Epic Games, makers of Fortnite, to take on Steam with desktop game store launch for Mac and Windows

“Fortnite-maker Epic Games is capping off their insanely successful 2018 with an even more ambitious product launch: a desktop games store built to take on Valve’s Steam Store,” Lucas Matney reports for TechCrunch.
“The store, which is ‘launching soon’ on PC and Mac, is going to be an attractive proposition to game developers with a revenue split that leaves them taking 88 percent of revenues on the store,” Matney reports. “‘As a developer ourselves, we have always wanted a platform with great economics that connects us directly with our players,’ Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said in an emailed statement. ‘Thanks to the success of Fortnite, we now have this and are ready to share it with other developers.'”
“Valve’s Steam Store is by far the most dominant presence in online PC game sales; they’ve enjoyed years of prosperity with rather light rivalry from competing stores that haven’t been able to match the scale of Steam,” Matney reports. “For Valve, holding onto big-game publishers is mission critical. Epic Games already has the benefit of a close working relationship with many major PC game developers that are using the company’s Unreal Engine to build their titles… A big sell for developers using Epic’s game engine is that the company says it will forego that Unreal revenue cut for any sales of the titles in the Epic Games Store. Depending on the early success of the game store, this could be a big threat to other game engines like Unity.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: It looks like a big shakeup in gaming – and game stores – looms!