Epic CEO Tim Sweeney spoke up on X.com: According to him, Fortnite could appear on other platforms such as Steam, Microsoft and Co. In order to do this, however, they would have to forego their share of the sales price.
Fortnite has been one of the most important games ever for years. This year in particular, the game is getting one cool update after another: Most recently, players were able to enjoy OG Fortnite. At the moment, the new LEGO Fortnite mode is fascinating entire hordes of players.
Epic Games shows LEGO Fortnite in the cinematic trailer
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Fortnite is currently available on PC and Mac via the Epic Launcher. This was originally intended to be a great counterweight to Steam, but is still in the red five years after its launch. Despite layoffs and losses, the company continues to pursue its aggressive course towards other platforms.
Now Epic CEO Tim Sweeny has commented on X.com about the port of Fortnite to possible other provider platforms.
Fortnite on Steam? Only under certain conditions, says the boss
What did Tim Sweeney write? Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games, published the following statement on X.com:
With the statement he criticizes the fact that platforms like Steam allow developers to publish their games via them, but also rip off a bit of the purchase price in return. However, this is largely how the platforms finance themselves.
How much money do the platforms actually take? What’s exciting is that Epic’s in-house Epic Games Launcher itself keeps 12% of the sales of the games it sells. Even if that’s a world less than what Steam rips off:
The popular platform keeps around 30% of a game’s total revenue. That’s comparatively a lot and hits particularly hard on indie developers who depend on every cent. However, one indie developer says: We are very happy with it!
In the Microsoft Store, on the other hand, according to The Verge, developers are even allowed to keep all of their sales. Tim Sweeney commented on this back in 2021 and called Microsoft’s 2021 version the best.
The third store mentioned by Sweeney is OneStore from South Korea. According to Pocket Gamer, the platform is financially supported by PUBG developer Krafton, among others. The provider has been active worldwide since 2022 and, according to PR Newswire, takes around 20% of its developers’ total sales.
What are the chances of something happening here? Tim Sweeney decided to launch the Epic Games Launcher in 2018 for economic reasons. As described above, this is not yet profitable, which could be a good incentive to look for alternatives.
But as long as enough development studios accept the fees to the store of their choice, there are very few, if not negligible, reasons for Steam and Co. to approach Epic.
Activision/Blizzard recently began offering its games via Steam in addition to the in-house launcher. Bethesda also tried to get their customers away from Steam and towards their own launcher and only stomped it out again last year (via GameStar).
At Microsoft, on the other hand, the chances are perhaps not bad at all: here the developer receives all of the sales. It can therefore be assumed that Tim Sweeney is explicitly addressing Steam in his tweet. However, for the reasons mentioned, Steam currently has at least no obligation to act.
So probably nothing will happen for now.
In fact, the developers of Fortnite are pretty clever: they seem to have figured out how expensive a shop can be before it becomes too much for gamers.