Update: Surprise — the store is now live!
Oh yeah, we launched the Epic Games store just now. ☺️
— Nick Chester (@nickchester) December 7, 2018
Original story: Epic Games will launch its own online store, positioning itself as a competitor to the likes of Valve’s Steam, EA’s Origin, Ubisoft’s Play, CD Projekt Red’s GOG and others. The big feature that seems to differentiate the Epic Games Store from the rest is that developers will receive 88% of store revenue.
“As developers ourselves, we wanted two things: a store with fair economics, and a direct relationship with players. And we’ve heard that many of you want this too,” Epic said in a blog post announcing the store.
“Developers receive 88% of revenue. There are no tiers or thresholds. Epic takes 12%. And if you’re using Unreal Engine, Epic will cover the 5% engine royalty for sales on the Epic Games store, out of Epic’s 12%.”
Epic credits the success of Fortnite — and its microtransactions — as the driving factor of this new store.
“Because of the high volume of Fortnite transactions, we can process store payments, serve bandwidth, and support customers very efficiently,” the post continues.”From Epic’s 12% store fee, we’ll have a profitable business we’ll grow and reinvest in for years to come!”
The first wave of games available on the store will “span Unreal, Unity and internal engines,” though developers can submit games using any engine. Titles will be available on both Windows PC and Mac.
We’ll have more on the Epic Games Store as it’s made available.
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