The Epic Games Store is offering developers and publishers the full 100% of a game’s sales revenue for the first six months of sale if they choose to launch exclusively on the store.
The new program, named Epic First Run, was announced today by Epic Games, which is opening it up to anyone eligible to publish a product on its store through its self-publishing portal. The program is available to anyone who is planning to launch a game on or after October 16, so long as the game won’t also launch (or hasn’t already) on a rival third-party storefront or third-party streaming service on PC. This excludes any releases on consoles.
Epic says that it will then share all revenue for the first six months of sale with the developer in question, after which it will revert to the 88/12% split that the store originally launched with. The announcement also makes provisions for stores such as the Humble Store or Green Man Gaming, as well as any first-party stores that a publisher might also sell on. These are allowed so long as the release is simultaneous with that on the Epic Games Store, or as long as a third-party store makes use of Epic’s keyless redemption program.
This new move seems squarely aimed at luring developers away from launching games on platforms such as Steam and Xbox Game Pass, and instead keeping it exclusive to Epic for potentially higher short-term returns. Epic has brokered numerous exclusivity deals in the past for releases (which are excluded from this program), but this seems like an easier way for more developers, big and small, to get involved without having to ink a similar contract.
Applications for the program are now open and only require an Epic Developer account to get started. The Epic Games Store’s next big exclusive is Remedy’s Alan Wake II, which follows Control in launching exclusively on the storefront on PC. It’s out on October 27.
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