Epic Games, creator of Fortnite, has just made a huge announcement that can potentially shake the gaming community to its core – they are opening a store! The Epic Games Store will be a digital distribution platform – comparable to Steam – but with an 88% revenue split!

The Epic Games Store will initially launch with carefully selected games for PC and Mac while expanding what is offered throughout 2019. The store will be open to all game engines and is intended to evolve with the community as time goes on.

The Developer Revenue Split

Tim Sweeney of Epic Games discussed that the company wanted to have a direct relationship with players and fair economics when it came to a store. The idea was to provide developers with a platform to launch their products without giving up such huge percentages for their titles.

For example, Steam has utilized a 70/30 revenue split system for an extremely long time, and Epic Games is looking to undercut the competition. If the gaming developer utilizes Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 to develop their product hosted on steam – it becomes a 65/35 for the developer.

The Epic Game Store will remain at an 88/12 split with developers – and if UE4 or Unity game engines get used to developing the title, then Epic will eat those costs. It will remain at an 88/12 split for the developers and allow them to put more money into their pocket.

With such a huge revenue split going to the developer, it leads to the question of why go 88/12 when the standard of 70/30 has gotten established? Tim Sweeney discusses with gameindustry.biz that stores who charge the 30% are marking up costs by 300% to 400% while Epic can be profitable at 12%.

Player and Developer Relationships

The Epic Games Store compared with the business models of others on numbers alone appears to be a great opportunity for indie and smaller developers while supporting them. It isn’t just about the generous revenue shares after all – but the outreach tools between developer and player.

There will be different features relating to building a direct relationship between the developers and players who purchase their games. When people buy a game from the Epic Games store – they will be automatically subscribed to the developer’s newsfeed to keep the players updated on game news.

It isn’t purely just the players who are getting the news updates, but the developers will be able to control their game page and newsfeed, ad-free. There will be no store-placed ads, no cross-marketing with competing games on the page, and no paid ads in the search results.

Content Creator Support and Connections Programs

Epic Games notes that the content creators of YouTube, game bloggers, Twitch/Mixer streamers, and so on are leading the charge when it comes to game exploration. With that in mind, they are encouraging people to get involved with their 10,000+ Epic Game Support-A-Creator program!

The program is designed to get creators and developers together to work in conjunction for their mutual success. For the developers that choose to participate in the program, the content creators will receive a share of the revenue that is set and tracked by the code/link that gets set.

Epic is even adding icing on the cake to get involved with the program by covering the first 5% of the creator and revenue-sharing situation for the first 24 months. The program is designed for developers to reach gamers and is designed to incentivize all those involved for mutual benefits.

Wrap Up

The Epic Game Store has many impressive features for developers to utilize and opens many potential business models for them to incorporate to reach players. The most significant features of the store are the considerable differences in revenue splits as opposed to Steam.

No matter how you break it down, an 88/12 revenue split sounds a lot better than 70/30 and even better than 65/35! The creator support program and other developer tools are just some additional icing on the cake.

This news is exciting with more announcements and upcoming game releases to occur Thursday, December 6th, at The Game Awards! We look forward to bringing you further information as it becomes available on this exciting topic!