*Updated* Epic Games announces their low-fee, curated digital games store - EG store is now live, with trailer

[Delicieuxz]

 

The Epic Games store is now live

 

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The store will also feature one free game every two weeks throughout 2019. Epic is funding these free releases so you always have something new to come and check out. The first free game will be Subnautica, available from Dec 14th to Dec 27th, followed by Super Meat Boy from Dec 28th to Jan 10th.

 

 

 

Here's the store link: https://www.epicgames.com/store

 

The Epic Games store is also accessible inside of the Epic Games launcher.

 

 

 

------- Original post -------

 

 

Announcing the Epic Games Store

 

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For the past five years, we've been building tools enabling Epic to bring our games directly to players. We built the Epic Games launcher on PC and Mac featuring Fortnite and Unreal Engine; we built a worldwide digital commerce ecosystem supporting dozens of payment methods; and we gained great economies of scale thanks to Fortnite's growth.

 

As developers ourselves, we wanted two things: a store with fair economics, and a direct relationship with players. And we've heard that many of you want this too!

 

Soon we'll launch the Epic Games store, and begin a long journey to advance the cause of all developers. The store will launch with a hand-curated set of games on PC and Mac, then it will open up more broadly to other games and to Android and other open platforms throughout 2019. 

 

The Epic Games store will operate on the following principles:

 

All Developers Earn 88%
Developers receive 88% of revenue. There are no tiers or thresholds. Epic takes 12%. And if you’re using Unreal Engine, Epic will cover the 5% engine royalty for sales on the Epic Games store, out of Epic’s 12%.

 

...

 

All Engines Are Welcome
The Epic Games store is open to games built with any engine, and the first releases span Unreal, Unity and internal engines.

When You Succeed, We Succeed

We’ve built this store and its economic model so that Epic’s interests are aligned with your interests.  Because of the high volume of Fortnite transactions, we can process store payments, serve bandwidth, and support customers very efficiently. From Epic’s 12% store fee, we’ll have a profitable business we’ll grow and reinvest in for years to come!

 

 

So, we're about to have yet another digital games retailer on the block. For a lot of people, that's not what they want to hear. However, I think there are reasons why this particular store is exciting.

 

 

Epic Games is one of the pioneers of PC gaming and is led by industry and anti-monopoly advocate and master game engine-builder Tim Sweeney. Epic has a positive reputation, and Sweeney is a bit of an industry hero, IMO. He also has designed what are probably the most-used game engines in PC gaming history. He has specifically been very vocal against Microsoft's predatory and monopolistic practices - and I wonder if this move is a part of his stance against UWP.

 

Next, the industry-wide standard fee digital retailer fee 30%. That standard store-fee was set by Valve back in 2003 (I think) when they launched Steam, which at that time represented a massive increase in profits for publishers and developers over the retail store model. Obviously, Epic's 12% store fee is yet again a large increase in profits for publishers and developers. And I think that it's going to make other digital games retailers have to respond sooner or later, because that low price along with Epic's reputation for solid coding and for not being greedy or assholes is likely to make Epic's store a very popular destination for games, and therefore for gamers.

 

Steam, GoG, Ubisoft, Origin... I think that all of them charge a 30% sale-price fee for 3rd-party games. And if Epic's store becomes a go-to place for games, why will developers want to keep selling their games on another store where they get only 70% of the profits?

 

Thirdly, Epic's store will be hand-curated. A popular, hand-curated game store by a company that has loads of technological competence and a good reputation could turn into something great.

 

 

By the way, remember when Microsoft decided that GFWL wasn't profitable enough for them keep doing it and so they shut-down down their game servers leaving all their customers without recourse? Well, what if the industry now moves to 12% to stay competitive? Will Microsoft still be willing to operate the Microsoft Store at those profit margins, or will Microsoft once against decide the business isn't profitable enough for them to keep participating in it?

 

Also, I wonder if Valve announced their 20 - 25 - 30% tier system as a result from hearing about Epic's upcoming profits-splitting system. Or, if Epic had the idea upon hearing about Valve's change in their system, and figured out that they can outdo it by far.

[TVwazhere]

6 minutes ago, Delicieuxz said:

So, we're about to have yet another digital games retailer on the block. For a lot of people, that's not what they want to hear. However, I think there are reasons why this particular store is exciting.

It's gonna be an Epic Showdown, all Valves Set to Wide open! 

[Spotty]

Just now, TVwazhere said:

It's gonna be an Epic Showdown, all Valves Set to Wide open! 

You could say we're witnessing the Origin of affordable pc gaming.

[asus killer]

how can they survive on only 12%, wasn't 30% almost non profitable 

 

sweet fork those greedy bastards at valve

[Princess Luna]

great more DRM bloatware in order to play games... yeah no thanks

[TheGlenlivet]

Competition is good. 

Hopefully they can get their security in order.  I get "someone tried to access your account" emails about once a week.  My kids only played that game for like 3 days and then it fell out of favor.  Never gave them any money or CC numbers.

[Orangeator]

Not good news. I hope there aren't any games I want that will be on that platform... I am already sick of having so many required applications to play my games. I honestly wish they could all just be on Steam, one place to have all my games. That would be ideal. I get the monopolistic standard of that but what I mean is maybe buy the game from the independent dev, then be able to launch it without having that devs stupid game launcher applications running in order to play the game. DRM is the worst invention, massive inconvenience.

[CommandMan7]

Clicked into this expecting to see Origin and/or Uplay clone but was pleasantly surprised. I hope this can become a true competitor to steam. Probably won't ever beat them, but something to at least make Valve try harder.

[Guest]

It's nice to see a more fair business practice, but at the same time I'm thinking not another store to install. There should be an app to launch and buy games from stores all in one place. 

[Dabombinable]

Key word Valve, their store is curated.

[AlTech]

2 hours ago, asus killer said:

how can they survive on only 12%, wasn't 30% almost non profitable 

 

sweet fork those greedy bastards at valve

30% is more than profitable. Executives at the companies with major game stores are doing well for themselves.

[EnergyEclipse]

2 hours ago, Dabombinable said:

Key word Valve, their store is curated.

Steam do have the 'Your Queue' feature. It can help tailor game recommendations depending on what other games you play already. Whilst not the most accurate, I certainly appreciate it. 

[imreloadin]

I for one know I always wanted to have to run a dozen+ different launchers to play all my games!

[Dabombinable]

35 minutes ago, EnergyEclipse said:

Steam do have the 'Your Queue' feature. It can help tailor game recommendations depending on what other games you play already. Whilst not the most accurate, I certainly appreciate it. 

That's not curation. We wouldn't have all the shit on Steam if Valve still curated games.

[Firewrath9]

On 12/4/2018 at 12:10 PM, asus killer said:

how can they survive on only 12%, wasn't 30% almost non profitable 

 

sweet fork those greedy bastards at valve

B4 steam, retailers (gamestop etc.) took like 50-80%, 30% Isnt bad.

[Arika]

Quote

hand-curated

aka whoever gives us the most money so they can get on the front page of the launcher for all the children that play fortnite to see

[Phentos]

Hurray for yet another digital storefront to have to use to just play some games... 

[Humbug]

Damn it, no Linux support.

 

They should have made it truly cross platform, this maybe indicative of their attitude towards unreal engine on Linux as well.

 

I think the big seller here could be bundling the unreal engine as part of the deal. What devs can do is launch their games simultaneously on this as well as steam. and hope that over time this store becomes big enough to offset the value of being on steam.

[Humbug]

43 minutes ago, huilun02 said:

As far as I can tell, it will just be a web based store instead of another client application. So it should not upset Valve as much if you still launch the game through Steam and still see Steam ads. Kind of like all those cd key sites we have already. And it might not necessarily mean cheaper games for us, if they keep standard pricing on the new store.

Pricing cannot be cheaper on other stores if you also want your game on Steam. It's part of the TOS that devs sign with Valve.

 

Valve does not ask for any exclusivity agreements with devs, so the devs are free to launch on Steam while simultaneously launching on GOG, Origin etc or anywhere else. However the devs should commit that they will not undermine steam by giving preferential pricing elsewhere.

[asus killer]

10 hours ago, Firewrath9 said:

B4 steam, retailers (gamestop etc.) took like 50-80%, 30% Isnt bad.

80%! i want whatever you're smoking.

[Humbug]

Valve had this plan years ago to roll out the Source 2 engine with full SDK as an alternative to Unity and Unreal. It was to be free to use for devs if you put your game on steam, and the plan doesn't even require your game to be exclusive to Steam.

 

Well that was a good plan to incentivise devs to use Steam using the Source 2 engine. But Valve grew so lackadaisical that we are at the end of 2018 and they still haven't released the Source 2 SDK. They do have the Source 2 engine. It supports Mac OSX, Linux and Windows, it supports Vulkan, it's well multi-threaded, supports VR, a new physics and lighting engine etc.. sounds good on paper. We are told it works well inside of Valve. But outside of Valve all we have seen of it is Dota 2, Artifact card game and some VR demos.

 

Valve as a company is now too lazy and too comfortable with all the $$. They should have got a big enough team together with enough motivation to get Source 2 out to the public years ago and keep it updated with new technology. Modern Valve doesn't seem like they are disciplined or motivated enough to play this game and keep up with the likes of Unreal and Unity.

 

If they had the disciplilne, focus and motivation not only would it make steam more resilient but it would also have gone a long way towards their goal of making Linux gaming bigger by providing a toolset for devs with first class Linux support.

 

Now they are facing Epic trying to do to them what Valve should have done years ago.

[Delicieuxz]

4 hours ago, huilun02 said:

As far as I can tell, it will just be a web based store instead of another client application. So it should not upset Valve as much if you still launch the game through Steam and still see Steam ads. Kind of like all those cd key sites we have already. And it might not necessarily mean cheaper games for us, if they keep standard pricing on the new store.

Epic do already have a games library client for their own games, which currently is limited to Epic's Fortnite, Unreal Tournament, Shadow Complex, and content for Unreal Editor 4 including a bunch of game-specific mod editors.

 

 

 

My guess is that all the 3rd-party games Epic sells will become available in this client.

[ravenshrike]

4 hours ago, Humbug said:

 

Valve as a company is now too lazy and too comfortable with all the $$. They should have got a big enough team together with enough motivation to get Source 2 out to the public years ago and keep it updated with new technology. Modern Valve doesn't seem like they are disciplined or motivated enough to play this game and keep up with the likes of Unreal and Unity.

Honestly at this point Gabe seems to be like Guru in DBZA abridged, lazy and comfortable and not caring of what's happening about him.

 

 

[Humbug]

21 minutes ago, ravenshrike said:

Honestly at this point Gabe seems to be like Guru in DBZA abridged, lazy and comfortable and not caring of what's happening about him.

lol

 

I actually think that Gabe and loads of other senior people in Valve still do care.

 

But the fire is not there behind them. Complex Software projects and AAA game development is a tedious, multi year process. Every big project goes through difficult times, and Valve employees now do not feel sufficient motivation to push through. They don't seem like a company that can get hundreds of employees working together on a mega project for a few years without losing interest.

 

When they developed HL1 and HL2 it was different. The whole company had the fire behind them to finish the project, it was their livelihood and their revenue source. If you learn about the development history it was as troubled and difficult as every other AAA game. But they stuck to it. Modern Valve would just say screw it, employees will eventually lose interest and drift off to do other things. And hey there's enough money in the bank and no management oversight so...

[suicidalfranco]

would still give my money to steam, at least they don't snob off the small linux community