Epic Plans To Launch Its Own Game Store Soon

Valve's Steam store is gaining yet another competitor very soon. Epic Games, the company behind the ridiculously famous Fortnite, has plans to launch its own shop, the Epic Games Store, sometime in the near future.

In a news update on the Unreal Engine website, Epic's Tim Sweeney outlined what Epic's been able to accomplish in the past few years, and what the company hopes to achieve through its latest venture.

"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," Sweeney said.

So yeah, Fortnite has a little bit to do with the move. The game's been downloaded by millions of players, and Epic already has a lot of experience taking payments from them. The company managed all that despite not being available in any other PC game stores, and there's reason to believe that Epic could have success funneling many of those Fortnite players over to the store it's building.

But how is Epic looking to affect the market? What will the Epic Games Store do differently than, say, Steam? The big answer has to do with the revenue split.

As it stands, Steam takes a 30% cut of all sales made through that platform. Epic's plan to lure developers and publishers to the Epic Games Store is to take a smaller percentage. And the deal gets even sweeter for those who develop their games using Unreal.

"Developers receive 88% of revenue," Epic says in its update. "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%."

There's no word on when exactly the Epic Games Store will be launching other than the word, "soon." It'll start out on PC and Mac, with a mobile version coming to Android and "other open platforms" sometime in 2019.