[glanzwulf]

I'd argue it was a bad play, they gambled on something others had gambled and failed, and just as the rest they didn't even put a dent in the market. All they did was overspent their resources and now have to resort to layoffs.

You mention EA, and they did try to break into the market and left steam for a while... they had the money, the franchises, the personnel and they couldn't do it. Now they're back on steam. Anyone else would look at what happened and would learn from their mistakes.

[myrmidon]

To put things in perspective: They had 2k employees in 2020 and grew to ~6k now.

To me, growing your employee numbers like that seems to be orders of magnitude more costly and risky than licensing some games to give away for marketing.

Having to lay off some people after growing quickly by ~200% does not seem like that big of a failure to me...

PC Magazines in the 2000s also managed to do regular game giveaways just fine (while being much smaller than even 2020-Epic), and I would wager they had razorsharp margins and much less revenue, too.

[jamesgeck0]

It would have been difficult for Epic to learn from from EA and Ubisoft's mistakes as they didn't return to Steam until well after the Epic Store launch.