Epic Games Store confronts the opponent, intends to “smack his head and laugh” Steam in the next 2 years

Over the next two years, the Epic Games Store plans to expand to include more exclusive titles than ever before.

Despite encountering many objections from the gaming community, Epic Games Store still firmly maintains its “exclusive” path. Over the next two years, the world’s leading video game publishing platform plans to expand to include more exclusive titles than ever before.

In the past few years, the Epic Games Store has emerged as a formidable force in the global game publishing market. Despite being a latecomer, with two big strategies, Epic Games Store is blowing heat on the back of Steam, the number one brand in this field for the past 10 years.

Two strategies to help Epic take shortcuts are giving away free games and releasing exclusive games. With free games, Epic has done very well in the past 2 years. In 2020 alone, 750,000 game versions were distributed to the community. This terrible number shows that Epic has a bottomless replay potential, ready to take down any competitor, including Steam.

With exclusive games, Epic also does a great job in their goal when successfully attracting many longtime Steam partners. To be able to negotiate with manufacturers in releasing exclusive games on the Epic Store, in addition to minimizing service fees, the platform also uses a “pawn” to convince partners. This amount is called the “exclusive fee”, which is passed on to the manufacturers by the Epic Store without regard to the game’s sales.

Taking the case of Control as an example, Epic used 10.45 million USD (~ 240 billion VND) to pay exclusive fees for the producer duo of 505 Games and Remedy Entertainment. In which, 505 Games enjoy 45%, the rest belongs to Remedy Entertainment.

Thus, we now understand why manufacturers are so interested in collaborating with the Epic Games Store. In addition to a very cheap service fee of only 12% (with Steam it will be 30%), Epic partners will receive an additional exclusive fee. In terms of total revenue, the cooperation with Epic Store will bring a lot of profit if compared to Steam or other platforms. This is the main reason why many game developers have not hesitated to “oust” Steam to “return to the Epic Games Store team”.

The above policy will continue to be strongly implemented by Epic Games Store in 2021. Like Hitman 3 is an example. The first blockbuster of the new year is currently releasing exclusively on Epic for the PC version. This makes the Steam community can only lament and wait.

Hitman 3 is exclusive to the Epic Games Store.

Speaking on PC Gamer, an Epic representative said they will continue on the path they have chosen. In the next 2 years, the number of exclusive games will increase even more strongly. Even Epic Games claims to have acquired an extremely large number of exclusive games, larger than the entire rest of this market. And when that happens, maybe Steam fans will really have to rethink their way of playing games.

In this race, who will be the winner? Does Steam have a new strategy for responding to this formidable challenger? Time will give us the most accurate answer.