 | |
 The storefront in December 2022 | |
| Developer(s) | Epic Games |
|---|---|
| Initial release | December 6, 2018 |
| Operating system | |
| Available in | 15 languages |
List of languages Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), French, English, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish (Latin America), Spanish (Spain), Thai, Turkish | |
| Type | |
| License | Proprietary software |
| Website | epicgames.com/store |
The Epic Games Store is a video game digital distribution service and storefront operated by Epic Games. It launched in December 2018 as a software client, for Microsoft Windows and macOS, and online storefront. Android and iOS versions of the store launched in August 2024, with the iOS version only available for European users. The service provides friends list management, game matchmaking, and other features. Epic Games has further plans to expand the feature set of the storefront but it does not plan to add as many features as other digital distribution platforms, such as discussion boards or user reviews, instead using existing social media platforms to support these.
Epic began offering digital distribution for game publishers after the success of Fortnite, released in 2017, which Epic distributed using their own software channels to players on Windows and macOS systems. Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic Games, stated in August 2017 that the revenue cut of Steam, the dominant game storefront from Valve, was unreasonably high at 30%, and suggested that they could run a profitable store with as little as an 8% cut. By launch, Epic Games had settled on a 12% revenue cut for titles published through the store, as well as dropping the licensing fees for games built on their Unreal Engine, normally 5% of the revenue.
Epic Games enticed developers and publishers to the service by offering them time-exclusivity agreements to publish on the storefront, in exchange for guaranteed minimum revenue. Epic also offered users one or two free games each week for the first five years of its operation to help draw users. Criticism from users has been drawn to Epic Games and those developers and publishers opting for exclusivity deals, asserting that these are segmenting the market.