kid playing Fortnite. They're either spending
money or declining to spend money constantly. Fortnite is free in the sense
that it's free to walk into a bar.

~~~
daneyh
I've really enjoyed my 20hrs+ playing fortnite without spending any money
through the platform. I'm happy for other people to pay for useless items and
subsidise my experience.

------
Waterluvian
Fortnite's pivot from failed co-op zombie game to... well, _this_... is
incredible.

I would love to have experienced that office environment over that year. I can
only imagine that the pivot was a "well, we already have most of the game.
What can do we do with it?" hail Mary as they considered what to do short of
closure.

I may also be misremembering how dire their situation was. But I thought it
was quite dire.

~~~
golergka
Fortnite may have been dire as a product, but Epic was surely not in any kind
of trouble as a company.

~~~
lotyrin
It's really odd to watch people see them as "the Fortnite company" and
ignore/discount the Unreal engine, etc.

~~~
AJ007
I actually see them as the ZZT company.

~~~
kbenson
Oh man, for some reason Epic Games and Epic MegaGames were distinct in my
head. Two companies, one which made ZZT, Jill of the Jungle and Jazz
Jackrabbit, and the other which starts with Unreal.

I loved ZZT back in the day.

~~~
fazilz
> Jazz Jackrabbit

Wow that's a name I haven't heard in ages. Jazz Jackrabbit 2 was one of my
favourite games growing up.

------
Cu3PO42
I think it is commendable that Epic used some of this profit to change their
Unreal Engine Marketplace rates in favour of the developers. Similar to their
store that is mentioned in the article, the revenue split is now 88/12.

This change will be applied retroactively to all past transactions [1]. My
understanding is the split was previously 70/30 as common in other online
stores—those should be some hefty payouts for some developers. In my opinion
this is going above and beyond and would make me feel good about supporting
Epic through purchase of cosmetics in Fortnite if I played the game, for
example.

EDIT: I previously mistakenly referred to the UE Marketplace as store, which
is now at best misleading since they did launch a proper game store last
month. Thanks to jsnell for catching this.

[1] [https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/epic-announces-
unrea...](https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/epic-announces-unreal-
engine-marketplace-88-12-revenue-share)

~~~
a13n
Eh, that move is definitely nice for developers, but it's still self-serving.
They're in an uphill battle against steam's moat, and increasing rates is a
way of attracting more developers.

~~~
Cu3PO42
The UE Marketplace is targeted at developers only and sells assets and such
for use in UE games. I was not aware that Steam is competing in that area at
all and a cursory search didn't yield any such results.

Of course other marketplaces selling assets exist, but I am not aware that one
has a dominant market position that Epic are trying hard to surpass. Please do
let me know if that is, in fact, the case.

Or are you implying that better rates in the Marketplace will also make it
more likely for developers to publish their games on the Epic Store
(disregarding the better rates there)?

~~~
mtgx
They are talking about the Steam-competing store Epic launched recently:

[https://www.epicgames.com/store/](https://www.epicgames.com/store/)

It's pretty empty now but I'll be shocked if it doesn't have thousands of
games within the next 3 years.

~~~
huhtenberg
The store is closely curated by Epic, and that - the quality of game selection
- was their main pitch for the gamers.

It's still possible that they will exhaust a pool of good games and start
listing random junk for $100 like Steam does, but that's not likely to happen
that quickly.

~~~
kbenson
Seems like Steam could pretty much fix that problem if they changed the fee to
$200, and doled out $@-$5 credits to random people that reviewed similarly
tagged games along with a copy of the game that's good for 5-10 hours before
needing to be purchased (or until a certain date), as long as they give a
thorough review of what they were able to see.

Steam already tracks time played in the game, so it's not like they would have
to add a bunch of mechanics to track extra stuff, and this would allow for
some fairly good initial reviews to be seeded.

------
rchaud
The interesting part of this article was that Epic intentionally circumvented
Google Play Store and required Android users to download the launcher from its
own website. Hopefully this leads to more app developers skipping Google Play
and launching solo. Of course most apps won't have the name recognition of
Fortnite, but I can't imagine discover-ability inside of the Play Store is any
better.

I got a new phone recently and had to re-download some apps; Imagine my shock
when I opened Google Play and saw that it had become like Google search;
crawling with ads for some of the worst, lowest-rung "apps", all of which
appear to be some variant of Candy Crush and Clash of Clans. Who honestly
wants to fork over 30% to Google for _that_?

~~~
nikanj
The Apple store is just as bad. I tried finding an app that just takes a photo
every n seconds until I press stop.

I could find endless pages of apps that claimed to do this - but had 1-star
ratings because they couldn't actually do the single thing they were supposed
to do.

Ugh. I remain pretty convinced that there's an app like this out there, but
discovering it is just plain impossible.

~~~
macintux
I’ve given up on searching the App Store, but I’ve had a lot of luck searching
the web. This article looks relevant and useful:
[https://iphonephotographyschool.com/iphone-time-
lapse/](https://iphonephotographyschool.com/iphone-time-lapse/)

~~~
nikanj
IIRC none of those just place the photos in the iPhone gallery. They only give
you the finished video.

I tried looking into making this myself, but it’s an insane rabbit’s hole of
Cocoapod compilation problems and general yak shawing. A kingdom for a bash
shell and a few good cli tools..

~~~
1123581321
Why not just make a Siri Shortcut? This took five minutes:
[https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/7b14ee82c76d4d64902b5e26a69...](https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/7b14ee82c76d4d64902b5e26a6960c28)

------
cheeseomlit
Shame none of that is going towards UT development and Epic scrapped that
project. Considering the state of the new Quake game I guess that's the end
for Arena shooters.

~~~
munchbunny
It's too bad, but arena shooters have been dying as a category ever since
around UT3. I'm hopeful they'll make a resurgence in the future.

~~~
zanny
Arena shooters are "dying" for the same reason chess isn't as popular as
online poker. Back in the day arena shooter popularity was because there was
no low hanging fruit alternative like modern military shooters or Fortnite of
today. But it turns out most people don't _want_ to either participate in or
watch games of absolute skill. The former requires a lot of commitment to get
good at it, and there is no randomness or luck to make you feel you are better
than you are - just your own ability. The later is reflected in the former, in
how complex interations and difficulty make watching really skillful games
harder because there is so much to account for deterministically.

Thats what gravitates people towards randomness in games, where skill is taken
out of the equation. Then you don't have to practice or actually "be good",
you could just get lucky, and thats enough for most people - they aren't
looking for challenges in their games, just dopamine kicks, and we are wired
enough to get similar effects to chance we get to perseverance and the former
doesn't require the hard work.

Arena shooters are alive and thriving. Quake Champions Doom Edition[1] is a
miracle mod that is incredible to see and play knowing its running on what
started as the first breakout PC shooter of all time. But its not a commercial
product. Its a fan game. But its just as good, or better, than what almost any
big budget arena shooter could offer, because they are not about spectacle at
all, they are about the tightness and responsiveness of the gameplay.

[1] [https://www.moddb.com/mods/quake-champions-doom-
edition](https://www.moddb.com/mods/quake-champions-doom-edition)

~~~
MattRix
Anyone with any sense of these games work would see that modern games like
Fortnite or Overwatch take more skill than typical arena shooters. You still
need to have the raw mechanical aim skill, but now there are a host of other
mechanical, tactical and cooperative skills to master on top of that.

~~~
munchbunny
Having played shooters since the arena shooter days... no, I definitely
disagree.

I like to compare arena shooters vs. Fortnite/Overwatch as chess vs. Settlers
of Catan. Arena shooters were much more "open play" in the sense that there
were few enough game mechanics that you could mostly guess your opponents'
tactics and it often came down to execution and minute variations in the
gameplay.

The newer shooters add many, many game mechanics that complicate and randomize
the game. Overwatch's large stable of characters, for example. This creates a
problem where part of your skill is reading matchups from an intractably large
number of factors, then executing on it.

I don't consider either to be superior, but the games put emphasis on and
reward different skills.

~~~
Pica_soO
There was a lot of meta-game you could not grasp as a newb in arena-shooters.
You heard the opponent grab the shotgun shells, you knew he could either reach
door a or door b in 5 seconds. So you grenade launched into Door A and flung
yourself at Door B.

For newcomers this resulted in dying horrible most of the time, all the time.

------
neilsimp1
Is anybody else bummed how Fortnite's success has drawn development away from
the new Unreal Tournament? I don't care about Fortnite, I just want UT to
continue to be updated. I don't think it's had an update since June.

~~~
fraXis
Not just drawn development away, but they are no longer developing it.

[https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/development-stopped-
unr...](https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/development-stopped-unreal-
tournament/)

~~~
mschuster91
Oh no, sad to hear this. Still regularly shoot around with my gf on classic
UT2004...

~~~
ep103
A guy upthread is mentioning quake champions doom edition as an alternative

------
arminiusreturns
Epic lied to Linux devs and stabbed us in the back. I have abandoned hundreds
in marketplace assets and moved to godot because of all that money and still a
refusal to address Linux as a platform for dev and shipping.

~~~
AgentME
I see several people complain about Linux limitations in this thread. What are
the Linux limitations exactly? A) Unreal dev tools can't be used on Linux, B)
Unreal dev tools can't be used to purchase marketplace assets on Linux, C)
Unreal dev tools can't use marketplace assets on Linux even if you previously
bought them on Windows, D) Unreal dev tools on Windows can't make a Linux
build if it uses marketplace assets.

------
shmerl
Tim Sweeney often complains about MS being a threat to PC gaming, yet there is
still no Fortnite for Linux. Also, Epic store doesn't support Linux (yet?).

~~~
ksec
I mean come on, it has got to be a business decision. If Gamers were there,
they would have made it. How much investment do you expect them to make when
only 1% of the world wide Desktop uses linux and possibly less than 10% of
that 1% are gamers?

I mean Mac Gamers don't complain as much when they have higher market shares.

~~~
shmerl
If he is so threatened, his business decision should be to do something about
it. Valve did, and push Linux gaming quit a lot. Epic do it very lazily. Good
thing their Unreal engine works on Linux, but they didn't put a lot of effort
in it. Lot's was done by third party and community developers to make it work.

------
sand500
Hopefully this shows others that you can make successful games without pay to
win mechanics.

~~~
tudelo
Of course there are games that already have proven this, most notably League
of Legends (which is also mentioned in the article).

~~~
wnevets
Don't you need to pay for "champs" in LoL? That sounds very P2W to me.

~~~
minimaxir
All champions, including the free ones on rotation, are balanced with each
other (in _theory_ ); there is no real-money-only-champion with blatantly-
boosted stats as is often in more P2W variants.

See Jarwain's comment in a sister thread.

------
mbesto
> Epic grossed a $3 billion profit for this year

What does this even mean? Net income? Top line gross profit (meaning minus
COGS), which is normally like 80% GM for heavily software enabled businesses?
Ugh, tech reporters.

~~~
jjeaff
Yes, gross profit is usually understood as revenue minus cogs. But it doesn't
seem like the reporter is using it correctly here.

~~~
mbesto
I'm about 63%* sure the reporter is referring to revenue.

* made up number

~~~
iiv
Revenue and profit are two entirely different things. If it says profit, I
feel like it's more likely it's profit rather than revenue.

~~~
mbesto
You must be new to TechCrunch articles.

------
ineedasername
I'm really happy they're so successful. My son loves it, and from my
perspective it's "healthier" than more realistic games like Call of Duty (for
his age, I mean. nothing inherently wrong with CoD). All that said, I really
don't get the appeal. Although I come from a gaming history that values deep
and lore-heavy CRPG & ARPG games. From that perspective I don't see a lot of
depth to fortnite, where success seems driven by twitch reflexes and very
similar end-games for most matches. That said I love the temporary special
features they do. My son & I had a blast jetting around, sniping each other
when rocket packs were available, and The infinity gauntlet tie-in was really
fun. Anyway, good on Epic!

------
beastman82
Tim Sweeney is a good person, good for him

~~~
limaoscarjuliet
I can confirm. We wrote couple of games together in 1995-98 (Fire Fight being
the biggest). He is genuinely a good guy.

~~~
z0r
Fire Fight! That's a blast from the past. I remember being amazed by how cool
it looked and felt to play when I was 12 or 13.

~~~
limaoscarjuliet
Yup, been some fun to write. We did it in Cracow Poland, no internet, barely
any money, these were times!

------
stupidbird
Fortnite makes over a million dollars a day... ON iOS ALONE.

They've built a money machine.

------
bufferoverflow
I'm surprised it made so much money. The game is free. Do people really pay
much for the skins/characters?

~~~
ihuman
You can also buy something called a "battlepass", which gives you access to
additional challenges every week. By completing these challenges, you can earn
additional cosmetic items.

------
disishhsha
$3B profit doesn’t really seem consistent with $15B valuation. Tech companies
these days seem valued at 20x revenue or more. Why would they bother raising
$1.25B at that price?

I suppose Fortnite is a fad, so there is a pessimistic case to be made to cash
in as much as possible.

~~~
ethbro
The impression I get is that the video game industry is extremely hit / miss.

Hence the large graveyard of publishers and developers who at one time made
excellent, well-selling games. (E.g. Interplay Games)

Money comes cheaply at times of hits. Money comes much more expensively at
times of misses. So it behooves Epic to build up a war chest if they can.

~~~
disishhsha
It does speak to a pretty conservative mindset - when you just made $3B cash
free and clear, selling some of that golden goose for $1.25B.

------
arnm
Guess everyone got a nice bonus this holiday season jeez

~~~
joejerryronnie
By "everyone" I assume you mean investors and upper management.

~~~
pageandrew
Eh its a tech company. Bonuses usually make their way down to the lower ranks
too.

~~~
user5994461
Meaning they will be provided with free beverages.

~~~
joejerryronnie
And my favorite perk - “unlimited vacation”. Nevermind the social stigma is so
strong against taking vacation that employees use far less than if they were
just given a certain number of vacation days.

~~~
techsin101
True story .. took 1 PTO per month.. took total of 3 in 4 months I was told
I'm abusing it and no longer available to me

------
thosakwe
Unreal Engine is honestly awesome. I recently purchased an AAA game called “DB
FighterZ,” built on UE, and the game experience is top-notch.

It piqued my interest in game programming once again.

------
ksec
One of the best thing about Fortnite is EPIC porting back all the work and
improvement to Unreal Engine, if any of those Unreal Engine Release note
improvement seems crazy, since Fortnite it has been insane. And there are
still many more to come.

At this stage Makes me wonder if Unreal Engine will ever get a major
competitor for AAA games. Even Konami are ditching the Fox engine and moving
to Unreal.

------
Reedx
> ...has popularized the battle royale category — think Lord of the Flies
> meets Hunger Games — almost single-handedly...

Almost single-handedly? This is a bizarre claim and it's like rewriting
history.

~~~
alexeldeib
Besides PUBG, who else has done this in a successful way? Fortnite wasn’t the
original but it blows the success of PUBG out of the water at this point. I’m
okay with “PUBG + Fortnite” ~= “almost single handedly”.

I think the key word in that quote is popularized — even if earlier games did
it, these are the two to demonstrate widespread appeal.

~~~
ehsankia
The order in video games, as far as I can make it was:

Minecraft (hunger game mod) > DayZ/H1Z1 > PUBG > Fortnite

At each step, the genre grew by 1 or 2 orders or magnitude. So while Fortnite
is by far the largest BR game now, if you look at the log-graph, they each had
an almost equal impact on getting to where we are today and are an important
part of the genre's history.

~~~
vanattab
I am pretty sure there was an Arma mod that directly inspired pubg in there
somewhere. Maybe even older then then hunger games mod.

Edit: Oh I just looked it up. The mod was PUBG. I just realized it was the
same guy who made it. It was released as a mod for Arma in 2015 by a player
who went by the handle "PlayerUnknown". So I guess it was after the minecraft
mod.

------
lupinglade
Now finish UT4!

~~~
flor1s
UT4 got killed by the success of Fortnite :(

------
yonatron
"Valve", not "Value"!!

------
usaphp
What does HN people think on the whole idea of stealing concept from PUBG? I
am kind of divided on this topic.

~~~
PurpleBoxDragon
I don't really see it any different than stealing the concept of FPS from
companies that came before, or from stealing the concept of video games from
the original creators. I see no issue with it, much like I see no issue with
all sorts of games borrowing from LOTR (or from other sources that eventually
trace their way back to LOTR). Even PUBG stole the concept from others. It
reminds me a lot of Hunger Games actual battles (not the teenage romance angst
portions), and Hunger Games effectively stole the idea from elsewhere. (And
likely I'm missing links in the chain of who stole what from who, and I don't
even like the idea of calling it stealing.)

~~~
thedaemon
It's all literally the name of a film and novel, Battle Royale.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Royale_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Royale_\(film\))

------
lanevorockz
All gaming companies could have made huge profits. Most game companies opted
to be condescending and preach personal politics into peoples hobbies. It's
not about fun but it's about education.

~~~
techsin101
Instead of working on a game for few years and releasing something innovative
they want to release new but really 1.2 version every year with 20 dlcs in
between. We Map editor - nope

Lan gameplay - nope

In a way counter strike is better

