In a turn of events that has become increasingly common, another game company has announced that it plans to directly compete with Steam by starting its own storefront. Epic Games, developer of the wildly popular Fortnite and Unreal Tournament series, is the next on the block to try and chop down the digital behemoth that is Steam. Its plan to dent the platform’s gilded armor? Appease developers. That’s the best plan I’ve seen in a while.
Whereas Steam takes a 30 percent cut of the profits from games sold on its storefront, Epic plans to only take a 12 percent cut of the sale. In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney claimed that through their distribution of Fortnite they learned the costs of distributing games and found that other storefronts were marking their costs up to 400% over what they should be. Based on Epic’s calculations, a 12% cut for the storefront was a profitable compromise that would be more enticing to developers. Even more enticing? How about waived fees for using the Unreal Engine?
Source: Destructoid Epic Games to launch developer friendly storefront to compete with Steam