Epic Games First Run Program Gives 100% of Revenue

The Epic Games Store is good for one thing, free games and even then most of them we never bother playing. The storefront quite simply is just not good enough when compared to Steam and any chance of competition is miles away which leads Epic to make exclusivity deals to try to force us to use their store as opposed to Steam. Unfortunately it mostly never works and this one will be no different.

Epic First Run Programme

Epic Games today shared their new First Run Program which is for third-party developers to opt in for a 6 month exclusivity contract that offers 100% of the revenue as opposed to the 88% devs would usually receive. This program is open to developers launching games on or after October 16th which isn’t on another third-party PC store or subscription service.

Epic has often done these exclusivity contracts which also annoy gamers who simply just don’t want to use their clunky app which pales in comparison to Steam which has of course had years to develop. Whilst competition is great, this method of trying to gain customers is annoying for gamers but at the same time, it should be keeping Steam on its toes just in case Epic does suddenly become good.

Interestingly Epic claims that their store has over 68 million monthly active users which may say that something is working, or it just tells me that is mostly Fortnite traffic. The thing with this 6-month exclusivity deal is that die-hard Steam fans will most likely be happy to wait 6 months for a game to arrive on Steam as with the state of modern gaming, you are more likely to see a polished product after those 6 months.

Gamers don’t want to have to use millions of different launchers for their games, EA and Ubisoft have at least partially figured that out as you still need to open those apps for their games but you can still launch and buy them through Steam. The sheer scale of Steam as a storefront for the majority of PC games just means that it will always be the more convenient choice, not to mention all the additional features that Steam offers on top of the storefront. Exclusivity deals make this harder as well, An ideal situation would be both services offering the same games but with differing UI and features meaning that users can simply just choose one based on their preferences rather than needing both for exclusive titles.

That ideal future is far from being true though.

Read more about the First Run Program here.