Epic Games Store Announces Self-Publishing Tools and Upcoming Support for Subscription Services
- Laurent Giret
- Mar 09, 2023
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Epic Games announced today that it’s launching new self-publishing tools for game developers and publishers interested in releasing their games on the Epic Games Store. Since its launch back in December 2018, the digital storefront has become a more serious competitor to Steam and it now has over 230 million users.
The Epic Games Store had a total of 1,548 PC games last year, with 626 new titles coming to the store in 2022. “That’s more than any previous year and represents a significant increase over games we had available to players in 2021,” Epic Games said today.
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The Epic Games Store is quite attractive for developers as the company just takes a 12% cut on game sales compared to Valve’s 30% cut on Steam (which decreases once sales reach a certain milestone). Moreover, the Epic Games Store allows developers to use any payment solution and receive a bigger share of the revenue coming from in-app purchases.
There’s a $100 submission fee per game with the Epic Game Store’s new self-service publishing tools, but all games also meet some requirements regarding game quality and prohibited content. Starting today, all games published on the Epic Games Store are also required to support achievements, and multiplayer games also need to support crossplay across all PC stores. Epic Games’ self-service publishing tools are now available in Epic’s Developer Portal and the company hopes that they will lead to “exponential growth in our catalog of games and apps.”
Epic Games announced today that it will add support for subscription services from third-party publishers and live service products in 2023. In practice, this means that we could eventually see game subscription services such as Ubisoft+ or EA Play become available on the Epic Games store. The latter is already available on Steam in addition to EA’s own PC game launcher.
Last but not least, Epic Games announced today that its Free Games Program will carry on in 2023. Last year, the company offered 99 free games worth $2,240 on the Epic Games Store, and this likely remains a great way to support the growth of the digital storefront.