For Epic Games, milking the Fortnite cash cow takes priority

As Epic Games said in a statement, the reason for discontinuing support for Infinity Blade is that it has become too difficult to meet its own standard for the games series. Users who have purchased one of the Infinity Blade games in the past may continue to download the game to their iPhone or iPad, according to Epic Games. However, the in-game shop has been deactivated.

Although it's not uncommon for developers to stop supporting older games after a long time, there's a more than bitter aftertaste here. Epic Games has lost a lot of its importance as a game developer in recent years, but in recent months Fortnite has made Epic Games famous again and made a lot of money - and if you have a lot, you always want more.

Milking the cash cow as best as it can

It seems as if Epic Games is sacrificing one game after another in favor of the current cash cow Fortnite. Thus, the developer is dropping other games by the dozen in order to be able to supply further masses of content for the Battle Royale game. On the one hand, so that the game doesn't get boring, and on the other hand, of course, to make a lot of money selling digital goods.

This is shown not least by the decision to offer Fortnite Mobile for Android via its own store. The game has to be loaded onto your smartphone using a special launcher via sideloading. The advantage, for Epic, is that it doesn't have to share its profits with Google for in-game purchases where the developer is the main earner. On iOS, Epic Games had no other choice, as Apple only allows distribution through its own store.

The other victims of the Fortnite hype

But Infinity Blade is not the only victim of the current Fortnite hype. Earlier this year, Epic Games discontinued the MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) game Paragon, in which the player fights their way into the base of an opponent from a third-person view in the style of League of Legends or Smite. The reason: Epic can't manage to balance the game properly because it wants to focus on the development of Fortnite.

Also recently, the reboot of Unreal Tournament was canceled. Here, too, the reason given was a desire to concentrate entirely on Fortnite instead of launching new projects.

But what does the company do if the hype about Fortnite falls away? In the past, the income from the Unreal Engine kept people the company afloat despite the rather lean game portfolio. However, other systems like the Frostbite-Engine and Unity provide competition.

Epic Game Store as a second revenue stream

Apparently, the recently launched Epic Game Store is supposed to help here as another mainstay. The aim is to counter what is probably the biggest competitor, Valve and the Steam Store, by offering games from other manufacturers for sale.

Admittedly, developers are supposed to get more of the sales revenue here, but a forum, messenger, craft shop and more, as there is at Steam, will not be on offer at Epic. Steam simply has more to offer and must use its revenues to maintain the services and at the same time continue to work on improvements.

Epic Games: listen to the community!

Personally, I was very upset that Epic Games only offers Fortnite outside the Play Store. The hassle of the extra launcher is just annoying. So you always have to start the launcher before starting the game to check for updates. If you forget to do that, you can look at the loading screen for a minute on Fortnite before you are kicked out of the game if you still have to download a patch.

And Epic Games on the PC? Even at times when I played a lot of Paragon, Epic's inability or lack of willingness to listen to the community was repeatedly evident. Not only with the game itself, which it could have turned around if it had worked more with the community. Even the launcher itself is a horror.

Here you had to download the complete game for updates. However, files were not actively exchanged, no, the 40 GB game was completely downloaded and only then were the data overwritten. So you always had to have twice as much space on your hard drive as the game was actually big. This problem has existed for several years.

I guess all that complaining doesn't help. As someone, like me, who calls many games from different manufacturers his own, accommodates Steam, Origin, UPlay, the Epic Launcher and the Battle.net Launcher on the PC, maybe I should boycott Epic Games?

What about you? How many launchers do you have on your PC? Do you play Fortnite at all? Let us know in the comments.