Fortnite-maker Epic Games announces a PC and Mac game store to rival Steam's, coming “soon”, with 88% of revenue going to developers, up from 70% on Steam
Fortnite-maker Epic Games is capping off their insanely successful 2018 with an even more ambitious product launch …
Context & Ripple Effects
Epic is turning Fortnite's install base into a storefront: because the new PC and Mac store doubles as Fortnite's launcher, it ships with a built-in audience no rival launch has had. The wedge is price — an 88/12 developer split against Steam's 70/30 — and the store went live within days of the announcement with Epic's own titles plus Supergiant's Hades.
The move opened a running argument about platform economics that Epic has kept escalating: by 2020 the store reported 108M users and $251M in third-party sales, and in 2023 Epic pushed further with the Epic First Run program, paying developers 100% of net revenue for six months in exchange for launch exclusivity.
First-order effects
- Developers selling PC games gain a credible second storefront whose 88% share beats Steam's 70% on every sale, making the split itself the pitch rather than features or audience size.
- Steam now faces direct price competition on its core take rate for the first time, since Epic's launcher-distribution model lets it run the store at a thinner margin.
Second-order effects
- Rival storefronts are pushed toward matching or restructuring their own splits, and Epic's follow-on First Run terms show the next battleground is exclusivity windows bought with even richer revenue shares.
- Publishers gain leverage in negotiations with any platform — including mobile app stores — because a demonstrated alternative changes what 'standard' means.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, storefront competition shifts from catalog breadth to take-rate economics, culminating in regulated markets: Epic's plan to bring the store to iOS under the DMA extends the same 12%-cut logic from PC to platforms previously closed to third-party stores.
The trend: Game distribution is becoming a take-rate war, with Fortnite-funded storefronts using developer revenue shares — and eventually regulation like the DMA — to crack incumbent platform fees.