After experiencing a wave of major layoffs, the outside world is curious about whether Epic Games’ future operating strategies will change. However, it is clear that Epic Games’ previous report conference pointed out that they will still not give up their signature strategies of “limited exemptions” and “exclusives”. As for platform exclusivity, there is a new profit-sharing plan named “Now On Epic”.
Just last week at the “Unreal Fest 2023” held by Epic, Kyle Billings, director of product content strategy at Epic, announced the recent results of the Epic Games Store platform on stage. It will achieve 68 million MAU in 2022, and every quarter in the third quarter of 2023. The average number of new monthly users has reached 2.4 million, and 50% of players play games from third-party developers.
It is worth mentioning that the official emphasized that the free game plan will continue to be implemented. So far, Epic Games has given away more than 100 limited-time free games and brought more than 90 million new users to this.
In view of the growing number of third-party developers entering the Epic Games store, they also further announced「Now On Epic」Project, this is a new program for publishers and developers to incentivize old games, allowing publishers to put old games released in the past on the Epic Games Store.
The biggest benefit of this program is that as long as the game works that meet the program qualifications, the revenue in the first half of the Epic store will increase from 88% of the net revenue from user consumption to 100%. After the first half of the year, the revenue share will return to 88%/12%.
However, to participate in this program, you need to commit to listing at least three titles that will be launched before October 31, 2023. In addition, these titles still need to be sold by other third-party PC merchants (or included in third-party subscription services). If the participant currently does not have three works that meet the above criteria, he or she needs to put all the works that have been launched on the shelves. All participating works need to be released before June 30, 2025, but do not need to be on the Epic Games Store at the same time.
according to Steamworks According to data, the Steam platform is still the world’s largest PC electronic game platform, with more than 130 million active players every month, and the number of online players peaking at more than 30 million every day, a height that Epic is still unable to reach.
The Epic Games Store currently has more than 230 million players worldwide and 68 million monthly active users. In the past, they always believed that the profit sharing plan for third-party manufacturers would allow more games to settle on the Epic platform, thereby attracting More players.
Of course, whether it is the “Epic First Run” launch profit sharing plan, or the “Now On Epic” launch profit sharing plan, or even limited-time free games being given away every week, these are Epic Games’ consistent currency-spending strategies in recent years, and previous layoffs have also It indirectly proves that Epic has a lot of expenditures on its operations. Whether this money-sprinkling policy can really catch up with Steam is still the focus of continued attention in the industry.
