Epic Games announced theFirst Run Project, will attract more third-party game companies to release games on the Epic Games Store as platform exclusives, and guarantee to pay all sales revenue to qualified game companies within the first six months. After the exclusive sales period ends, it can still maintain 88% of the sales revenue, and Epic Games will only charge 12% of it.
Prior to this, Epic Games emphasized that it would adopt a lower profit sharing method compared to Steam to attract more game companies to release games through the Epic Games Store platform. This time, it announced that through the First Run plan, game companies will be guaranteed to collect all sales revenue for six months. Even after the game's exclusive sales period ends, game companies can still retain up to 88% of the sales revenue. This will obviously attract more game companies to sell games through the Epic Games Store.
However, game companies cannot sell their game content on other third-party PC gaming platforms. Furthermore, game content must have been released and sold after October 10th of this year to meet Epic Games' requirements. Games that have already signed platform exclusivity agreements with Epic Games are not eligible for this plan.
Epic Games explained that the actual sales revenue obtained by game companies in this plan will be deducted from sales tax and refunds, while the costs of processing game sales payments and providing CDN network services for game content downloads will be absorbed by Epic Games.
In addition to driving sales opportunities with the current Epic Games Store's approximately 6800 million monthly users, Epic Games also plans to give additional exposure to game content participating in the First Run program to attract more players' attention. This includes obvious "exclusive" labels and prominent placement in the Epic Games Store. It will also cooperate with various publicity and promotional activities to enhance exposure.
If we follow Steam's announcement of 2021 million monthly active users in 1.32, more than 2022 million daily active users in 3000, and even a record of more than 2023 million simultaneous online users in a single day in early 3300, the Epic Games Store's current number of users still cannot match it, especially since many users log in to their personal accounts to download free game content. However, Epic Games still hopes to continue to make the Epic Games Store a more popular game service platform for players.
