Founder of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, has announced that Epic Games Store might come to Android later this year. Apart from Android, they are also working towards bringing their online game store to iOS as well.
Epic Games launched its Gaming Store dubbed Epic Games Store last month and has been gaining traction quite quickly. Just recently, Ubisoft announced their upcoming title The Division 2 will come to PC exclusively through Uplay and Epic Games Store and will ditch Steam for all its future releases as well.
The plan of bringing Epic Games Store to Android and iOS was actually revealed by Tim last month in an interview with Game Informer. His official statement on launching Epic Games Store on Android and iOS was
The Epic Games store is launching on PC and Mac in 2018, and Android later in 2019. We’d like to launch on iOS in 2019, however, that is in apparent conflict with current Apple policy. We believe all general purpose computing devices, such as PCs, smartphones, and tablets, should be open to competition between stores.
Consoles are a different market, with dedicated game machines whose hardware costs are often partly subsidized by software revenue. Epic doesn’t seek to operate a storefront on console platforms, but as an engine maker we do everything we can to enable cross-platform interoperability.
This could make it very easy for Epic Games to bring Fortnite to the devices via their own store as currently, Epic Games has Fortnite on Android without using the Google Play Store. Sweeney mention that bringing the store to Android is much easier than iOS because Apple has very strict policies.
Epic is currently in talks with Apple on bringing the Epic Games Store to iOS as well and they will proceed with the procedure once both parties reach a mutual arrangement. Epic Games Store coming to both Android and iOS could really mean big news for mobile game developers as well because Epic Games offer 88% revenue share to developers.
Let us know in the comments section below about how Epic Games Store could affect mobile video game industry.
