Epic Games has certainly been the success story of 2018 when it comes to gaming. The creators of Fortnite have managed to turn it into a global phenomenon that has kids dancing in the streets and well over a billion dollars of revenue flowing into Epic’s pockets, including at least that much in investments.
The immense success of their flagship game caused them to rethink the way they distribute games. On mobile platforms they stayed away from Play Store, allowing people to download the installer from their website. This meant that Epic was keeping 100 percent of the profit to themselves, and the global popularity of the game drove the downloads.
With this experience behind them and with the help of Tencent, who own 40% of Epic and are a major player on the Asian market, Epic Games have decided to open their own store – Epic Games Store.
Developers and creators rejoice
The store will feature Epic’s games, but it will not stop there. The bombshell is that, unlike other stores, who usually take 30% for their service, Epic will take only 12%. For games that use Unreal Engine, Epic will also cover the 5% engine royalty.
Apart from this generous offer, Epic has been thinking about promotion as well, offering Twitch streamers, bloggers and YouTube content creators a chance to participate in their Support-A-Creator program, where developers can choose to provide a share of the revenue to the creators who post an affiliate link leading to the store. What is more, Epic covers the first 5% of this revenue-sharing in the first two years.
The future of digital distribution platforms is now
With an increasing number of big publishers opening their own stores online, Steam is far from the only place in town anymore. Now, standing strong on the foundations of 2018’s runaway success of Fortnite, another competitor arrives. This is good news for the developers, as well as the customers.
Epic is expected to share more details at The Game Awards tomorrow, December 6th.
