Epic has announced their own game store, aptly named the Epic Games Store. Where they boast having lower revenue cut percentages than Steam and other markets.
Epic, the company behind both the Unreal game engine and the popular battle royale game Fortnite, recently announced plans for their own game marketplace. The leading feature of the store is their lower-than-average revenue cuts. Steam takes a straight 30% cut of revenue for all games on the Steam marketplace. This has been a standard number, with Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo having similar rates. The Epic Games Store instead offers a 12% cut.
They also stated that if your game uses the Unreal Engine, the usual 4% cut they take for engine fees will be waived if the game is hosted on the Epic Games Store.
Epic claims a collection of “hand-curated” games will be available on the Store launch day, but we don’t know what will be available or when the store launches.
This news comes not long after Steam announced their own reduced revenue pricing for triple-A games. Games making $10 million will be reduced to a 25% cut, with $50 million unlocking a 20% cut. I assumed these changes were due to games like Fortnite and Fallout 76 intentionally using their own game launcher to avoid Steam fees. Maybe it was in response to Epic’s game store.
News out of the way, here are some thoughts I had about this.
They’re making a point to show how much better the Epic Games Store would be for developers but doesn’t give any reason for the consumer to bother making the transition. I already have a Steam account, one full of games and friends. New titles can be offered on the Epic Store, but if they don’t also offer it on Steam, they’re going to lose significant sales from users not wanting to get another game launcher.
I’m glad they’re offering something better for developers. But they need to give the gamers a reason to try it, too.
