The Epic Games Store is a digital video game storefront operated by Epic Games. It launched in December 2018.
The store is available on the web and through Epic Games' launcher application. It does not have features such as achievements or virtual reality headset support.
Epic's newer games will be exclusively available through its store and the company plans to fund developers to release exclusively through their store, using revenue guarantees to developers that opt for this, with Epic paying the difference should a game underperform.
Epic plans to offer one free game every two weeks through 2019.
Eventually the storefront will offer user reviews, but this feature will be opt-in by developers to avoid misuse by activities like review bombing. Additional planned features include cloud saving and achievements; however, Epic does not plan to add any "game-shaped features" similar to Steam's trading cards designed to drive sales. There are no plans to include internal user forums. The storefront will include a ticket-based support system for users to report bugs and technical problems for games to developers, while developers will be encouraged to link to external forums and social channels of their chosing, like Redditand Discord, in lieu of storefront-tied forums.
Where possible, Epic plans to extend its "Support a Creator" program that it had launched in Fortnite Battle Royale to other games offered on the store. With the Support a Creator program, players can opt to indicate a streamer or content creator, selected by Epic based on submitted applications, to support. Supported streamers then receive revenue from Epic Games on microtransactions made through the Epic Games Store from the players that supported them, incentivizing these content creators; within Fortnite, creators had received about 5% of the cash value of the microtransactions.
Digital distribution of games for personal computers prior to the introduction of the Epic Games Store were through digital storefronts like Steam and GOG.com, with Steam being the dominant channel with an estimated 75% of all digital distribution in 2013. Valve Corporation, which operated Steam, took a 30% revenue cut of all games sold through their services, a figure matched by the other services like GOG.com. In August 2017, Epic's Tim Sweeney suggested that 30% was no longer a reasonable cut, and that Valve could still profit if they cut their revenue share to 8%.
In early December 2018, Epic Games announced that it would open a digital storefront to challenge Steam. Epic planned to compete with Valve on game developers' share of profits: 88% with Epic, against 70% with Valve. Epic would also forgo the standard 5% revenue fee normally applied to games using the Unreal Engine if they were published on the Epic Game Store. By Epic's calculations, the storefront's reduced portion of profits was sufficient to be profitable. Epic also said that it wouldn't impose digital rights management (DRM) restrictions on games sold through its platform. The store opened days later, on December 6, 2018, as part of the Game Awards, with a handful of games and a short list of upcoming titles. The store is expected to open for macOS and Windows platforms before expanding to Android and other platforms. Epic aims to release a storefront for Android devices, bypassing the Google Play Store, where it will similarly only take a 12% cut compared to Google's 30%. While Apple, Inc.'s monopoly on iOS currently makes it impossible for Epic to release an App Store there, analysts believe that if Google reacts to Epic's App Store by reducing their cut, Apple will be pressured to follow suit.
Prior to the store's launch, its Director of Publishing Strategy, Sergey Galyonkin, had run Steam Spy, a website that collected Steam usage data from public profiles to create public sales statistics. He ran the site as a side-project, but used it to learn what developers would want from Epic's store, namely fewer social elements and less visual clutter. The store will be hand-curated until it opens to developer submissions in mid-2019. Once at this point, Epic's staff will still need to approve games for the store, a process that "mostly focus[es] on the technical side of things and general quality", according to Tim Sweeney. Sweeney does not expect this vetting process to be as stringent as the approvals needed to publish games on home video game consoles, but will use human evaluation to filter out bloatware and asset flips, among other poor-quality titles. Epic does not plan to allow adults-only mature content on the store.
In January 2019, Ubisoft announced its plans to distribute its games via the Epic Games Store, with its upcoming Tom Clancy's The Division 2 to be sold on the storefront (in addition to Ubisoft's own Uplay storefront) instead of Steam, making it the first major third-party publisher to utilize the Epic Games Store. Publisher Deep Silver followed suit later that month, announcing that Metro Exodus will be exclusive to Epic Games Store for one year, at a reduced US$50 (in North America) compared to US$60 when it was offered on other storefronts. Epic has subsequently made partnerships with Private Division and Quantic Dream for publishing on the store.
The Epic Games Store was announced a few days after Valve had revealed a change in the Steam revenue sharing model that reduced Valve's take, reducing their revenue cut from 30% to 25% after a game made more than US$10 million, and to 20% after US$50 million. Several indie game developers expressed concern that this change was meant to help keep larger AAA developers and publishers and did little to support smaller developers. As such, when the Epic Games Store was announced, several journalists saw it as potentially disruptive to Steam's current model. Some developers and publishers have announced plans to release games that they were planning to release through Steam now exclusively through the Epic Games Store, or to have timed exclusivity on Epic's storefront before appearing on other services.
Some consumers have reacted negatively towards the developers and publishers of games that have opted for Epic Games Store exclusivity, as it appears to create division in the gaming community similar to games that are released with timed exclusivity on home consoles. Metro Exodus, by developers 4A Games and published by Deep Silver, had been planned as a Steam release. However, Deep Silver announced a few weeks before release that the game would be a timed-exclusive on the Epic Games Store, eventually available on Steam a year after release. Some users were upset by this, review bombing the game on Steam and complaining at 4A Games. Deep Silver backed up 4A Games, and noted the decision for Epic Games Store exclusivity was made by Deep Silver's parent, Koch Media. In the days that followed after Metro Exodus' release, players used the Steam review system to praise the game as Epic Games Store lacked user reviews at that time. Phoenix Point, a spiritual successor to X-COM by X-COM' lead designer Julian Gollop, was successfully crowdfunded with players given the option of redemption keys on Steam or GOG.com. In March 2019, Gollop announced that they have opted to make Phoenix Pointexclusive to the Epic Games Store for a year; backers would get a redemption key for the Epic Games Store as well as for Steam or GOG a year later when the exclusivity period was up, as well as being provided the first year's downloadable content for free. Gollop explained that with the exclusivity deal, his team received additional financial support to finish up Phoenix Point. Several backers were angered by this decision, believing that Gollop's team used their funds to get the game to a point where they could get external investment and then change the direction of the game. Gollop asserted that the deal with Epic Games did not alter Phoenix Point's ultimate direction, but did offer full refunds to backers if they wanted. Following a number of other time-exclusive planned releases on the Epic Games Store announced during the 2019 Game Developers Conference and further complaints from players about this, Steve Allison, head of the storefront division, admitted that they not want to cause such disruption in the gaming community. According to Allison, they will try to avoid making such large-scale exclusivity deals so close to a game's release, and want to try to respect what the community wants. According to Sweeney, they will continue to accept offers for exclusivity on the Epic Games Store from any developers or publishers that are interested, regardless of what prior plans they had made with Steam or other storefronts.
Complaints leveled at the Epic Games Store have also included disproven claims of the Epic or the Store client collecting data on users to sell to China, as if it were spyware. This criticism was spurred by a Reddit post that mistakenly claimed that the Store client was collecting user data and asserted that it was tied to Tencent's involvement with Epic. Tencent is the largest video game publisher in China and the world and since 2013 has had a 40% ownership of Epic Games. Due to the nature of oversight that the Chinese government has with products released in that country, Tencent has to maintain a close relationship with the government. According to writers for USGamer and Polygon, due to the state of US-China political relations at the time the Store was launched, coupled with the general distrust and xenophobia among some Western video game players of Chinese players, this accusation caught the attention of many that repeated the claims from the Reddit post, and leading these people to boycott the Store and those publishers that opted to sell their games exclusively on the store. Epic has stated that there is some data tracking but only to support useful functions such as importing one's Steam friend lists into their client, or to track streaming media viewership for their Support-A-Creator program. Some of the information in the Reddit post reflected initial methods to collect this data, but Epic stated they only used the data for their said features and since adjusted their data access to be more in line with how privacy settings should be handled.