"Giving away free games seems counterintuitive as a strategy, but companies spend money to acquire users into games," said Sweeney. "For about a quarter of the price that it costs to acquire users through Facebook ads or Google Search Ads, we can pay a game developer a lot of money for the right to distribute their game to our users, and we can bring in new users to the Epic Games Store at a very economical rate.

Good for Epic.

"And you might think that this would hurt the sales prospects of games on the Epic Game Store, but developers who give away free games actually see an upsurge in the sale of their paid games on the store, just because their free game raises awareness. And it's so much that often developers, when they're about to launch a new game, come with us wanting to work closely on a timed release of a free game, just to drive user awareness of their next game. That's been an awesome thing. And it's been by far the most cost effective aspect of the Epic Games Store."

Good for developers, that have decent enough games.

"We spent a lot of money on exclusives," said Sweeney. "A few of them worked extremely well. A lot of them were not good investments, but the free games program has been just magical."

Exclusives, of course this is the expected result, because that how game publishing/marketing works. People in this thread talking like publishers make a lot of money on 80% of their released games. (<-- it's not, in case you did not get it. ) I think it's just Tim Sweeney's way of saying, we will adjust our approach in the future, like what any publicly traded CEO would do.

cause commercial rental is a commitment, if you can't find another company to take over your lease, chances are you have to pay the majority of left over amount + penalty + restoration. Licensor commitments are similar but probably on tech/software licensing, ie. server rentals, Maya/Speedtree licensing agreement for the site, whatever cloud service they use for backup and share stuff, etc. Those at bigger scale aren't paid year to year like your regular indie studio just subscribe to Adobe/Autodesk for app uses per seat.

it's viral game what do you expect?

very typical for people that never even run or host their own server from data center or even cloud service.

live streaming is worse in bandwidth consumption compare to youtube with same resolution input to output. Like youtube can do whatever they like to keep the outgoing low even if you encode according to spec. But streaming with the demand of like 4~6s delay their 2nd pass to try lower the output bitrate is just not gonna be as good as youtube. That's why twitch still don't have 4k stream, they have new beta programs thanks to newer codec on newer GPU, as otherwise their data center is gonna get crushed hard.

Suddenly not interested in the article itself when it detect my ad-blocker.

Mark my word, once Gabe pass it's gonna be very very different. We have very different things to worried about, like climate change, but on software side and tech we shouldn't rely on monopolies. Valve was kept in that state because all the competition didn't actually put up a fight worth extra investment. The windows store pushed valve to develop SteamOS and Proton, they also back off on some revenue split policy because of EGS's deals. (Let's be honest, not all players care about which launcher they use, as long as they get better deals and can play the game they want.)

And to my experience, Steam's recent years' updates to store/client are not something I like as well.

• I don't like the gamification of sales event etc.
• I don't like the new unlimited scroll type, they backed off a bit and become like 3 pages long until you hit the top/popular/sales part.
• I also don't like some of the UI changes(ie the downloads/library mixed together and not separate item)
• I hated the auto start live streaming thing, if there is option to turn off that please let me know.

For EGS,

• their search sucks
• library page sucks, you can't really organize your free games/purchased games etc.
• auto updates are pretty on par so that's okay.
• their friends/etc also sucks.(not that I care much but at least it's far worse than steam one.)
• I like that they adopted Nintendo's gold coin reward type to encourage consumer to purchase there.
• games from other big publisher usually do require install their clients as well, which sucks. (it's similar on steam as well.)

It's because Nintendo still haven't implement server client networking and host their own dedicated servers. It's why people paid Nintendo Online to play multiplayer Nintendo games are getting scammed.(even Capcom or EA/Epic did batter job on switch then Nintendo.)

That's why you get no real online plays, blame Nintendo's internal policy, not networking complexity.

Master as in the production term like gold master. He stolen the first prints before it hits the shelf, thus a "master" thief.

Look at the steps we have to go through? Firefox container tabs just for google products, have to switch to DDG as default after every update, have to keep the browser extensions updated, have to use vpn, tried to not use google open auth when register on 3rd party sites, have to clean the cookies regularly, have to click through those cookie settings visiting a site. Oh, and have to go around the amp link when trying to share a searched image/page result.

After reading all the comments, I'm just gonna say that if you don't allow kids to tinker and do their thing, they will learn a lot slower and your "investment" will be left mostly unused. (age range proper hardware/OS of course.) The school policy is not doing the kids a favor, it's a waste of time and tax money that you cultivate a generation of people get used to chrome book and google apps. That's the ultimate purpose for school license being cheaper.

so similar to say, a redditor trying to sound smart by googling and debating another while both has no qualification on that topic, got it.

The common stance against DRM is not the "entitled" part, but to be able to keep playing it even if the companies involved are gone. For games with Denuvo or other DRM there are things like these to consider:

• the Denuvo company's server shuts off(whatever reason, blackout, maintenance,etc), your DRM now can't verify if you have legit copy or not.
• the game company shuts off, no one left to patch out DRM, your game is in limbo. (cause they have to pay Denuvo to keep the licensing/verification. )
• your internet went off.(this part depends on game and how often they need to refresh the "valid" token)

With games that have no DRM you have none of the above concerns.