Back when Fortnite for Android was nearing its release, there were rumors, followed by a confirmation, that it would ditch the Google Play Store. After its release, you could download the game from their website or Samsung’s Galaxy Apps Store. Apparently, that wasn’t enough for them. Fortnite’s creator, Epic Games, is planning to launch its own game store for Android, PC, and Mac.
Epic Games has announced that they’ll launch the Epic Games store soon. The store will launch with a curated set of games for PC and Mac. Later on, in 2019, it will open up to Android. We don’t have any info on how the store will work on any of the platforms, however. Epic has said that they will reveal more details on December 6th.
To set itself apart from the competition, Epic Games will give 88% of the revenue generated to the developer. The Play Store, on the other hand, gives only 70% of the revenue. Also, if a developer uses Epic Games’ own game engine—a software-development environment designed to build games—the developer is supposed to give 5% of his revenue to Epic Games. That won’t be the case if he uses the Epic Games store to distribute his game. Epic will cover the 5% royalty out of their own 12%.
Apart from that, the store will also have a newsfeed so that game developers can reach you with game updates and news about upcoming releases. The developer can let YouTube content creators, Twitch streamers, bloggers, etc. refer their audience to buy a game, and the developer will give them a share of the revenue. Epic will also cover the first 5% of creator revenue-sharing for the first 2 years.
Epic will not limit the store to games built with Epic’s game engine, Unreal. It is open to games built with any engine, including Unity. Developers don’t need to be worried about advertisements on their game pages either.
It’s time someone’s brought competition to Google’s monopoly on the Play Store. However, Epic is going to have to manage the security well: we all know what happened to Fortnite in the past. If executed right and without any security issues, it would drive most game developers away from the Play Store, and for good reason. Sure, it will bring fragmentation, but along with it, it’ll put Google on its toes. They haven’t been treating developers right lately anyway.
Source: Epic Games
