Epic says it is “going all-in” on webshops, and claims that currently just 18% of the top 200 mobile developers are taking advantage of off-store payments.
The Fortnite maker also claimed that the 70/30 revenue model maintained by Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store is “broken” during its State of Unreal event yesterday.
Epic had previously confirmed that its webshop tech would be launching in July, rather than June, in the State of Unreal keynote yesterday. In a separate talk, Epic Games Store VP and GM Steve Allison and director of portfolio strategy and business operations Kyle Billings explained a little more about their webshop plans.
Payments through Epic’s webshop tech have the same terms as the Epic Games Store, in short – developers get 100% of each game’s revenue up to the first $1m, then Epic gets 12% thereafter.
“We’re going all-in,” said Allison. “We know a bunch of people are competing in this space – Xsolla’s got a good foothold – we’re building it native to a platform that has 70m users.”
He said later: “Why we believe we can really get a foothold here is when you really breakdown the top 200 mobile developers…only about 18% of the top 200 mobile developers have webshops today.”
“The top 50 have a bunch, the percentage is really high, but it starts to fall after that,” Allison continued. “Creating them is problematic, and managing them…a lot of teams are not built to do it. We want to make a solution that’s easy to set up and easy to manage.”
Billings also took to the stage to acknowledge that Epic is still building its mobile store to be a “true 1.0” product. With forthcoming improvements to search, browsing, social, login, authentication and the integration of Epic’s Fortnite wallet system, the mobile store will be at parity with the PC store by the end of the year, he said.
He concluded by emphasising how important it is that the mobile industry moves on from the existing status quo.
“The 70/30 model is broken, I stand by that and I will die by that,” he added. “If we can get people to shift to 80/20, 88/12, that’s where we need to get and we need everyone to work to gather to make this happen.”
