It’s just been announced that Fortnite developer Epic Games plans to launch a competitor to Steam, and it wants to undercut Steam’s developer costs.
According to GameInformer, the new and upcoming digital PC store from Epic hopes to pull game devs away from Steam by giving them 88% of the revenues, keeping just 12% for itself.
Right now, Steam usually takes around 30% of revenue from devs, meaning Epic Games would be seriously undercutting them with a move like this. With such potential savings for game developers, it’s easy to see why they’d want to publish their game on an Epic store page.
The news comes just a few months after Epic announced it would be releasing Fortnite on mobile through its own site, avoiding the revenue shares with the likes of Google Play and the Apple App Store.
Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney announced: “As a developer ourselves, we have always wanted a platform with great economics that connects us directly with our players.
“Thanks to the success of Fortnite, we now have this and are ready to share it with other developers.”
Plans also include the waiving of all Unreal Engine royalty fees for revenue generated on the store page. According to GameInformer, for the same benefits on Steam, a creator “would have to make $50 million in revenue…before getting to an 80/20 split, with engine fees still on top.”
Epic Games just announced a store with 88/12 split (no tiers), access to the audience, and Support-A-Creator program.
I’ve been working on this project at my day job for the past several years.https://t.co/eG1KdWGpK4
— Steam Spy (@Steam_Spy) December 4, 2018
Right now there’s not too many details about when we can expect the project to come to fruition, but we can imagine Valve is quaking in its boots – despite also announcing a cut in its percentage shares from developers.
The timing of this announcement tho pic.twitter.com/4bmrvqbPl4
— Nibel (@Nibellion) December 4, 2018
Maybe now’s the time to announce Half Life 3?