Epic revealed that self-publishing is coming to the Epic Games Store next year.

During the Year in Review 2022 episode of Inside Unreal, Epic’s weekly show on Twitch, host Tina Wisdom made this announcement:

“The Epic Games Store has a global audience north of 60 million monthly active users (MAUs), and it continues to have industry leading revenue share of 88-12. Keep in mind that games built on Unreal Engine that are distributed on the Epic Games Store do not pay royalties on those Epic Games Store sales.

Also, developers can use their own payment systems for in-app purchases, and we do not take revenue on any of those sales. We’re excited to share that self-publishing tools to ship your game on the Epic Games Store are coming as early as 2023.”

It’s been a long trip for the video game storefront since Epic founder Tim Sweeney decided they could sell games with a smaller cut than Valve, who is asking for too much at 30 % of revenue. Epic Games Store takes only 12 % of revenue for items. As Tina mentioned, they also drop royalties for games that use the Unreal engine on their own store.

On a daily basis, most gamers would know the Epic Games Store for the generous weekly giveaways of games, of different scales and from different companies. Tim has gone on record that these giveaways are helping sell more games, as counterintuitive as that would sound.

From the onset, however, the storefront has faced criticism for another famous aspect to it. Epic Games Store has been making games timed exclusive to their storefront, locking those games out from competitors like Steam or GOG, similar to how console companies can also have timed exclusives for video games.

While they do not look for games to be exclusive forever, some of the deals brokered for this exclusivity have angered gamers. We had covered how studio Glumberland received harassment for arranging for timed exclusivity for their game, Ooblets, but that deal was what helped them secure funding to finish the game.

Still, Epic seems to have achieved its goal of disrupting the market overall. Microsoft has decided to match Epic’s 12 % developer revenue cut, for their own Microsoft Store.

While Epic Games Store users have been patient, the storefront has been slow to roll out even the most basic features after these four years. Cloud saves did not arrive until a year after the store’s existence, and incredibly, wishlists did not exist until two years after that, in 2020. It was also only relatively recently that you could add multiple items to cart.

So, this new feature for the sake of the developers is welcome, but long overdue. Developers can already do their own self publishing in platforms like itchio and Steam, and this will definitely prod a large number of individual and smaller developers and dev teams to bring their own games to Epic Games Store. The  increased competition for Steam means more games can be made, and that means we get to play more great games as well.

Source: Twitch