Epic Games Store Is the Untold Success Story with 80 Million MAUs, Says Sweeney; It’s Catching Steam Fast

wccftech.com:

Following the groundbreaking victory obtained in the Epic v. Google trial, founder and CEO Tim Sweeney was interviewed by The Verge on various topics, including the Epic Games Store.

One of the main goals of the lawsuit against Google (and Apple) is being able to establish the Epic Games Store on Android and iOS. When asked whether it would be just a game store or a more generic app store, Sweeney was clear:

The Epic Games Store isn’t a games store, right? It’s the store operated by Epic Games. So we have a lot of non-games there already. We have the Brave web browser, we have a number of software creation tools including Unreal Engine, and there’s more coming, including some other awesome creation tools and productivity tools. We’ll host any app anybody wants of any sort.

I think the gaming market is something we’re uniquely close to, and so I think we would likely be able to forge closer partnerships and opportunities in gaming, but we’ll be open to everybody on Android as we are on PC.

Of course, the Epic Games Store originally launched around five years ago on PC, making its debut at The Game Awards. The goal was to offer an alternative store to Steam's near-monopoly, allowing developers to retain a much higher percentage of their game revenues. Whereas Steam (like console stores and Android/iOS) grabs a 30% fee by default, marking up costs by 300-400%, the Epic Games Store only asked for 12% of the revenue, and it also removed the usual 5% fee for games made with Unreal Engine distributed through the EGS.

Over the years, Epic lured both users and developers by giving away free games on a regular basis and paying for timed exclusives such as Metro Exodus, Borderlands 3, Control, The Outer Worlds, Detroit: Become