Epic CEO Tim Sweeney spoke up on X.com: According to him, Fortnite could appear on other platforms like Steam, Microsoft, and others. However, they would have to forgo their share of the sale price.
Fortnite has been one of the most important games for years. Especially this year, the game is receiving one cool update after another: Recently, players were excited about OG Fortnite. At the moment, the new LEGO Fortnite mode fascinates entire hordes of players.
Currently, Fortnite is available on PC and Mac via the Epic Launcher. This was originally intended to become a major counterbalance to Steam, but even five years after the launch, it still shows red numbers. Despite layoffs and losses, the company continues its aggressive stance against other platforms.
Now, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney commented on X.com about the port of Fortnite to possible other provider platforms.
Fortnite on Steam? Only under certain conditions, says the CEO
What did Tim Sweeney write? On X.com, Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games, published the following statement:
With this statement, he criticizes that platforms like Steam allow developers to publish their games through them, but they also take a good cut from the purchase price. This is how the platforms primarily finance themselves.
How much money do the platforms actually take? Interestingly, Epic’s own Epic Games Launcher retains 12% of the revenue from the games sold through it. Even though this is worlds less than what Steam takes:
The popular platform retains about 30% of the total revenue of a game. This is relatively high and particularly hard on indie developers who rely on every cent. An indie developer says: We are very happy with it!
In the Microsoft Store, however, developers according to The Verge can even keep their entire revenue. This Tim Sweeney already commented on in 2021 and called the 2021 version of Microsoft the best.
The third store mentioned by Sweeney is OneStore from South Korea. Financially supported, according to Pocket Gamer, among others, by the PUBG developer Krafton. Since 2022, the provider has been active worldwide and takes about 20% of the total revenue of its developers, according to PR Newswire.
What are the chances that something will happen here? Tim Sweeney decided in 2018 for economic reasons to launch the Epic Games Launcher. As mentioned above, it is still not 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 any, reasons for Steam and others to approach Epic.
Activision/Blizzard has also recently started offering its games via Steam alongside its own launcher. Bethesda also tried to bring its customers away from Steam to its own launcher and shut it down just last year (via GameStar).
At Microsoft, the chances may not be bad: here, the developer does receive the entire revenue. Therefore, it is suspected that Tim Sweeney is specifically addressing Steam in his tweet. However, Steam currently has no incentive to change as mentioned.
Therefore, nothing will likely happen for now.
In fact, the developers of Fortnite are quite clever: they seem to have figured out how expensive a store can be before it is too much for gamers.
