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Comment by pkilgore | Hacker News Reader

Love this because it shows two things 1) competent people are handling problems and 2) they actually care.

A whole lot better than spoon feeding customers bullshit for weeks while hamstringing your product rather than investing in it (looks at EA, mumbles about SimCity).

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Lets not labor under the impression that Epic invested resources in fixing these issues purely out of the goodness of their hearts.

The success or failure of the recent Sim City game was hardly EA's number one concern. Fortnite, however, is probably extremely important to the folks at Epic.

I'm not defending EA here, but it was definitely in Epic's best interests not to piss off Fortnite's player base given that there are some other, ahem, similar titles on the market right now.

Why do you think a game that sells for ~$50 was not important to EA, but a game that sells for $0 is extremely important to Epic?

Epic is a pretty big operation too.

For SimCity, most of the sales were already done, so EA could have chosen to do the bare minimum because they would only see small returns for those fix. Whereas for Epic, the business model is different since it's F2P, so they'll need the player to keep coming back so they keep buying stuff.

Because Free For All games are really popular right now, and they want their engine (Unreal) to be a competitive choice for these and other massively multiplayer games.

Unreal is already an extremely competitive choice for multiplayer games (read: the best choice). They are putting resources to solving these problems because they are making millions of dollars from "free" players.

Unlike EA, Epic does not have a diverse portfolio of games on different devices. EA can absorb a flop while Epic is clearly pushing people to install their PC launcher through their free Battle Royale to get potential customers to pay for their paid content (Fortnite, in-game purchases, other games, etc.)

SimCity was the most successful game of all time on the Origin platform. Anyone who claims it was a failure is ignoring the things that actually matter, the money, in deference to meaningless (at least in terms of business) issues like the experience of gamers. Nothing is better news to a game publisher than mountains of gamers who pre-ordered were discouraged by launch day troubles (caused by not spending more for more resources, the game was on Amazon and providing more resources was a few button clicks away but would cost money) and who aren't coming back. "Look at the playerbase dwindling!" sounds exactly like "look at our server costs dropping!" for any game that isn't based on subscriptions or microtransactions.

1. competent people are handling the problems

2. they actually care

3. they enjoy what they are doing

One thing I really miss working solo is working with a team of smart folks to solve a complex problem together. It's so damned fun.

These three things (plus your addendum of working together to solve stupidly hard problems) are basically why I love going to work every day.

(I work at Epic on Team Online, aka the team that this whole PM is about.)

Glad to hear you're loving it. And thanks for detailed yet fun write-ups like this. Keep on keeping on!

Epic game is not a publicly traded company and there is a lot of things you can say when you're private.

I would have thought it was the opposite way around! Private companies always seem so tight lipped especially being that they dont have to answer to shareholders.

You're not going to say to shareholders "please give me your money and also we're looking for expert because we lack expertise in the product we're doing"

That is an interesting state of affairs isn't it? Why do we, the world, expect that large, supposedly more professional companies, communicate less honestly?

> Why do we, the world, expect that large, supposedly more professional companies, communicate less honestly?

Because being honest can hurt the share price.

Particularly, it can hurt the share price on an horizon over which the C-level execs have their performance measured.

But if this shows anything, it shows that the company has people who are on stand-by and who constantly monitor and optimize their product. Also, the fact that "the product" they are developing is not a consumable (think processors) there would be no recall cost for example, how can that hurt the shares ?

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