Epic Store will not accept the sale of ‘fake games’

For years, Valve has always had a problem with what games to sell on Steam. They launched Greenlight, allowing Steam users to vote on the games they wanted to appear on Steam. Finally, Valve removed these barriers, allowing anyone to sell games on Steam for a $100 fee.

That created a few problems for Valve: this open process resulted in some games having to be removed from Steam later – due to its ‘don’t care’ policy, Valve was heavily criticized from the community.

Currently, Epic is pretty much the same as Steam before: considering negotiating game by game, but they are planning to expand their game store in the future. And when that happens, Epic Games won’t follow Steam’s ‘don’t care’ book.

Earlier this week, EPIC CEO Tim Sweeney was asked by PCGamer how they decide which games to release and which not to release on the Epic Store. He began to explain the Unreal Engine aspect of Epic and said Epic’s “very different policy” when releasing the game.

“Epic makes Unreal Engine tools for everyone, for you to make anything legal, and we don’t limit creativity – controversial or not,” Sweeney said. “This also applies to Unreal Engine, because we treat it like Microsoft Word. Wouldn’t it be crazy if the Microsoft Word EULA said ‘can’t you write these ideas in our word processing software?’ We are not going in that direction.”

However, when talking about the Epic Games Store, Sweeney said that Epic will apply quality standards “similar to movie theaters, having the right to choose the movies they want to show.”

“We will have quality standards, not accepting fake games,” he said. “We will accept games of ok quality, at all levels, whether small indie games or big AAA games, we will take them all. GTA is fine with us, but Epic won’t sell porn or anything that might shock players. PC is open platform, and if we don’t sell in our store, they can still communicate directly with customers.”

“Quality standards”, which means that Epic will play games before they are approved. However, this was not their plan.

“We won’t have a game certification process when we launch a game,” Sweeney said. “But I think we need to understand the quality of the games before we decide to sell them on the store.”

“Humans can make decisions, and they are okay.”

The fact that Epic does not sell porn games on the same platform as Fortnite is not too surprising. valve and Epic share a lot in common – both are privately held companies that heavily influence the PC game market by making game engines – but Epic is more geared towards the mainstream. Imagine what would happen to the Epic Store now, if an adult game was next to Fortnite. It will become a global advertising disaster.

But in addition to adult games, Epic rejects low-quality games, which is also a way of separating them from Steam.

While similar in many ways, the two companies have very different philosophies on how to sell games. Epic says that 12% of the profits from selling games on the Epic Store are fairer than Steam’s 30%. In a talk with PCGamer, Sweeney said that 12% of Epic Games will remain unchanged, and they can make a lot of money from this business model.

According to PCgamer