Epic's PC and Mac games store, announced last week, is now live with Epic's own Fortnite and Unreal Tournament, Hades from Supergiant Games, with more to come
It's a busy week for Epic Games . Fresh from pushing out a major season 7 update for Fortnite, so the gaming giant has taken the wraps off its own games store.
Context & Ripple Effects
Four days after Epic announced it would take on Steam with an 88%-to-developer revenue split — up from Steam's 70% — the store is actually live, shipping with Epic's own Fortnite and Unreal Tournament plus Supergiant Games' Hades as early third-party proof.
The launch matters because it pairs the industry's biggest live game with a storefront that undercuts the incumbent's economics, giving developers a credible second checkout option on PC and Mac for the first time in years.
First-order effects
- Developers now have a storefront paying them 88% of revenue instead of 70%, and Supergiant's Hades gets launch-window visibility alongside Fortnite rather than competing against Steam's front page.
Second-order effects
- Valve faces its first direct pricing challenge on PC distribution, forcing a response on revenue terms or curation as publishers weigh dual-storefront releases.
- Fortnite's massive player base becomes a distribution funnel: the store doubles as the game's launcher, converting existing players into store users at near-zero acquisition cost.
Third-order effects
- If the 88/12 split becomes a benchmark, platform fees shift from a fixed industry norm to a competitive variable across stores — a pressure point Epic later carried to mobile with its iOS debut in the EU.
- The pattern points toward storefronts being won or lost on exclusive content and first-party hits rather than catalog size, a dynamic whose costs show up later in Epic's own accounting of $251M in third-party sales against heavy investment.
The trend: PC game distribution is moving from a single dominant storefront toward platform-subsidized challengers that use first-party hits and lower revenue cuts to break the incumbent's hold.