Meanwhile, Epic Games has decided to take a bold step and let everyone use their own payment system instead of Apple’s.
Epic Games founder, chairman, and largest shareholder Tim Sweeney recently gave an important interview to Lex Fridman. We’ve quoted from it before about Unreal Engine 6, but during the four-hour conversation, Tim Sweeney also addressed some of the feedback about Epic Games’ launcher, which launched in late 2018 and is often criticized in comparison to Valve’s Steam client. Sweeney acknowledged the launcher’s shortcomings, but also emphasized that Valve has had much more time to refine its platform.
“The Epic Games launcher is clunky and we need to improve it. There’s a lot of work going on there and, you know, I wish we’d gotten better at addressing quality of life features and prioritizing them over all the other features. Steam has 15 years of accumulated work by many of the best programmers in the industry working on it. It’s a much bigger team working on Steam and a lot more time to work on it, so we’ve had to make a lot of prioritization decisions about what to support and when to support it with the Epic Game Store. A lot of the time it’s been supporting commercial features like merchandising, offering multiple versions of a game for sale, offering upgrades from the regular edition to the deluxe edition, and other things that partners are working on.
Other priorities were quality of life and launcher load times and other things. And we didn’t put enough emphasis on the quality of life features. We’ve made that very clear several times and we’ve gone through several refactorings. But it’s definitely been a disappointment to us and to a lot of users. One thing that took us a while to realize is that it’s not uniform. Depending on your proximity to a CDN and the size of your game collection, it can be either great or really clunky. And the people for whom it’s really clunky are the people behind a lot of the complaints. I should also say that the Steam launcher, for a long time, from my memory, but also just looking online, was also very clunky in the beginning,” Sweeney said.
Fortnite is slowly making its way back to iOS in the US, and to that end, Epic Games is offering players a deal: in Fortnite, Rocket League, or Fall Guys, if you buy using Epic’s payment system, you get 20% of what you spend back in Epic Rewards. That’s a big improvement over the usual 5% offer for purchases in the Epic Games Store, and it’s simple math, as Epic has demonstrated with this handy image: if you spend $23 on 2800 V-bucks, for example, you can get $4.60 back in Epic Rewards, or nothing. The 20% rewards offer is available across all platforms and is permanent. The announcement of the new Epic Rewards offer comes practically at the same time as Epic’s announcement that it has submitted Fortnite to Apple for review for launch on the App Store in the United States.
Fortnite‘s impending return to the App Store comes just a week after Epic scored a major court victory against Apple in a lawsuit that dates back to 2020. While Apple has largely come out on top in the legal battle, Epic still scored a major victory when the court ruled that Apple cannot prevent iOS app developers from directing users to their own payment processors outside of the app instead of Apple.
This is potentially very beneficial for developers, as using an external payment processor for purchases would allow them to avoid paying Apple a 30% profit margin, so it’s not really surprising that Apple wasn’t exactly keen on enforcing the ruling. Epic complained that Apple’s continued refusal to comply with the court’s orders on the merits led to this latest ruling, which included a statement – from the judge, not Epic – that Apple had continued its anticompetitive conduct solely to maintain its revenue streams.
The day after the ruling, Epic announced plans for “webstores” within the Epic Games Store that will allow developers to offer out-of-app purchases as a more cost-effective alternative to in-app purchases, where Apple, Google and others charge exorbitant fees. To encourage people to use the online stores, they will also receive 5% Epic Rewards for purchases made through them.
Epic is also offering 20% rewards on other Epic Games Store purchases – including other companies’ games, not just Epic’s own – through August 31, also across all platforms.
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