Epic Games Challenges Steam with Digital Storefront for PC and Mac

Epic Games’ Founder and CEO, Tim Sweeney, has publically bashed Steam on a number of occasions, stating that PC gaming’s premiere storefront doesn’t do enough to earn its cut a developer’s revenue. 

With the release of Fortnite on PC and Android, Sweeney has even gone so far as to create their Epic Games Launcher on PC (for Windows/MacOS) and avoid the Play Store on Android, allowing Epic Games to keep all of their game’s revenue for themselves whenever possible. 

Over the past five years, Epic Games has built tools that enable them to deliver their games directly to customers, with the success of Fortnite allowing them to create a world-class digital commerce ecosystem, which is capable of supporting a variety of payment methods at a massive scale. Moving forward, Epic Games wants to make this system available to 3rd party developers, even to those who do not use Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4. 

A few days ago, Valve confirmed that their basic revenue sharing rate for their games is a 30:70 split between Valve/Steam and the game’s developers. Epic Games promises to give developers their fair share of their game’s revenue, only taking 12% to pay for their server costs and to generate a modest profit. On top of that, Unreal Engine 4 games will not be forced to pay their 5% royalty fee on sales on the Epic Games Store, with Epic taking this fee from their 12%.

Epic also plans to launch their store with a collection of hand-curated titles, making the store a considerable contrast to Steam’s saturated shelves. In effect, Epic Games in creating the Steam that many of us want, free of the constant charge of sub-par releases while offering developers a great deal.