Epic’s entry into the fiercely competitive webshop business is currently at the ‘minimum viable product’ stage, says Games Store boss Steve Allison.
The Fortnite maker announced it is entering the webshop business in May 2025, and suggested at the time that it would launch by June. It ended up launching in October last year with little fanfare, and we’ve heard very little about it since.
So we asked Epic Games Store boss Steve Allison how it’s going at GDC earlier this month. He told us that Epic’s webshop business is in a ‘minimum viable product’ stage currently, with a few partners offering feedback on the new suite of monetisation tools. Only a handful of PC and mobile game developers have adopted Epic’s webshop tech to date, it seems.
“We wanted to get them out the door, we wanted to learn,” explained Allison. “We know webshops work, we saw with the IDFA rollback how this new thing just emerged and really sophisticated developers are able to push like 50% of their revenue through that and make all the margins that they want to make. We want to provide that for everybody.”
“It’s out, but I would say it’s kind of in a MVP state…we have had a bunch of people take a look at them, we’ve got a bunch of feedback.”
The small number of PC and mobile studios to adopt the tools have seen “some pretty good outcomes,” Allison continued, but Epic webshops have yet to attract any major developers so far.
“We’ve got to do a few more pieces of work to get the bigger fish, yeah…we have some of the smaller companies onboarding what we have, but we’ve got to get some sophisticated merchandising tools and dynamic price adjustment and regional stuff that’s not there yet,” he added. “We’ve got work to do.”
“It’s a really interesting emergent thing that just happened a couple years ago – it’s pretty surprising, actually, and it’s not a way to extract more from from Apple, not from my perspective. It’s just a way to give developers another path to the monetisation that they need to have to have a healthy business when 30% may not work.”
You can find more of Allison’s thoughts on how the Epic Games Store is performing on mobile so far here.
