The head of Epic Games also discussed how Epic Games Store’s strategy around exclusive titles would continue.

This week, Epic Games Store made several announcements. For one, the publisher has made a self-publishing toolkit available (and is charging $100, the same amount Valve is charging to get a game onto Steam). There are some differences with Steam: for example, pornographic games have no place on the Epic Games Store. And PC crossplay is mandatory for multiplayer titles. Epic provides the option of custom crossplay, third-party SDKs (software development kits), or its Epic Online Services.

PCGamer reported how critical Sweeney was of Valve’s API (application program interface). According to him, the Steamworks API is quite troublesome when it comes to multiplayer games: ” They have a classic lock-in strategy where they build these services that only work with their store, and they use the fact that they have the majority market share to encourage everybody to ship games that have a broken experience in other stores.

And we were bitten by this early on with several multiplayer games coming to the Epic Games Store. Steamworks didn’t work on our store, so they had either a reduced set of multiplayer features or none, or they were just limited to a much smaller audience back in the launch days of the Epic Games Store, so you had a lot of multiplayer games that felt like they were broken,” Sweeney said.

The Epic Games Store’s exclusivity strategy is changing so that fewer but larger games will be available only on their platform (the caliber of Borderlands 3 comes to mind) because those more prominent titles have attracted the audience. Exclusive titles include Alan Wake 2 (Remedy Entertainment), but genDESIGN, PlayDead, and Mediatonic, acquired by Epic in 2021, are also doing something for the platform.

Epic Games Store had 230 million users in 2022, up 36 million from 2021. Monthly active users increased from 62 to 68 million. Last year, developers released 626 games on the platform, almost doubling the titles available. Last year, 99 games were available for $2,240, and in the meantime, the Epic Games Store launcher is undergoing several improvements (faster loading times, support for subscription services, and content hubs).

Source: PSL