Seems like buying games to remove them from your competitor is a scummier thing to do.

  • reksas@sopuli.xyz
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    1 day ago

    its not about making better product for epic. its about removing competition so they dont have to.

    • Lfrith@lemmy.ca
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      15 hours ago

      Epic approach is the typical venture capitalist run company approach of running at loss then once they get market share start jacking up the prices.

      Can’t really trust a company until they are actually profitable with a functioning sustainable business model. We’ve seen it time and time again where even Facebook launched without ads and look at it now.

      • BilboBargains@lemmy.world
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        9 hours ago

        There’s an argument for using these services in the early stages because they often operate at a loss in the hope that they will secure a monopoly in the future. The trick is to immediately abandon them when they jack the price up. I recently heard that in the food delivery space virtually no one is turning a profit.

        • Nugscree@lemmy.world
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          9 hours ago

          Even worse, it’s costing the food places you order from money. We have a lot of restaurants here that will give you free stuff if you do not use Thuisbezorgd which is owned by Just Eat Takeaway. They also own the American Grubhub since 2021 and are also active in the UK, Germany, Canada and the Netherlands.

      • Stern@lemmy.world
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        12 hours ago

        If they didn’t have fortnite and unreal engine money propping them up it would have closed by now. Hasn’t been profitable since it opened in 2018.

        • SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world
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          11 hours ago

          If they didn’t have Fortnite they probably wouldn’t even have the money to dump into Unreal Engine to make it where it is today. They probably would ask Tencent for more money and Tencent would have bought the rest of the company. The game engine business is just not as profitable as Fortnite, just look at Unity.

    • M137@lemmy.world
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      16 hours ago

      They could remove that competition by making a better product, but that is somehow always the last thing they’d ever think about. It never stops being so fucking weird with all these business people who go to great lengths to do shitty stuff and always end up making it worse for everyone except a quick buck for themselves, even though they could easily make a lot more for a longer time by simply doing a good job. But no, that would require anything other than immediate greed. Absolutely vile people.

      • Lfrith@lemmy.ca
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        14 hours ago

        Their approach feels like how lot of companies are currently focusing on AI to market to investors and AI data centers directly, and ignoring what consumers want assuming their opinions are of little relevance. Like how Microsoft doesn’t care if people dont want copilot, and keeps talking up the corporate side with the assumption that they know people will use Microsoft no matter what.

        Which is much like Epic with them focusing more on giving money to publishers to lock up titles in the past like Final Fantasy 7 Remake from Square Enix over concerning themselves with the demographic of people buying the product.

        Its not a consumer focused business model, because the idea of consumers not buying it is impossible to comprehend. Their headlines never seem to be around how its better for the consumer and the benefits to using them over the competition.

        • reksas@sopuli.xyz
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          3 hours ago

          we are products and cattle for them, not customers. Their customers are other rich people they associate with and exchange favors and assets with.

          I wonder if this is how it would be to live in world dominated by vampires.