Four things that can make epic games successful
‘Epic lost around $181 million on EGS in 2019. Epic is projected to lose around $273 million on EGS in 2020.’ — Forbes
Resources
I have done a clone of epic games with the changes I propose below.
Repository: *to be filled later.*
Deployed application: *to be filled in later.*
Disclaimer
I am a user of both steam and epic games. I have 186 games in the Steam library and more than 70 games in the epic games library.
That brings us to our first point.
The story of tea in my native
Tea is not indigenous to where I’m from until the British introduced them to Nilgiri Mountains in 1835 from seeds shipped from China. Their purpose could be to use the climate in the Nilgiri hills to produce tea to export. But they wanted to have customers locally too.
They needed to introduce tea to the people to whom it was alien back then. They decided to offer tea for free to certain regions. In the early mornings, their vehicle would and offer hot tea to the people for free. It happened for a few weeks. People got hooked on having tea in the mornings.
Free tea was not regular. They missed coming some days and people found themselves bad without that hot stimulating drink. Then slowly tea got introduced to the merchants and got introduced into the daily lives of our people.
This story is passed by word of mouth and I heard it from my dad. We can question the validity of the story and maybe tea is so irresistible that it simply does not need these gimmicks to get people hooked. Nevertheless, tea has taken a permanent place in our society today.
Numerous companies have employed free-of-cost strategies in their marketing and have seen success. But it does not seem to be working for epic games. So, what is going wrong here?
1. Free games every Thursday!
I came to know about the weekly free games as soon as they launched. My experience with the platform goes like, open the site on Thursday night (for me in IST) and buy the weekly free games. There were some really amazing games like Overcooked, Wilmont warehouse and so on which we enjoyed a lot as a family.
I did not end up buying any game at all from the epic games platform. And that too when I own 150+ paid games in steam which I continue to do even today.
“What if the game I buy today in epic games store ends up being the mystery-free game the next thursday?”
It would feel like I made myself a fool if that happens right? What percentage of users think like me? The company must have the answer to this question.
What is the average percentage of games users own that are provided for free vs paid? What percentage of users have 100% of their games given free on Thursdays. The company must have the answer to this question.
Regular free games mess with the users’ reward cycle.
Possible fix: Record Low Prices on selected titles
Steamdb.info maintains the price data of the steam game store. There they maintain an option called Blue discount — Product has not been this cheap before.
So, we can implement something like that.
Instead of the Free games section on the home screen like shown above, We can have a section named Record Low Prices.
Further points to consider.
Cost to the company
Right now, the company should be paying the publishers of the free games. That money should be spread to multiple publishers to bring the price to record low.
Unlimited?
Right now I never faced a situation that the free games ran out. So, it must be given in an unlimited fashion right now. It does not have to be the case in our Record Low Prices alternative.
If the game Cyberpunk 2077 is selling for $5 dollars in epic games store, we can have a limit on how many sales epic games would allow. Let's say it is 10,000 units.
The user does not have to know what that limit is and when would the sale go invalid. The fear of missing out will drive the sale.
Cheesy hypes
The Thursdays are still special to the epic store. That day the site will list the games with prices that are not available anywhere online.
We can start sending the users some clues about the mystery games and let the users speculate a list for themselves of what games are going to be listed in the Record low section.
The clues could be,
- A not popular dialog from the game.
- A screenshot from the game that is too difficult to guess.
- Year of release and how successful it got at that time.
- and so on.
This creates a constant guess-and-reveal every week throughout the year.
After all what is the point of mystery if we don’t allow the users to guess?
User roleplay with the altered reward cycle.
Let's have a user persona called Gillian.
- Gillian waits for Thursdays.
- Gillian knows that there won’t be any free games. But there will be games at a price that she can’t get anywhere else on the internet.
- When the time comes, the record-low games section updates to show the new set of ten games.
- Gillian does not see any one of the games being immediately playable for him.
- Two of them interest Gillian. She wants to add them to his library for later use.
- Gillian also has experienced an incident that the discount goes invalid in front of his eyes minutes after the sale started (as the stock limit runs out).
The above flow sets the user up for the sale in a healthy manner.
2. The Cart
This is a basic requirement to which the users are hard-wired. Epic games store does not have a cart facility right now (Aug 2021).
Checking out is still a bit of a time-consuming process. Every payment still takes a noticeable duration before telling us that it is successful!
If the user-flow of checking out a game takes 15 seconds, Purchasing 10 games takes 150 seconds of clicking and looking at the loader.
It is very painful for current internet users. The user is most probably going to give up after 3rd or 4th purchase.
Fix:
A cart is necessary.
3. Dead ends in the user flows
Before going into this commentary. I’d like to get into one UX assumption that lets us create a seamless experience.
All users are always lazy and completely preoccupied!
So, make all the clicks they make as effortless as possible.
We can even say we should make all the efforts they make as effortless as possible. Even eye movement takes six muscles and it gets painful when the task feels uninteresting or a chore.
User flow:
- Gillian opens the home page.
- She will see the same set of games if she had opened the home page within 24 hours. [She may leave feeling nothing new there.]
- She finds the game ABC interesting and clicks.
- She skims through the page till the end. [She may purchase.]
- She feels lost at the end of the page. There is just the footer and privacy policy.
- She searches the screen. She misses seeing the muted (grayed out) “←Back to store” option in the breadcrumb. [She might click to go back to home screen]
- Whenever we feel lost we would do the reverse of what we did which in this case is to scroll back up. She scrolls back up.
- It is still the same game she wanted to skip. She still feels lost. She starts to look around to go somewhere.
- She looks at the search bar. She does not have anything to search for.
- She looks at the wishlist. It says 4.
- Finds the ←Back to store and clicks.
- She sees the same set of games she saw earlier.
The above is the key loop in the user experience and it needs to be polished.
Let’s talk about stories
What makes a story compelling? To keep this short, let's talk about short stories. (I have about 30+ short stories in medium)
What makes a story compelling?
It moves. The person goes from point A to point B. Or the journey of the reader following the fictional person realizes something that he/she can relate to.
The 5–10 minutes experience of a short story can be compared to a user using our application for 5–10 minutes.
It has to move. It has to change. Even if the story goes on a loop, there has to be something different about each iteration that the user will look for.
Possible fixes:
3.1. Dynamic and personalized content on the home page.
When we refresh youtube, we will get a unique set of recommendations every time. Yes, youtube is different from epic games especially in terms of the number of items it has to offer. Still, the static set of items epic games returns get boring really quick.
When a user discovers our site and gets pumped. We have to make the first session longer and hence memorable.
- Learn about the user. There are many plug and plug services like AWS Personalize which learns our users in real-time and changes the recommendations accordingly.
- Inject personalized content accordingly.
3.2. Add more interesting sections to the home screen
Current sections:
- Home showcase
- Games On Sale
- From Your Wishlist
- Free Games
- New Releases — Top Sellers — Comming Soon
- An unnamed section (with two new games with description)
- Recently Updated
- New To The Epic Games Store
- Most Popular
- Browse
The above number of sections is not small but for a game store, it is.
Some ideas for newer interesting sections are,
- Curated for you! A real-time recommendation engine populates this list.
- Record High Discounts. The blue discounts we discussed earlier.
- Games similar to ABC. We will make the ABC dynamic from a list of games our user has wish-listed, added-to-cart, purchased, or played.
- Binge-worthy. Games with the largest average game playtime.
- Biggest Blockbuster hits of this (Month/Week).
- Most Anticipated. Upcoming games with their release dates.
- Story Rich.
- Visual Marvels.
- Quick Bites. Simple games that take less time to finish. Opposite of Binge-Worthy.
We can make the home page infinite scroll too using the genres.
- Action games.
- Adventure games.
- … Infinite scrolling till we run out of genres.
3.3. Similar items at the end of the product page
We discussed how the end of the product page is a dead end.
We can have a carrousel saying similar items. For that, we need to create a recommender system that suggests a list of similar games to every game.
We did that in the article linked below.
3.4. Others
- The “sticky” game card with BUY NOW and Add to Wishlist should come all the way down. At any point in the product page, the call to action has to be there to click without scrolling back.
4. The presence of other users.
Imagine you are at the shopping mall. You feel hungry. You look for restaurants. You find one named Restaurant1. But it did not have any customers. You find one more restaurant on the other side named Restaurant2 but there were some customers.
The very basic primal instincts that stop us from choosing Restaurant1 can go like this.
- If the food in Restaurant1 is poisoned, I have to die alone.
- If the food in Restaurant1 has a dead rat in it, I have to fight alone.
The epic store feels like an empty restaurant right now
There are no user-generated reviews. There are no publisher/developer pages that show a follower count or comments.
Possible fixes
4.1. Review System
A living and breathing review system will make sure that there were people who have bought what I’m going to buy now. Even if the reviews are bad, at least the user knows what to expect?
Also, nothing sells like a convincing review from another customer.
4.2. Notifications
A full-fledged user feed can be overkill to a game store. We can have a simple notifications list from the developers’ and publishers' announcements.
Currently, I’m not seeing notifications in the store.
A notification can be about many things.
- Hey, the game you wish-listed is in Record High Discount! Don’t miss. Buy now!
- GameBoy443 commented on your review.
- The most anticipated game GameABC got released today to great reviews. check it out!
- Publisher GHJ made an announcement about their upcoming game.
- and so on.
Epic is changing
As I’m working on this epic games clone, I’m seeing a lot of improvements going on in the store.
The appearance is changing. But there was one critical problem in the user flow that got fixed as I was writing this article.
Wishlist
It used to look like below. What is with the tick in the right end you may ask? That is to remove the item from the wishlist.
So, what is the point? the user flow goes like this.
- User wishlists a few games.
- Comes to the wishlist page. The actions to do are a. to remove the game from the wishlist. b. go back to the product page and click buy now.
Epic games fixed it like below.
Yes. That buy now button! It can save users' efforts and can bring in more sales! There is also a toggle in the right top to toggle back to the legacy look of the wishlist.
Still, the tick with a circle is not appropriate here. Removing an item from the wishlist is a negative outcome from the user. The UI need not call for it. It can be a subtle muted x.
Conclusion
The intentions were to point the UX problems in the application while discussing some of the UX principles that I believe in.
It is possible that I can be completely wrong. Maybe the epic game store has the facilities I pointed above and I did not encounter them in the way I used it.
This article will most probably change as in this series we actually build the refactored version of epic using React. So, I will be updating the screenshots and gifs from the refactored clone.
Thank you for reading.
