At what point does a company stop raising money? Aren't they raking in the micropay money?

Never. That's the purpose of the corporate bond market. Allow companies to sell structured debt for operations, research, growth etc... normal fundraising stuff

When they make enough money to fund growing at the rate they want to grow?

The Fortnite section at my nearby Halloween store had empty shelves - they had pretty much sold out. I expect it's popularity to be ephemeral, much like "Angry Birds" was, but if you've got the hot game, you need to run with it as far and as fast as you can.

Fortnite is even more so susceptible to sudden death.

Genres like RTS, MOBA, Space Warfare, RPGs bring gamers that do not care for trends.

The shooter genre however, is very trend focussed. Users jump to the next shiny thing ever few months and even the best games (battlefield 4) have much shorter shelf lives than in other genres.

Thank fully I don't quite a another trend setting free-to-play game in the release pipeline in the near future. Fortnite has survived RDR2 and Spiderman, so they have that going for them.

isnt fornite free to play?

It's all about the merchandising. Or "Moichandising" if you're a short gold dude in a robe.

Clearly, you do not have any kids addicted to this game. My two nieces and a nephew, are costing me ~$100.00/week in in-app purchases. This has been going on for a little over a year now.

Isn’t that not good to let them spend that much money? $30+ a week per kid seems like quite a bit of money to be spent.

My 10 year-old nephew had a Fortnite costume that honestly made little sense without the $60USD (separate purchase) foam pickaxe that he barely even wanted to carry around all night from an early Halloween trick-or-treat in his neighborhood. It captured him from social pressure to want to be included but I don't honestly see him pursuing the game in any major fashion beyond cosmetics.

I really hope they can launch their own store, with decent standards to entry, and a 12% commission. Steam is a dumpster fire.

Please no. We have Steam, Gog, Origin, Ubisoft, Twitch and Discord game stores now. Doing a game store is not a simple thing and stores being built by those who make the games is generally anti-consumer because there is no negotiation of sales.

Epic make Fortnite and Unreal Engine. They already have their own launcher which is on tens of millions of PCs.

so does ubisoft and Blizzard. It's a gimmick that hinders useability in favor of complete control.

Why is steam a dumpster fire?

There's also GOG, if you want drm-free downloads of games you purchase.

Because its a monopoly platform (at least from the perspective of sub-AAA) charging monopoly rents of 30% commission on each game sold.

They have no standards/barriers to entry, so the store is being filled with crapware - developers releasing 20 games in a week, etc.

Plus, it has completely ineffective DRM, so the work of developers is not protected from piracy.

All of these things can be done better, and developers given a much better deal, which will result in better games being delivered to gamers.

People seem to care so much about Telltale shutting down and the poor treatment of game workers in the industry. Part of that is because the monopoly platforms holders Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Google, Apple, Valve have no competition in terms of the deals they offer developers. We need Epic to come in and break this pattern open with a much lower commission.

Isn't 30% the standard on most app stores ?

Apple charges 30% and afaik, so does Android for popular apps.

Steam is a great thing for gamers from the Third world, with the country specific pricing.

Also they give no-questions-asked refunds on purchases.

Which other store can match these features?

None, Steam has an unchallenged monopoly.

Steam is the only one pushing for Linux support in games AFAIK, and their SteamPlay feature is awesome. I use Linux, so I'll continue supporting them until someone else provides a better service.

I really don't have any problems with Steam as a platform. I certainly like not having to have multiple launchers for the games I play.