The Epic Games Store is announced with a massive 88% Developer’s cut

By rohan
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Updated: December 5, 2018
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The Creator of Fortnite, Epic Games has announced its very own Games store. The ‘Epic Games Store’ will be a place for developers to publish their games and an alternative to Valve’s Steam. For now, the Epic Games Store takes a 12% cut, allowing developers to take an 88% cut. This is in stark contrast to Valve’s 30% cut from the developers.

The case of Games stores taking a huge cut of the developers’ earnings is an issue in the recent months. Epic Games’ Fortnite is still not available on the Google Play Store, the premier games store for the Android platform. The Android platform has the largest mobile user base and yet Google sees it fit to take a 30% cut off developers earnings. The situation is not better on the PC platform where Steam is the largest games store. Valve takes a 30% cut from the sales. Just a few days ago, Valve announced a significant reduction in their cut for games which sell more.

For any game with more than $10 million in sales, Valve will reduce its cut to 25%. For games with more than $50 million in sales, Valve’s cut sees a further reduction to 20% For all other games, however, Valve continues with its 30% cut on all sales. The huge market share commanded by the Steam Store is the sole reason for such a high cut on the sales.

Epic Games can afford a lower cut because of Fortnite

The massive success of Fortnite has propelled Epic Games to large revenues. They announced $100 million investment into the esports scene. With this new Epic Games Store, the developer is diversifying their portfolio.

Epic Games has also released a small graph highlighting how their lower cut is for the benefit of the developers.

For many game developers, this new competition will be a boon in disguise. Without a monopoly in the market, the game stores will have a lower cut in order to stay relevant. Despite putting in the hard work and the constantly updating their games, the developers have to part way with a significant portion of their income. With no viable alternatives on multiple platforms, they have no option but to allow the same.

Developers have control over the newsfeed

The developers have complete control over their newsfeed and the game page.

As a developer, you control your game page and your newsfeed. There will be no store-placed ads or cross-marketing of competing games on your page, and no paid ads in search results.

Short Curated Games list at first

At first, the Epic Games Store will have a short list of curated games on its store. It will also only be available on PC. In 2019, the Epic Games store will include a lot more games as well as expand to other platforms. We will have more information at The Game Awards this Thursday, December 6th.