And that with anachronism. It gets worse if considering that after 15 years, shopping cart projects with permissible licenses had become a reality.

"This first release is light on features. Think of it as a speedboat and not a yacht! Though it does have advanced digital commerce technology such as a shopping cart." - Tim Sweeney

Give them a break, it's an advanced technology. Definitely not something we implement in college Programming 101.

Every time you go trough the purchase loop you affirm the habbit of buying from them. So it was not a high priority, they probably only added it for good pr.

This is why you have to purchase games that are free instead of just adding them to your library.

It works on enough people to establish a future bussiness model. Epic game store runs on a loss. Backed by enough money to keep losing till they believe to have caught a big enough base to turn it around, stop giving handouts and jack up the prices.

That works on people? I stopped getting the free games because that was annoying

I'm curious what the economics at Epic are.

I know Fortnite was paying the bills for years, but does it still carry the same weight?

Virtually all multiplayer games atrophy because over time, you have to cater for long haul playets, which makes the barrier for new players' entry high. (Even if it's not a skill or challenge thing, some long games are just a huge time sink to commit to the story or missing time-sensitive stuff.)

Is it just an endless stream of collabs now to bring in a new demographic each week and hope a few stick?

I know Unreal Engine is a revenue dtiver, but it's one that the market is eager to route around.

Time until their shopping cart works? Like functionally? I'm confused

It took them 6.5 years to implement a shopping cart in their store.

This. There was no loop, the software pissed me off so much I deleted it.

Fortnite still makes ridiculous amounts of money.

Tim just cannot resist talking about Gabe's yacht.

Scamming impressionable kids is the name of the game.

Yea :/ but it was us adults that let it get to this point.

And for some reason game devs keep choosing the unreal engine. If these guys can't code a simple fucking launcher and store front, I struggle to understand why anyone would think their game engine is worth anyone's time.

I struggle to understand why anyone would think their game engine is worth anyone's time.

It's not. But it's easy to use, which makes it easier to outsource 'development' to countries like India.

Otherwise you have to pay people who worked hard to learn coding a relatively decent wage. What a nightmare!

Nobody tell Tim Wheeney that there are 15-minute tutorials about coding a shopping cart.

"programming is hard"

I think it's more a case of douchebag billionaire and/or nepobaby has an idea and nobody around them wants to sabotage their own career by pointing out how stupid it is.

It also doesn't help that the AI psychosis hit Sweeney harder than most.

My home network has it's domains blocked. Good riddance.

How many titles were even on Steam in 2003?

That's before HL2, and it looks like the first third party titles were added in 2005, so I guess it would have just been Half Life 1, Team Fortress Classic, Counter Strike, and maybe a couple other things that are mostly forgotten today.