Epic Games found itself in a spot of hot water recently when it was discovered that its Epic Games Store was pulling users’ Steam friends list data without permission — something that Epic says was an oversight that will soon be rectified — but that’s done little to deter Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney from extolling the virtues of his company’s platform. In fact, he did just that in a recent interview with Gamasutra, in which he delves into the ways he thinks the Epic Games Store will set itself apart from its primary competitor, Valve’s monolithic Steam.
Obviously, he touts the EGS’s relatively generous revenue-sharing split, which gives developers an 88% share of sales (rather than the “industry-standard” 70%), but that’s not the only reason he argues that devs — and players — should pick the EGS over Steam. Epic is also devoted to continuing its practice of releasing a free game every couple of weeks, which Sweeney says is a win-win-win situation: Epic supports the developers by paying them for the rights to release their games for free, Epic gets some extra traffic and publicity, and users get good games for the unbeatable price of zero dollars.
Sweeney also discusses the prospect of self-publishing for indie developers, a feature that he says is coming, though he promises that Epic will be applying “a reasonably high quality filter” to the offerings — games that feature pornographic content or that are “intentionally controversial” won’t find a home on the EGS.
“We’re perfectly fine with M-rated experiences like GTA or Far Cry,” Sweeney says, “but we’re not the place for the other stuff. For the bigger anti-social things.”
When asked how Epic will decide what makes the cut, Sweeney says, “Oh, there will be humans.” That’s right, actual human moderators — what a concept.
