Epic Games is all-in on ensuring its new mobile games store gets even more titles by the end of 2024 — it’s aiming for up to 50 third-party titles to entice players, and instituting a low fee for developers.
Following the Unreal Fest keynote on Tuesday, Epic Games Store general manager Steve Allison said in a roundtable (reported by mobilegamer.biz) that it would be bringing the free games program it already has on its desktop app to mobile as well sometime before the end of the year.
“In the holiday season, we’ll open up with our first third-party applications,” Allison said. “We probably expect somewhere between 10 and 50 of them to be ready.” The company still has to implement a payment solution for developers, so it might take longer.
The Fortnite publisher, which has been competing with Steam on PC, launched the mobile version of the Epic Games Store on Android worldwide in August and on iOS just in the EU in a bare-bones form. It featured Fortnite (obviously), Fall Guys, and Rocket League Sideswipe. It announced at launch that it would be working to get it on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store while also opening it up to developers.
As for third-party games, Allison announced Ark: Ultimate Mobile Edition would be one of the first added to the store, and that it is set to arrive later this year. It’ll be taking a reduced 3.5% royalty for games developed in Unreal Engine that launch on Epic Games Store.
This is in line with CEO Tim Sweeney and the company’s former lawsuits against Apple and Google, which they claimed participated in anticompetitive practices to raise developer fees. These came after Epic tried to get players to purchase V-Bucks through its storefront instead of Apple and Google, which led to it getting banned from both app stores. The results of those two suits, along with a 2022 EU ruling that forced certain conglomerates to open up to third parties, allowed Epic to finally get back on the platforms.
“Apple and Google have a totally broken vision for the world, which is to limit what developers can do, to impose ever more restrictions, to prevent things like the metaverse from happening, or to tax it to the point where they’re extracting all the profit from it,” Sweeney said during his keynote. “And we’re at a point now where game development is expensive. It’s low margin, and game companies are suffering.”
However, you still can only get the Epic Games Store on mobile if you have an Android phone and go through Epic Games’ website. Apple iOS users in the EU have to follow a similar process.