For any platform and its ecology, it’s essential to make it easy for developers to release their products. In other words, platforms that are open source are more likely to win than those that keep everything closed. Well, there are some exceptions, such as Apple’s App Store. But there are many more cases of the opposite success. Today, Epic Game Mall announced that it is opening up the self-publishing feature. This will allow developers to publish their own games directly to the store. This is the first time the Epic Game Store has introduced such a feature. Previously, only invited developers could publish games on the store.
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The company’s blog post outlines the steps developers need to take to submit their games to the store through the Epic Developer Portal. In simple terms, developers need to register an Epic account, pay a $100 fee for each game, then submit the game and wait for review. The Epic Game Store will reject some games that contain certain content, such as copyright infringement, piracy, malware, etc.
Compared to Valve’s Steam service, the Epic Games Store only takes 12% of the game’s revenue share. As for Steam, it can go up to 30%. In fact, developers can also choose to use other payment systems. This allows them not to share their revenue with the platform.
Epic will waive engine royalties for games submitted to the store using Epic’s Unreal Engine, as long as in-game transactions are made using Epic’s payment system. In addition, any game that includes online multiplayer must support cross-play if the game is also available on other PC stores (including Steam).
With this move, the Epic Games Store will undoubtedly add more games and be able to better compete with Steam. The big question is whether the platform can handle the massive growth in its games library.
