Epic to take on Steam and the Play Store with upcoming Epic Games Store

In a blog post published today at the Unreal Engine website, Unreal and Epic Games announced that at some point in the near future there will be an Epic Games Store. This new online shop will be a direct competitor with both Steam on PC and Mac and the Google Play Store on Android devices.

According to the blog post, the Epic Games Store will launch “with a hand-curated set of games on PC and Mac,” after which it will “open up more broadly to other games and to Android and other open platforms throughout 2019.”

Epic and Unreal did not disclose any specific dates for the launches of these platforms but the companies did say that they would reveal more details at The Game Awards this Thursday, December 6, 2018.

To help convince game developers to use this upcoming platform, the Epic Games Store will offer better revenue splits than Steam. For example, a developer making a game with Unreal Engine and releasing it on Steam would net them a revenue share of only 65 percent, whereas on the Epic Games Store that same game would net the developer an 88 percent cut.

In addition to better revenue cuts, the Epic Games Store will also give developers better control over their games’ pages, with no ads and no cross-marketing of other games. There will also be novel ways to connect developers and players.

Epic Games is the developer of the mega-hit Fortnite, which caused plenty of controversy earlier this year by launching outside of the Google Play Store via a sideloaded installer. With the upcoming Epic Games Store, it looks like Epic is going to take things a step further by introducing a full-on competitor to the Play Store itself.

What do you think? Will you be downloading the Epic Games Store on your Android device when it launches? Let us know what you think in the comments.

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