What is great about capitalism is that anyone can take part in the market place and the best ideas always win out. Don’t like the game store ecosystem? make your own store and compete on an even playing field with a company that loss leads $330 million then laughs it off.
google did this for years with youtube and just look at all the choice we have today if we want to post a video on the internet
Sadly pornhub did the same with porn.
Quantifying “money lost” from people taking something for free that you would otherwise sell is misleading. It’s like, I’m not buying a game but if you’re giving it away, yeah I’ll take a copy. That’s not $70 of lost revenue.
Plus a copy of a game costs epic exactly $0 to produce, if I am not otherwise going to buy it. It’s not like Starbucks giving out free samples, which costs them both materials and time. A game copy is not additional cost to epic. So I would bet the majority of the $330M of “lost money” is including missed game “sales”.
It’s all dumb.
A game copy is not additional cost to epic
It actually is in this instance as they are 3rd party games where epic is paying the sale cost to the developer then giving the game to the consumer for free.
It is analogous to a supermarket buying bread from a bakery then giving it away or heavily discounted to get people in the store.
Plus they’re throwing a bunch of extra money at the devs for exclusivity deals.
