Some interesting industry news for you here. Epic Games have announced a change to the revenue model of the Epic Games Store, as they try to pull in more developers and more gamers to actually purchase things.
Announced in a blog post on May 1st, Epic will take a 0% store fee for the first $1 million revenue developers make per app per year. After that, it goes back to their normal 88%/12% split.
Interestingly, this seems to be an expansion of their Epic First Run program they launched back in 2023. For that though, developers had to be exclusive for at least six months. Seems this simply wasn't good enough, so now all developers will get it.
Not surprising they're doing this, when you see how player spending on third-party games on the Epic Games Store has gone down two years in a row.
On top of that they've also announced "Webshops" to release in June 2025 that enables developers to "launch their own webshops hosted by the Epic Games Store". This seems to be mainly a target for mobile by the sounds of it as Epic say it means developers can offer "out-of-app purchases, as a more cost-effective alternative to in-app purchases, where Apple, Google, and others charge exorbitant fees". People who use the Webshops will "accrue 5% Epic Rewards on all their purchases".
This was announced only a day after a judge ruled massively in Epic's favour against Apple (The Verge).
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Phlebiac a day ago
rea987 18 hours ago
jarhead_h 15 hours ago
In other words, Valve is still winning.
dziadulewicz 12 hours ago
ElectricPrism 7 hours ago
I don't think you have to Worry, I don't think Tim Sweeney knows how to dismount a tiger.
It actually makes it really nice, because you know upfront the whole store is going to be a huge fail for consumers, and therefore don't need to waste money feeding the tiger before it's meal time.
I DO want a competitive market, this is why I use itch.io, gamejolt, and GOG as well as steam. I want that competition to succeed, not Epic, with the rare exception of Epic clapping Apple's ass in court which I am 100% in approval of in a very "Enemy of my enemy" fashion.
But those other places have things that actually benefit me as an end user, instead of holding games at gunpoint and going "Use our badly made store with no linux support outside of a 3rd party launcher like Heroic or you don't get to play this" while itch and gamejolt host fangames, experimental projects, and mods, and GOG has DRM free games to entice me. Epic just has a whiny CEO pretending
But speaking of demographics, You know what I am the target audience of? Unreal Tournament. And they did not treat the franchise their engine's namesake comes from with any level of dignity since UE4 got cancelled and they delisted the entire franchise, so there's that chip on my shoulder about Epic too.
Contrary to what Tim Sweeney has directly said, Consumers decide the store wars, not publishers.
Last edited by WMan22 on 4 May 2025 at 6:20 am UTC
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