Following the groundbreaking victory obtained in the Epic v. Google trial, founder and CEO Tim Sweeney was interviewed by The Verge on various topics, including the Epic Games Store.
One of the main goals of the lawsuit against Google (and Apple) is being able to establish the Epic Games Store on Android and iOS. When asked whether it would be just a game store or a more generic app store, Sweeney was clear:
The Epic Games Store isn’t a games store, right? It’s the store operated by Epic Games. So we have a lot of non-games there already. We have the Brave web browser, we have a number of software creation tools including Unreal Engine, and there’s more coming, including some other awesome creation tools and productivity tools. We’ll host any app anybody wants of any sort.
I think the gaming market is something we’re uniquely close to, and so I think we would likely be able to forge closer partnerships and opportunities in gaming, but we’ll be open to everybody on Android as we are on PC.
Of course, the Epic Games Store originally launched around five years ago on PC, making its debut at The Game Awards. The goal was to offer an alternative store to Steam’s near-monopoly, allowing developers to retain a much higher percentage of their game revenues. Whereas Steam (like console stores and Android/iOS) grabs a 30% fee by default, marking up costs by 300-400%, the Epic Games Store only asked for 12% of the revenue, and it also removed the usual 5% fee for games made with Unreal Engine distributed through the EGS.
Over the years, Epic lured both users and developers by giving away free games on a regular basis and paying for timed exclusives such as Metro Exodus, Borderlands 3, Control, The Outer Worlds, Detroit: Become Human, MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, Shenmue 3, Ooblets, HITMAN 3, Oddworld: Soulstorm, Chivalry 2, and the Final Fantasy VII Remake to name a few. While we recently learned the Epic Games Store still isn’t profitable, Sweeney told The Verge that the EGS is the ‘untold success story’ quickly catching up to Steam with its 80 million MAUs.
We’ve gotten so much traction with Fortnite in so many different ways, and with the Epic Games Store, right, we’re going to continue investing heavily here. The Epic Games Store is the untold success story in the background. Since it launched in 2018, we now have 80 million monthly active users. Steam has 120 million, so we’re catching them fast!
When asked whether he planned to continue with an aggressive pursuit model of Epic Games Store exclusives, Sweeney said they’re employing a ‘ridiculously aggressive’ model instead, hinting at further exclusives on the way.
No, we’re in a different model, which is called the “Ridiculously aggressive pursuit model.” If it’s a 10-slide deck, that’s on slide 11.
The Epic Games founder also had something nice to say about the Steam Deck. He would like to support it with Fortnite, but he regrets not having enough programmers and the ‘amazing’ Deck hardware not selling more units, as that would be a good way to justify the effort.
If we only had a few more programmers. It’s the Linux problem. I love the Steam Deck hardware. Valve has done an amazing job there; I wish they would get to tens of millions of users, at which point it would actually make sense to support it.
