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Race to the bottom?

Epic Games Store completely eliminates revenue fees for smaller developers

Epic takes no cut for first $1 million in annual per-game revenue under new plan.

Kyle Orland – | 107
Credit: Epic
Credit: Epic
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It has been over six years since Epic started undercutting Steam’s 30 percent revenue share for developers, asking for just 12 percent of sales on its then-new Epic Games Store. Now, Epic is going even further by reducing those fees to zero for a game’s first $1 million in annual sales.

The newly announced fee structure will go into effect in June, Epic said, and will apply to a developer’s revenue on a “per app” basis. After the first $1 million in annual sales, apps will be charged the usual 12 percent fee for listing on the Epic Games Store.

This isn’t the first time Epic has offered a financial break to smaller developers. Back in 2011, the company eschewed royalty payments for the first $50,000 in sales for projects made with the newly free Unreal Development Kit. By 2020, that royalty-free grace period for Unreal Engine projects was increased to cover the first $1 million in lifetime sales for a project.

Looking out for the little guy?

Epic’s focus on the low end of the gaming revenue scale is something of an inverse of Valve’s fee structure on Steam. In 2018, Valve cut its default 30 percent revenue share to 25 percent, but only for lifetime per-game earnings in excess of $10 million. Valve’s fee goes down again to 20 percent after a game hits $50 million in lifetime sales.

Steam is the guy standing his ground on the left. Epic is the guy jumping in with a Superman punch on the right.
Credit: Epic Games
Steam is the guy standing his ground on the left. Epic is the guy jumping in with a Superman punch on the right. Credit: Epic Games

That “better deal for bigger developers” setup drew particular ire from Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney shortly after it was announced. “Right now, you assholes are telling the world that the strong and powerful get special terms, while 30% is for the little people,” Sweeney wrote to Valve in a 2018 email unearthed during the company’s legal fight with Apple. “We’re all in for a prolonged battle if Apple tries to keep their monopoly and 30% by cutting backroom deals with big publishers to keep them quiet. Why not give ALL developers a better deal?”

The first few years of the Epic Games Store were characterized by a “hand-curated” approach to game offerings, focusing on established developers and flashy exclusives to attract new customers to the store. Back in 2023, though, Epic officially opened the store to self-publishing, allowing for a flood of hundreds of smaller games such as Fell in Love with Coser 4 and Vacation Adventures: Park Ranger 17 Collectors Edition, to highlight just a couple of recent and upcoming Epic Games Store releases.

While Epic will certainly lose a lot of revenue under this new fee structure, the company has long shown a willingness to throw large sums of money at the Epic Games Store in an attempt to get a foothold against Steam’s near-monopoly in PC game distribution. And while the Epic Games Store managed to attract over $1 billion in customer spending in 2024, that number falls well short of Steam’s estimated $10.8 billion in total spending the same year.

That has to be at least a little disappointing for Epic, considering the company fell well short of early hopes of becoming 35 to 50 percent of the PC gaming market by 2024.

Photo of Kyle Orland
Kyle Orland Senior Gaming Editor
Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.
107 Comments
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Trogmor
I have no issue with this as long as this does not force devs into exclusivity. The thing some folks do not realize is that it does take some effort to list your game on multiple stores and can be daunting. As such, smaller shops are more likely to use the behemoth that is steam for the better shot of success.

I hate epic (mostly because I really do not like Tim Sweeney), but competition is good as long as you don't lock it away from my choice of stores.

I suspect though that this is epic trying to find the next big thing, then buy out the developer and ruin a game like they did with Rocket league and Fall guys.
4
42Kodiak42
As a developer who's currently working on an indie game, this makes me almost consider putting it on Epic. Unfortunately for EGS, I'm including a multiplayer component and really don't want to split my users across different online subsystems (Steam integration and the Epic online subsystem don't talk to each other), and I am certainly not going to roll my own as a one-man-band here.
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