– Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney discusses how the new Epic Games Store operates.
Game Informer recently published an interview with Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney following the announcement of the company’s new digital storefront.
This is a great interview for developers interested in learning a bit more about how the Epic Games Store will operate, and if it’s a good place to publish their work.
The Epic Games Store will no doubt receive competition from established marketplaces like GOG, Itch.io, and Steam, but Sweeney says that now was as good a time as any to start up a new storefront.
“The 70/30 percent split was a breakthrough more than a decade ago with the advent of Steam, the Apple App Store, and Google Play,” he explains. “But today, digital software stores have grown into a $25,000,000,000+ business worldwide across all platforms, yet the economies of scale have not benefited developers.”
“In our analysis, stores are marking up their costs 300 percent to 400 percent. We simply aim to give developers a better deal.”
When asked about how revenue split percentage was determined, Sweeney points to Fortnite as a big learning tool for the company. “We learned a lot about the cost of running a digital store on PC,” he says.
“The math is quite simple: we pay around 2.5 to 3.5 percent for payment processing for major payment methods, less than 1.5 percent for CDN costs, and between 1 and 2 percent for variable operating and customer support costs.”
“But with developers receiving 88 percent of revenue and Epic receiving 12 percent, this store will still be a profitable business for us,” he adds.
He also shares his optimism for the future of the Epic Games Store, pointing out that it’s a long-term project with plans to extend and improve on the storefront. In a particularly nice sentiment, Sweeney hopes that the competition between storefronts will benefit and bring better deals to developers.
Interested developers should be sure to read the entire piece over at Game Informer, it’s well worth the read.
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2018