In December 2018, Epic Games surprised many in the game industry when it announced, and then launched the Epic Games Store. The PC digital game storefront offered a number of features designed to benefit both PC gamers and game developers. They included offering free games per week for consumers, and 88 percent of a game’s revenue from the store to developers.
It’s been nearly five years later, and while the Epic Games Store has seen a lot of growth during that time period, it also hasn’t made any money from this venture either. That’s according to Epic Games Store leader Steve Allison, as part of his court testimony during the first day of the jury trial between Epic and Google over that company’s Play Store policies.
As reported by The Verge, Allison stated in court the Epic Games Store was not yet profitable after almost five years. Allison said the goal of the store right now was growth. However, that’s still not good news for a venture that has gone out of its way to compete with other digital game stores in general and Valve’s highly successful Steam store in particular.
In just the past year, Epic has added support for the self-publishing of games to developers for the store. It has even offered developers 100 percent of the revenues from their games for the first six months on the store for both new exclusive games and games that have been previously released on Steam and other stores.
For consumers, the Epic Games Store continues to not only offer at least one new game for free each week but also a rewards program that gives gamers 5 percent back on their purchases that they can use later to buy games.
However, since the store has been losing money since it launched, we do have to wonder how long Epic will continue to operate this part of its business at least in its current form. It’s already held a mass layoff of 16 percent of its workers earlier this year due to financial issues.