In 2012, the company decided to move to making online games, Sweeney said, and by 2014 it launched its own store to distribute the Unreal game engine. Those games helped highlight the features of the game engine for other developers.īut at first, starting more than a decade ago, it was just for Epic’s games. Unlike Unity, Epic Games always made its own games alongside its Unreal Game Engine. Sweeney said that the store began as a distribution vehicle for Epic’s own games. The Epic Games Store history Epic Games Store versus Steam back during the launch days. It’s an unblocking event for the store going much wider than it’s gone so far,” Sweeney said. They don’t have to work with us directly. “Not only can they submit their own game, but maintain their own presence and constantly update the materials. These tools are available to any developer or publisher with games meeting the store’s requirements, such as content ratings. Developers can head straight to the Epic Developer Portal to release a game using the self-service publishing tools. The company will still curate higher-profile games.īut the tools will allow developers to rate their own games and have the market verify those ratings. As a practical matter, as the number of game submissions grows, Epic can’t keep up with the demands for curation. Now it’s Epic’s chance to enable the same kind of growth on the Epic Games Store as Steam saw when it unlocked self-publishing. “It’s on us to make our services attractive enough that developers choose to use them, rather than forcing them through payment terms, like we’re fighting in the case of Apple.” We think that if we have enough of these services to choose from, then we’ll be successful,” he said. “We just want to help developers build awesome experiences.

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