Epic Games now allows independent developers to self-publish their games on the Epic Games Store. The company charges a lower commission than major competitor Steam. Epic also requires these games to have crossplay with any other PC platforms.
Steam has allowed creators to self-publish their games on that platform for many years. Epic Games charges a 12 percent commission on games sold, it underlines in his blog post. Steam usually asks for 30 percent. Epics committee exists alongside the submission fee of 100 dollars, which pays for the approval of the game. Epic Games does not allow a number of types of content, which can be found on Steam, for example. The prime example of this is pornographic games; Epic Games does not need it on its platform. Other than that, the limitations are pretty obvious: illegal content, copyrighted content, scams, fake games, malware, and the like.
Epic also requires publishers to use the platform’s achievements system, but only if the games on other platforms also have achievements. The Epic Store was launched in 2018, but didn’t receive achievements until 2021. Epic further reports that age ratings for the Epic Store will be free.
At the same time, Epic Games is sharing some Numbers about how things are going with his game store. In total, there were 230 million users on the platform at the end of last year, 36 million more than at the end of 2021. The maximum number of daily active users was 34.4 million and for monthly active users that is 68 million. A year earlier that was 62 million. In total, the store had 1548 games at the end of last year and a total of 99 games were given away for free, worth $2240. The free games have been claimed almost 700 million times in total.
For the coming year, Epic announces support for game subscriptions. The Fortnite maker himself does not mention examples of which services that can become. In addition, there must be hubs come for content about specific games, similar to that of Steam.