Epic Games Store

The Epic Games Store is a digital video game storefront for Microsoft Windows and macOS, operated by Epic Games. It launched in December 2018 as both a website and a standalone launcher, the latter which is required to download and play games. The storefront provides a basic catalog, friends list management, matchmaking, and other features. Epic Games has further plans to expand the feature set of the store front but it does not plan to add as many features as other digital distribution platforms, such as discussion boards or user reviews, instead using existing social media platforms to support these. Epic entered the distribution market after the success of Fortnite, which Epic distributed by their own channels to users on Windows and macOS system rather than other storefronts. Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic Games, had stated his opinion that the revenue cut of Steam, the dominant games storefront run by Valve, was too high at 30%, and suggested that they could run a store with as little as an 8% cut while remaining profitable. By launch, Epic Games had settled on a 12% revenue cut for titles published through the store, as well as dropping the licensing fees for games built on their Unreal Engine, normally 5% of the revenue. Epic Games enticed developers and publishers to the service by offering them time-exclusivity agreements to publish on the storefront, in exchange for assured minimum revenue, even if Epic made a loss on under-performing games. Epic also offered users one or two free games each week for the first year of its operation to help draw users. While the storefront has been considered successful, criticism from users has been drawn to Epic Games and those developers and publishers opting for exclusivity deals, asserting that these are segmenting the market.