Fortnite is making hundreds of millions of dollars a month{1}. IDK what "free to play crap" is, but if it can pull in over a billion a year I think most companies would be happy to have it on their ledger.
It's simple. 99.9% of the users play without paying a dime, and the game has to cater to the "whales" that spend thousands.
That's fine when you peddle digital hats, but if they want to open a store, they want paying customers in it don't they? Most actual games they'd want to sell need to be paid for upfront... and I don't see the average Fortnite (or any other free to play abomination) player doing that.
My kids have put more of their money into Fortnite stuff in 1 year than they have paid for in total for any other AAA title game. So have all of their friends.
It isn't whales, its the 10-18 yo disposable money. They get into the stage where physical toys don't hold interest, their birthday and allowance money piles up and social/peer pressure comes into play.
Lower posts have shown that your math is off on this 99.9% thing you made up, so we're not going to address that.
We're talking about user base and network effect. Fortnite is your gateway to getting people to install Epic Game Store. You've already shown people will pay real human money to buy digital hats, so use those digital hats to get them to install EGS. (you just give a free skin every month if you have an EGS account. easy peasy). Now you've got a few million installs of your platform. Pretty good starting place to start selling the other games if you ask me.
Sounds like you just have a lot of problems with FTP and Pay to Win type games based on how you talk about them. That's fine, you don't need to play them, but the rest of the gaming community seems to be using them pretty regularly. Don't assume everyone else is like you.
Yeah, you'd think, but this survey of 1,000 players said 68.8% had spent money on in-game purchases.
Maybe they somehow managed to target just the 0.1% of players who spend money (according to you), but it seems highly unlikely that the numbers are that low.
Valve got the initial userbase for Steam via, among other things, giving away "free to play crap" as well as their award-winning Portal. It was several years before my Steam account had a single purchase on it, Valve correctly guessed that users who never buy anything at all help generate those enormous userbase numbers and don't cost that much to service so it's fine.
Hmm, wasn't it Half Life 2 (paid for) and only then their award-winning Portal (also paid for)? There were no or very few free to play abominations back then.
Portal was free on Steam. That was the incentive. Heard about this cool game but not sure you can justify full price for what sounds like a weird tech demo? Install Steam and it's free (for a limited time). Most people I know who play some games but not many installed Steam precisely to try Portal for free. Valve has doubtless made back the investment many times over, even if you ignore the fact that Portal was already wildly successful and so didn't need to earn Valve one single extra penny.
