Fortnite is still a massive cash cow, but man they burn actual billions for the Epic Store which still isn't very epic and is missing most basic features.
It's actually mind blowing how much money they spend on user acquisition while the thing is still full of bugs!
Why does it take ages to open? Why did downloading some games launch another launcher that downloaded the game again? Why did it sometimes not switch to idle when in the background and keep wasting CPU? Why does the UI sometimes just randomly not work? Why is every interaction with it so slow? Why does it get exponentially slower the more Unreal Engine assets you have? Why is that even in the same launcher? Why can't I do basic things like open game pages in a new tab? Does anyone at Epic actually use this thing?
Most importantly, why did they do the stupidest PR moves imaginable, by "stealing" games that were already announced for another platform?
This is basic stuff, it doesn't take 5 years to figure it out! They had a once in forever chance to kill the unnecessary 30% tax booth that is Steam and they blew it by shipping this terrible software.
There is a curious phenomenon in decent sized companies where the more money they have the more problems they have. When flush with cash the middle managers love to overspend and grow mini empires in the promise that one day the product will be finished, but it never will because the warring empires require it being unfinished to justify their ongoing existence.
Things have to get amazingly bad before such empires are dismantled and the product fixed, generally something existential for the company as a whole.
The Epic Store almost certainly could not be fixed without simply rebooting with a whole new team with the incentive structure setup to make it work.
It's a damn shame the only way to get a good product is to find a company that is still in hustle mode -- once its revenue/moat is secure it all goes to offshore/acquihire hell.
Yeah at a certain point it seems like the bean counters really take over and the easiest way to grow profits is to cut costs... except a certain point there is only so much you can logically cut or optimize. After that you are just cutting the product/service/business to the bone. You can remove the suspension in a race car to save weight, but it's a bad idea.
I am reminded of a Steve Jobs quote:
""It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.
They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers."
It is shockingly slow. If you go to the store tab it freezes up for 20+ seconds, just to show a few small jpegs and some text. It's baffling to see such poor performance from a games company that's used to accomplishing more complicated tasks in less than a 60th of a second.
It gets even more cursed if you look under the hood. You've probably seen Electron, right? Well they didn't invent that so clearly they can't use it. How about we use an old version of Unreal Engine, then use this to embed an even older version of Chromium Embedded Framework, and then we use that to render the UI with software rendering only? Genius!
