Epic Games is about to become Steam’s new competitor. The creator of the popular Fortnite plans to launch a digital gaming store to offer not only its titles, but also those of third parties.
The platform will be called Epic Games Store and will sell games for PC and Mac. It will be released soon, but does not have an official date. At the moment, Epic simply states that the store will be open for more games and platforms, including Android, still in 2019.
At The Verge, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney says the company wants to include “quality games of all sizes and genres”. To attract more producers, the platform will bet on lower rates on purchases made by users.
For every store transaction, developers will pay a 12% fee. The fee charged by Steam, for example, starts at 30% and is reduced to up to 20% as the game reaches some goals.
Owner of Unreal Engine, a tool for game creation, Epic Games says that its store will also be open to other solutions, such as Unity. However, in sales at the Epic Store, games created in Unreal Engine will not pay the traditional 5% royalties that go to the game engines.
Epic’s strategy goes against its criticism of the high fees charged by Google and Apple stores. The company does not offer Fortnite in the Play Store precisely because of the fees and said that just did not do the same in the App Store because of an Apple ban.
In addition to the lower fees, Epic wants to expand its store with Support-A-Creator, a program that rewards YouTube and Twitch streamers. It already exists with Fortnite, where creators get paid when someone who watched one of your videos makes a purchase.
The same logic will be taken to the Epic Store, which will let the streamers receive a kind of commission when their viewers buy the games they release. Because the value will leave the part received by the developers, the program will be optional.
With information: Epic Games.