'Fortnite' developers to launch Steam competitor 'Epic Games Store'
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.
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