Epic Games launching digital store to rival Steam

MANILA, Philippines – Fortnite developer Epic Games announced Tuesday, December 4, it was coming out with its own digital games storefront to rival that of industry leader Steam. 

The Epic Games Store’s biggest draw towards getting game companies on board: a generous revenue sharing proposition where 88% of revenue goes towards the developer, with 12% meant for overhead on the store.

The traditional industry standard tends to be closer to a 70-30 split favoring the developer.

Epic Games, which also develops the Unreal Engine, also said it would waive all royalties on revenue made by Unreal Engine-powered games. For example, games sold on Epic Games Store using Unreal Engine 4 don’t have to give a separate percentage towards Epic, which makes it enticing for developers to push people further towards buying on the Epic storefront.

The company’s Support-a-Creator program – where game devs can team up with content creators who can further push games out into the public consciousness through videos and streams – is one other way Epic is trying to make their service a viable competitor in the digital storefront wars.

“As a developer ourselves, we have always wanted a platform with great economics that connects us directly with our players,” Epic Games founder and CEO, Tim Sweeney, said in a press statement.

“Thanks to the success of Fortnite, we now have this and are ready to share it with other developers.”

In an interview with Game Informer, Sweeney also explained the Store – which would feature a hand-picked curation of game offerings – would launch on PC and Mac this year, with Android in 2019.

He added, “We’d like to launch on iOS in 2019, however, that is in apparent conflict with current Apple policy.”

More information is expected to be revealed during The Game Awards, set for December 6. – Rappler.com