Developers of battle royale phenomenon Fortnite, Epic Games, are foraging in a new venture: digital games store. Epic Games has announced today that it will be launching its very own online PC and Mac games distribution platform called Epic Games Store. While Valve’s Steam store takes 20 to 30% of game revenue, the Epic Games Store will take only 12% and will grant the remaining 88% of sales revenue to the devs.

Talking to Variety about the news, founder and CEO of Epic Games Tim Sweeney had the following to say: “As a developer ourselves, we’ve always wanted access to a store with fair revenue-sharing that gives us direct access to our customers. Now that we’ve built such a store, and Fortnite has brought in a huge audience of PC gamers, we’re working to open it up to all developers.”

In a similar fashion to Steam, the Epic Games Store will be accessible via a dedicated launcher and a website and will be open to games developed on any game engine. Given that it will be just starting off, the games library will initially be limited to a curated number of titles.

“We’re starting small, with a hand-picked set of games at launch,” Sweeney further added. “We plan to grow throughout early 2019 and open the store up more widely later on. We’ll have an approval process for new developers to go through to release a title. It will mostly focus on the technical side of things and general quality. Except for adult-only content, we don’t plan to curate based on developers’ creative or artistic expression. Epic will manually curate the Epic Games storefront rather than relying on algorithms or paid ads. We believe the ultimate vector for players to discover new games will not be our storefront but creators. Viewership of creator channels has greatly outgrown any storefront.”

Together with the store, the company is also launching the Support-A-Creator program which connects developers with over 10,000 creators from online video producers to streamers. This program further rewards creators for bringing exposure to game developers.

“Epic’s Support-A-Creator program was launched as a one-time event, but it’s now permanent and is available to all creators and all developers on the Epic Games store,” Sweeney said. “Creators will earn a share of revenue from each attributable sale, either by link or by manual creator tag entry, like in Fortnite. Developers will set the rate of the revenue share and Epic will pay the first 5% for the first 24 months. Developers will have immediate access to thousands of creators who can promote their titles in fun and entertaining ways, and they can automatically give creators free access to their game if they choose to.

“We believe this will make a more direct and sustainable connection between game developers and content creators such as streamers and video makers. There are currently more than 10,000 content creators in the program, with tens of millions of supporters, and that number is growing every day.”

There is no concrete release date for the Epic Games Store but it is expected to release "soon" with more details on upcoming game releases to be revealed at The Game Awards this Thursday.

SOURCE

 

[LittleFlame]

oh boyyy another one can't wait to play fortnut

 

[migles]

Just because your game was a success, doesn't mean the same players will use your store. Steam will always be on top. Especially after they erased many restrictions.

the way i see theese news is that epic games cashed out too much with fortnite and now they are hungry for power...
they scammed millions of kiddos insto stealing mommies credit cards for bullshit cosmetic ego, and now they feel the rush and powerfull enough to want level up their game and chase steam..
i really hope they fail, competition is always great but i really hope steam doesn't get too much bullshit competition and in 50 years when i want to download one of the thousans of games that i have in my steam client, i am greeted with "we are shutting down, all your purchases are gone"

hey valve, do you remember when other people turned your games into better games and you bought them?
well, buy the shit fortnite game make a tf2 meets fortine game, get kiddos to steal mommies credit cards again

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Someone's getting a bit too big for their britches

my toughts ^^ TLDR of my previous comment, they are feeling they are too big

 

[TunaKetchup]

To be fair, competition is ALWAYS a good thing, for the consumer at least , so why would it bother you as an individual? it actually benifits us.

Yes I agree!

I wish every single game had its own separate storefront

 

[Shadowfied]

This is a fucking joke right?

It hasn't even been half a year since I wrote

Great. Another launcher.
I'm getting pretty fucking sad about the PC gaming situation honestly. I've always preferred gaming on PC and I absolutely love Steam, but now when everyone wants to make their own launcher and prevent PC gaming from being the great thing that it was...it's really exhausting and almost makes me wanna go console.

Let's take a little look..

- Steam
- Origin
- uPlay
- GOG
- Bethesda Games Launcher
- Epic Games Launcher
- Rockstar Social Club
- Discord Library
- Blizzard Launcher
- Windows Store (fucking puke)

..and the list goes on..

Just the idea that you require at least 8 pieces of software on your computer to access most of the AAA library is downright baffling and disgusting.

 

[migles]

Yes I agree!

I wish every single game had its own separate storefront

get out.
your opinion is making me really mad. i believe you lost your mind...

really? i mean really?
the first comment to theese news answers for itself
we totally need a single client peer game and fill my computer with crap and bloatware...
maybe my computer is too powerfull and needs a billion game clients running in the background to make it slow enough to use it.

 

[DinohScene]

Glad I don't like fortnite ;o;

 

[Lumince]

Please stop following this trend. Every company is doing it and at this point im just gonna pirate the games that are not on steam so I can avoid getting those horrible "launchers"

The only game I will give an exception too is overwatch. lol

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Glad I don't like fortnite ;o;

fortnite is pretty bad lol

 

[DarkCoffe64]

ANOTHER one?? Next even non-gaming companies are gonna have their stores, like youtube or facebook.
Unless they already have, dunno, I live under a rock mostly.

Good thing I get most of my games the, emh, "sailing" way.

 

[DCG]

Piracy just got a tad more attractive again...
I quit pirating, because I could find it all on steam :/

Also regarding the indies and 30%
Upkeep has to come from somewhere and 30% of a small amount is still a small amount. I don't know the exact costs, but my guess is that it aint cheap amd they'll keep games on there even after the sales start to dry up.

 

[Shadowfied]

Please stop following this trend. Every company is doing it and at this point im just gonna pirate the games that are not on steam so I can avoid getting those horrible "launchers"

Really fitting moment for the Who Killed Hannibal meme right here. Publishers keep on crying about piracy while doing everything they can to demotivate their audience from buying their games. Fucking fucks.

 

[Maq47]

I really hope steam doesn't get too much bullshit competition and in 50 years when i want to download one of the thousans of games that i have in my steam client, i am greeted with "we are shutting down, all your purchases are gone"

This is my thought process exactly. And with the current rate of companies making their own game stores, '50 years' could really easily be '5 years', and that's just plain scary.

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ANOTHER one?? Next even non-gaming companies are gonna have their stores, like youtube or facebook.
Unless they already have, dunno, I live under a rock mostly.

Good thing I get most of my games the, emh, "sailing" way.

Facebook has microtransactions on most of their games, and 'Facebook Game Room' is a thing, so I guess Facebook already has a 'game store'.

 

[elBenyo]

I still refuse to buy Minecraft on PC because signing into the windows store hijacks your windows profile, changing your password to the one on your email address. Steam has thousands of my dollars in purchases, why would I buy games anywhere else?

 

[PrincessLillie]

Attention all Epic gamers! Epic Games needs your help in order to launch their new game store! But in order to do that, they need your parent's credit card number, the three digits on the back, and the expiration month and year. But hurry fast, so they can get the EPIC VICTORY ROYALE!

Steam,Origin,Gog Galaxy,Uplay,Bethesda Launcher,Windows store were not enough

Don't forget Discord

 

[orangy57]

i cant wait until we get like 15 storefront launchers that all auto-start with my pc so that i can have it slow to a crawl while i try to do anything

 

[migles]

I still refuse to buy Minecraft on PC because signing into the windows store hijacks your windows profile, changing your password to the one on your email address. Steam has thousands of my dollars in purchases, why would I buy games anywhere else?

i bought minecraft in the beta days, i dont need to login to the windows store bullcrap, i can freely download the normal version of the game in their site (it has their launcher thing but its more like that rockstar social club thing)
you can still buy the game trough their website and dont have to deal with that windows store crap. i am not sure if they are cross multiplayer but i dont see why they didn't just packed the normal version and released it trough the windows store (specially because most phone apps are java)

 

[elBenyo]

i bought minecraft in the beta days, i dont need to login to the windows store bullcrap, i can freely download the normal version of the game in their site (it has their launcher thing but its more like that rockstar social club thing)
you can still buy the game trough their website and dont have to deal with that windows store crap. i am not sure if they are cross multiplayer but i dont see why they didn't just packed the normal version and released it trough the windows store (specially because most phone apps are java)

Now, I'm interested in that.

 

[Ren_Ambrose]

i bought minecraft in the beta days, i dont need to login to the windows store bullcrap, i can freely download the normal version of the game in their site (it has their launcher thing but its more like that rockstar social club thing)
you can still buy the game trough their website and dont have to deal with that windows store crap. i am not sure if they are cross multiplayer but i dont see why they didn't just packed the normal version and released it trough the windows store (specially because most phone apps are java)

Yeah, for some reason a while back, they split it into two versions; Java edition and Bedrock edition. Bedrock runs in c++ which allows for crossplay. If you had a code back in beta/alpha (which is what the java edition is branched from) you got a win10 key for free. There's a few quirks like redstone not working the same between versions but aside from that, it's almost the same game. Except the store, that sucks.

 

[Lumince]

Really fitting moment for the Who Killed Hannibal meme right here. Publishers keep on crying about piracy while doing everything they can to demotivate their audience from buying their games. Fucking fucks.

I just dont get how this even sounds like a good idea to them. Other than MONEY MONEY MONEY WE NEED MORE MONEY. They cant live with what steam wants to take for their game being displayed on their store?? No wonder sales for BF5 are down 80% and Fallout 76 sales are down 82%. No one wants to buy the damn thing on another store.

 

[Xzi]

JFC this makes like ten major launchers on PC. I remember when digital downloads helped to simplify things. Now it'd be a lot easier if we went back to physical media.

 

[the_randomizer]

Lol that's cute