Going out of business because we bought into Epics lies about UEFN

After seeing UEFN’s announcement at GDC we bought the lie. As a game studio with payroll, overhead, taxes and all the expenses that come with running a business we decided to take the risk and invest in Epic Games and UEFN and it was the biggest mistake we ever made.

It all began when we decided to port a game we were working on in Unity over to UEFN. We took 3 months of our time and budget to put together a full futuristic city built from scratch with cutscenes, recorded voice actors and all the bells and whistles that come with a stand alone game. After dealing with broken software with constant crashing, a brutal approval process and an uncaring technical support team we finally get the island published just to never see it on Discovery Page, ever. We lost out in hundreds of thousands of dollars in income we could have made on client work and also the payroll and overhead that comes with game development.

We than began looking into why this happened just to find a Discovery Page overrun with IP theft, clickbait, poorly made clones and all around deceptive Islands geared towards children who come over from Roblox. When asking Epic Games “or at least who we thought were tech support for developers” we were just treaded as disgruntled Fortnite players. We have been disconnected from any chat when we bring up real issues, we were banned from the official Discord channel for bringing up the non existent staff, told over and over that the Discovery Page was working perfectly and more. In our combined 40 years in the industry we have never seen a company treat their developers in such an uncaring and disrespectful way.

I know this sounds like complaining but when we develop stand alone games at least we can see them for sale and download in the store and if not at least we have filters and search options to at least give it a shot. We have moderation to keep scams and IP theft to a minimum, even Epic Games store is moderated with these features so why is Discovery Page the way it is? Why when you go to Epic Games Store do you not see 5000 Only Up clones, thousands of Mr Beast games, blatant IP theft on massive scales as well as deceptive thumbnails and clickbait? Why is there no way to weed these things out on Discovery Page or at least be able to search for something else? Why does Epic Games support for stand alone developers actually seem to know how to do their jobs when the UEFN technical support just seem to know how to deal with disgruntled players? They even have developers reach out to Player Support with issues…

Between a Broken Discovery page, incompetent support “that even locked an Island for a paying client on us recently costing us 2 weeks of pay”, and all the other mistakes and neglect and defending a BROKEN SYSTEM our company is now going out of business because the lies we were sold by Epic Games.

uefn isn’t a tool to make high budget games and also the discovery page existed way before uefn, you should have checked before transitioning to uefn so that’s a mistake on your part XD

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People tried to warn you about your overinvestment into a beta tool and your “feedback style” in the discord, I was one of them. You disregarded all of what was said, and to be honest I am not happy to see this outcome- but when people tried to tell you these things your disregarded us “haters” or something. I hope you guys can bounce back and that this was an eye opening experience for you, but it doesn’t seem like it was.

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That joke of a discord was just as bad as the Joke of a Discovery Page and the simple fact of knowing that Epic does not treat Unreal developers like disgruntled Fortnite players is proof that UEFN was nothing more than a tool to make Fortnite more Roblox like and draw in the millions upon millions of player and dollars without having to suffer any consequences of publishing IP theft, click bait and so on. The creators are left with the lawsuits while Epic keeps their profits and it’s painfully obvious. The thing is I was sold this personally by people at GDC and was told personally things like “You can make games and not have to worry about being flooded out on the Android market” and “There will be great exposure for your games and ideas with a built in player base of adults”. They neglected to say things like “Well, we lack filters and even basic search features so players only get a small choice of games.” and “Our system prioritizes clickbait and children games so we can get more people to come over from Roblox”.

We were personally sold lies to convert over so yeah. Thankfully looks like we will be landing funding for not only further development but also a very substantial advertising budget to make our maps trend by brute force. Fingers crossed for tomorrows meeting.

As a development company I would have made the choice to have simple search and filter options before releasing the tools and yes it was sold to development studios as well. That is the reason they kept going on and on about the UE5 compatibility and so on and calling them “professional tools”.

You are not wrong, and this is not a gemedev engine. Its UGC, and as much as Epic wants to think its gamedev, it will never be. Its predecessor, Creative, had the same issues.

Why try to make a large complex game when updates will break it and creators that simply appeal to the BR mechanics that never break get the majority of the audience anyway?

This has been one the core issues in Creative since the Zone wars meta in 2019, all because Epic has bigger analytics-focused mentality than quality-first.

If you are making large polished games, you better stick to gamedev engine, this is the Tik Tok of gaming, where first impression matters and hook mechanics do best.

At least for the time being. But voicing those concerns will improve the ecosystem overall, so my advice is to ask many questions and figure out what is the cause of this, then voice your concerns as you have so that Epic can improve the platform for the better (like this post, so thank you).

Its hard to invest without market research and this is a market that focuses on first impressions and current trends, much like tik tok. Hope you come back from it, persistence is key. This can still be a career, solo or even for studios, I was in one of them.

3 Likes

if you’re going to call Fortnite Players “disgruntled” then i think it’s good your going out of business

Wow someone has public school reading comprehension. I assume like most you only saw the part to make you mad and let your imagination to fill in the rest rather than take the effort to read and comprehend. I know reading and stuff is hard but buddy if you don’t you just sound like someone who can’t read.

I found this post interesting in the beginning as maybe there was something legit there. Then Thomas responded with kindness (which you completely ignored) and you continued on your ranting against Epic and how they fooled you into make decisions that were detrimental.

Now finally somebody called you out on your all round general attitude in a less than kind way and you lash out further. You have no issue going on the attack but not once seem to have said thank you to those that tried to help and don’t wish the worst for you with the attitude you are exemplifying.

I for one find your post now without value, whereas in the beginning I did give it some thought. You’ve burnt all the bridges I think that you need to and it’s probably best to just move on to your new endeavour. There are creators making a ton of money on Fortnite right now because they can read the market and create for it. So… not so much lies I think :slight_smile:

No you just misread and misrepresented what I was saying and I called you out on it. Thomas is a nice guy but we don’t need nice, nice gets exploited, welcome to the gaming industry, want to keep being exploited? Then keep stroking one another and be the victim’s of a broken system. Me on the other hand, I’ll keep on making noise until the problem is fixed thank you.

Also we learned that Epic Games wants that juicy juicy Roblox money so yes, we got investment and are pumping out the most mind numbing content imaginable, like letteral garbage with 0 effort and they are all hits, one right after another. Well the garbage as well as our BOOM game but BOOM has become our baby and money maker.