Marvin

SiTime said:

Marvin said:

According to a recent interview, Epic still spends more than they make though so once the one-hit-wonder game finally loses player interest, their situation will be different.

Did the definition of “one-hit-wonder” change recently? Maybe I’m showing my age a bit (and I know the company is a very different company in 2025), but: I’ve been playing Epic Games hit after Epic Games hit since the 90s. I still load up Unreal Tournament 2004 every now and then and that hit came out back in… well, 2004, lol.

Relatively, low single-digit million copies (< $200m) is a negligible amount of sales vs Fortnite ($5b+/year) and this was how Unreal Tournament and early Gears of War sold. Epic's revenue is over 90% from Fortnite:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1234185/epic-games-annual-revenue-segment/
https://www.tweaktown.com/news/103306/over-75-of-epic-games-store-revenue-comes-from-first-party-titles-like-fortnite/index.html

If people stopped playing (or just paying for it), the company would struggle to survive at the size it is now. It has to happen eventually.

They have been trying to grow their store to generate revenue but with 12% or lower margins, it would have to scale much higher to be enough. They'd need to be a dominant store on mobile.

SiTime said:

Marvin said:

It's crazy how such a repetitive, mindless game has lasted so long and generated so much revenue.

Although you might be showing your age as well because that was very much an ‘Old Man, Kids These Days, Back In My Day, Don’t Know What Real Games Are, Get Off My Lawn’ type of comment, lol.

Young adults play it and stream it and it's still a terrible, repetitive game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHmblPPOXbg

The way people behave when playing it isn't healthy either:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xGVEv1Heqo

It's clear why it would have some appeal but not 650 million registered players and 30 million active per month after 7 years. This is more than GTA.

Fortnite will die out eventually and this will leave Epic with a massive funding shortfall and this is what they aren't being honest about. Epic is trying to position themselves as a platform so that they can generate revenue from other creators the same way that Apple and Valve do because it's key to their long-term survival, while dishonestly trying to convince people that what Apple and Valve are doing is wrong. Their game engine helps them in this regard because it helps tie big game developers' products to their company's success. Big game studios need to be wary of this but they are all being convinced to play along by getting a good rendering engine. If there was an open, industry-standard rendering engine, big developers wouldn't even consider using Unreal Engine.

I don't know why the big game companies haven't done this already - EA, Valve, Take Two (Rockstar), Microsoft, Ubisoft, CD Projekt RED, Crytek etc. They all have their own engines with varying quality and have to maintain them. At some point in the past, the engine was a competitive aspect for a company. These days it's just a headache to maintain them while also building huge products in parallel. Instead of working together, a lot of them are just giving up on internal tools and buying into Unreal when they could build a better product between them on open standards without royalties and without depending on a 3rd party company staying in business.

camber said:

Sweeney ought to be considering how many people will never but EPIC products because of his conduct!

Not enough unfortunately, Fortnite is still one of the most played games in the world:

https://fortnite.gg/player-count
https://www.demandsage.com/fortnite-statistics/

Around 30 million daily active players, 650 million player accounts. $40 billion in lifetime revenue.

This is what gave Epic the ability to lose $1b on a lawsuit.

According to a recent interview, Epic still spends more than they make though so once the one-hit-wonder game finally loses player interest, their situation will be different.

It's crazy how such a repetitive, mindless game has lasted so long and generated so much revenue.

Epic is also trying to get big game studios hooked on Unreal Engine and their store, which will tie their products to their company success. Apple has options to undermine this but they need to partner with the studios.

The likely worst outcome is that Apple is forced to lower their fee to 15% to avoid big developers processing fees externally. There's a single digit percentage that is break-even for any developer/publisher processing revenue at scale and as long as the fee is at a reasonable level, they will use Apple's setup.

fishwhisperer said:

Why the Mac Mini has the headphone jack in the front but the Mac Studio has it on the back is baffling to me. The only reason I have to move my Mac Studio is precisely to connect my headphones, and even though I don't do that often, it is always an irritant to me.

If the internal speakers aren't needed, an extension cable left plugged in would save having to reach around the back every time:

https://www.amazon.com/Headphone-Extension-Nanxudyj-Smartphones-Tablets/dp/B08MDQ4QL1/?th=1

AppleInsider said:

Offering to incorporate Vision Pro support into Godot offers Apple a few good benefits. For a start, the initiative could encourage developers to use Godot, an established engine, to create more content for the Apple Vision Pro itself. 

The decision for Apple to bring Vision Pro support to Godot may seem a bit unusual, but it's one that does make sense. At least, if you consider the current game development landscape.

The two main game engines used for development are Unreal Engine and Unity, but Godot is growing in popularity. As a free game engine, it does away with any need for developers to pay licenses to Epic or Unity to use the engines commercially.

The open-source nature also makes it easier for people to contribute to the project as a whole, or to add their own code to customize it for their own creations.

Apple may also find Godot as needing assistance in developing the visionOS support, since it isn't being worked on by a commercial entity. Epic and Unity both have teams of developers working on mixed reality tech for their engines in a paid capacity, while Godot relies on volunteer efforts.

While Godot is getting popular with developers, especially cash-strapped indies and hobbyists, it has yet to really be used for a major release. So far, it has enjoyed successes with games like Buckshot Roulette and Cassette Beasts, but even these are moderate and far from the revenues of mainstream titles. 

The main issue with Godot for immersive content is it doesn't have a fast, high quality rendering engine, which is especially needed for AR/VR as it has to draw at 90FPS+.

They asked the community for help with this as they don't have many rendering system engineers. Most of them work for the big companies like Epic, Unity and the big game studios on their internal engines:

https://wccftech.com/godot-engine-creator-will-go-with-full-path-tracing-instead-of-a-lumen-like-hybrid-nanite-like-system-not-planned/

Someone made a test renderer for Godot, this has no denoiser, caching or complex shading support:



The focus on integration with the big game engines seems less important. AR/VR experiences are more cinematic than interactive so Apple could build a basic engine with the main focus being a fast, high quality renderer.

The hard parts for community developers to make are the rendering system, compilers and the platform support.

The other parts of the engine are much easier to take care of, even physics, particles and volumetric shading can be done by community developers.

If Apple had a rendering and deployment system, people could build the scene in any game engine and code it there. Then they just need to convert the scene to a compatible format for their rendering API. This would save having to modify 3rd party engines directly and in a lot of cases, people would be able to use Apple's core engine directly. This would have a faster turnaround to being production-ready.

Apple's immersive dinosaur demo doesn't need a huge game engine. It just needs an animated model in a standard scene format and some interaction.

People don't want to get locked into the Swift language as it's not well-supported across platforms like C#, C++, Python etc so having multiple language runtime support would be needed but the API can be small. Mainly it's moving objects in a scene and playing animations, then the renderer draws it.

Apple doesn't have to build this alone, they can collaborate with Microsoft, Nvidia, Valve, Pixar and others. This can become an industry standard rendering library and would give a lot more competition to Unity and Epic because it can spawn dozens of larger engines that rival them on visual quality.

ITGUYINSD said:

"Apple is estimated to sell around 320,000 iPhones in the US every day"?  That seems high.  Every 10 days, they sell 3.2M iPhones?  Every 100 days they sell 32M phones?  That's 10% of the entire US population every 100 days, and we all know most people have cheaper Androids.  

Maybe they based it on Apple selling around 250m iPhones worldwide and the Americas region is 40% of the revenue = 100m iPhones / 365 = 273k and the US skews higher for iPhone sales. However, this region includes South America and Canada.

US smartphone sales are around 125m units:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/619811/smartphone-unit-shipments-in-the-us/

Apple has a 50% marketshare so it will be closer to 62m iPhones in the US per year or 171k per day. 1.5m iPhones would only be enough for 8 days.

In Apple's early days, Tim Cook said they didn't like to hold inventory because it was like storing milk and loses value every week. But they are a different company now, much bigger and more resilient to value loss on inventory. Storing 1-2 months of inventory of Macs and iPhones would be good to cover uncertain circumstances.