The Epic Games Primer

https://www.matthewball.vc/all/epicgamesprimermaster

by homarp • 6 years ago

74 17 6 years ago

matthewball.vc

paulryanrogers• 6 years ago

TLDR a breakdown of each of the ways Epic is making money and expanding its empire in the present.

STRML• 6 years ago

JFYI, pressing `esc` on your page takes me to a squarespace login page, which was rather jarring.

obilgic• 6 years ago

why did you press `esc` in the first place?

vulcan01• 6 years ago

Many (including me) have remapped their caps lock key to esc, for Vim :)

NortySpock• 6 years ago

What, you don't hit it reflexively whenever the computer pops up something weird that you don't want?

"Nope, none of that, don't want pop-ups or questions. Whatever it is, I'm canceling out of your dialog box. Nope!"

dreadlordbone• 6 years ago

thats standard on every squarespace website

Jonnston• 6 years ago

This was a really well written essay! Great breakdown of Sweeney’s strategy!

dbish• 6 years ago

Great series, really liked the exploration of their flywheel and I wish there was more writing like this about other companies and how they are poised. Unreal's moves into the movie industry and their detail-focused engine upgrades recently have been the most surprising but compelling strategic pieces they've recently added

arminiusreturns• 6 years ago

But if Epic is successful in building out its ‘flywheel’, it will even more dramatically reshape the digital world - from data and privacy rights, to emergent technical standards, the distribution of profits, and the very ways in which humans work and relax.

Give me a fucking break from the bullshit please!!!

1propionyl• 6 years ago

Time to rebrand as WeGame...

sfRattan• 6 years ago

The article is a reasonable summary of Epic's accelerating ascent, but little factual inaccuracies littered throughout smell like investor hype and some bits of tortured prose stink of advertising copy.

The whole thing feels like it was written for investors who want to know just enough about a topic to pat themselves on the back for the 'value' their decision making will bring to a related enterprise.

cyjyar2• 6 years ago

Agreed. An example of this would be the mention of rival engine Unity in part 6:

"But Unity, the most widely deployed engine for small/mobile games, deploys a flat “per seat” fee for its engine. As a result, for users with a Unity Pro license, even a game with $1,000 in revenue would generate revenue for the company."

This is inacurrate, in fact Unity previously waived these fees for the first few thousand dollars of revenue earned, and with their current plan it looks like licencing is free of charge for dev generating less than 100k/year.

Source:

https://store.unity.com/compare-plans

https://unity3d.com/unity/faq

tomc1985• 6 years ago

Why the hell does epic need financing when they're sitting on a huge pile of Fortnite money?

granzymes• 6 years ago

Good essay, but it felt like the six sections weren't meant to be read consecutively. Seeing entire paragraphs reused is a very jarring experience.

l0b0• 6 years ago

The lines labelled "Funding" from Fortnite to literally every other part of the flywheel looks like a big risk.

aml183• 6 years ago

If you don’t want to read the essays, I published my notes on them.

https://www.arilewis.com/aris-posts/notes-on-epic-games

jzelinskie• 6 years ago

These are actually very good notes and totally dismiss the VC fluff from the articles. Nice work!

The Epic Games Primer

Related Stories