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Comment by fhood | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.)

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.

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.

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