Epic has announced plans to take on Steam with a PC games store of its own.
The Epic Games Store features an eye-opening 88/12 per cent revenue split in favour of developers.
This is a much better deal for developers than currently available from Steam. Historically, Valve has taken around a 30 per cent cut of revenue made on Steam, a figure broadly in-line with Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft’s cut from their own digital storefronts.
However, Valve recently announced plans to drop its cut to 25 per cent once revenue from a game hits $10m, and then another drop to 20 per cent for earnings over $50m. That announcement, made just a few days ago, is interestingly-timed in the context of Epic’s own announcement today.
The Epic Games Store launches soon with a hand-curated set of games on PC and Mac, Epic said, and it’ll open up more broadly to additional games and other open platforms throughout 2019. Epic said it’s open to games developed with any game engine, not just its own Unreal. So, games made with Unity, for example, can make the cut. However, games made with Unreal will see Epic waive all engine royalties on revenue generated through the store.
Epic boss Tim Sweeney told Eurogamer over email he’s open to PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds launching on the Epic Games Store, despite the strained relationship between Epic and PUBG developer PUBG Corp.
Earlier this year, PUBG Corp. dropped its copyright lawsuit against Epic that had accused the company of copyright infringement over battle royale phenomenon Fortnite. PUBG, by the way, is built using Epic’s Unreal engine, and both Epic and PUBG Corp. are part-owned by enormous Chinese corporation Tencent.