Epic is offering a big incentive for developers to bring older games to its store

theverge.com:

By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.

Epic Games announced a new program on Monday to try and incentivize developers to bring their older games to the Epic Games Store. Under the new “Now On Epic” program, Epic will give developers 100 percent of the “net revenue from user spending” for six months on products offered through the program, according to a blog post. Typically, Epic offers 88 percent of revenues while keeping 12 percent for itself, and the revenue split will go back to that level after the six months are up.

To be part of the program, developers must commit to releasing at least three games that have come out before October 31st, 2023, and “are currently live on another third-party PC storefront (or are included in a third-party subscription service).” Alternately, if a developer doesn’t have three products that meet that criteria, Epic says they must “bring over all products that are live.” If you want to wait a bit to decide if you want to bring your games to the program, that’s okay; Epic says that developers can “enroll in the program until December 31, 2024, and all eligible products must be released on the Epic Games Store by June 30, 2025.”

The new program could help Epic better compete with Valve’s Steam storefront, which already offers huge back catalogs of games. But players who seek out those older games may have already built sizable collections on Steam, so they may not have much of a reason to switch to Epic’s store even if an older game shows up there due to Now On Epic.

The Now On Epic program adds to a few others to try and convince developers to bring their games