Yesterday, Epic Games unveiled a new program to entice publishers and developers to bring their catalog games to the Epic Games Store.
The program is called Now on Epic. According to its terms, any game released before the end of the present month on another store or subscription service can be added to EGS, and the developers or publishers would get 100% of the revenue for the first six months. After the game has been released on the Epic Games Store, the revenue will revert to the standard 88-12% split that all games on Epic’s store enjoy.
Developers will need to create an Epic Games dev account to opt in to the program. There are a few additional caveats:
Participating in this program requires a commitment to release a minimum of three products that have been released prior to October 31, 2023 and are currently live on another third-party PC storefront (or are included in a third-party subscription service). Participants that do not have three products currently live that meet the above criteria must bring over all products that are live. All participating products must launch by June 30, 2025, though they do not need to launch on the Epic Games Store at the same time. You can enroll in the program until December 31, 2024.
A similar initiative called Epic First Run was announced earlier this year and now developers can finally register through the Developer portal. The difference with this newly announced program is that Now on Epic is geared towards catalog games.
Despite the financial issues that caused the recent mass layoffs, Epic continues to support its efforts to deliver an alternative store on PC and, should the fights against Apple and Google bear fruit, eventually on iOS and Android mobile devices, too. Whether these programs are enough to entice developers remains to be seen.
