Epic Games has introduced a new initiative called “Launch Everywhere with Epic,” designed to lower royalty fees for game developers using Unreal Engine who choose to release their games on the Epic Games Store.
This program applies to developers launching their games either exclusively on the platform or in tandem with other distribution outlets.
Epic Games has faced significant backlash from the PC gaming community. CEO Tim Sweeney has repeatedly made controversial statements over the past decade, claiming that the PC platform is “dead” and predicting that consoles will dominate.
Epic’s efforts to challenge Valve’s Steam, which holds a strong position in the PC gaming market, have resulted in major financial losses and widespread disapproval among PC gamers. Much of the criticism stems from Epic’s tactics, such as offering large sums of money to developers in exchange for timed exclusivity deals on the Epic Games Store a strategy similar to Sony’s approach in the console industry.
Since the launch of the Epic Games Store, Tim Sweeney’s company has repeatedly sparked outrage among PC gamers, largely due to exclusive deals made with major developers. One notable example is Gearbox Software’s Borderlands 3, which was released exclusively on the Epic Games Store for six months.
Other high-profile games, such as Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade from Square Enix, also launched exclusively on Epic’s platform. Additionally, Metro Exodus was initially advertised and pre-sold on Valve’s Steam, but just before release, its Steam listing was pulled, and it became an Epic Games Store exclusive leading to widespread frustration and backlash from gamers.
In an effort to attract users, Epic Games has also been giving away free titles on a weekly basis, offering major games like Borderlands 3 (May 2022), the Saints Row reboot, Batman Arkham Collection, Metro, Fallout, Payday 2, and their most infamous giveaway, Grand Theft Auto V.
Despite these aggressive tactics, the Epic Games Store has struggled to generate profits. It continues to lag behind competitors like Steam, which remains popular thanks to its robust player base, advanced account customization, and social interaction features, despite Steam’s 30% commission rate for developers.
Epic Games has consistently hemorrhaged money in its efforts to lure PC gamers away from the dominant platform, Steam, by employing its own monopolistic tactics yet with little success. Now, in what seems like a desperate move to gain both gamers and developers’ respect, Epic is further lowering its already minimal royalty rates.
Through its new “Launch Everywhere with Epic” program, Epic is cutting the royalty fee for games developed with Unreal Engine from 5% to 3.5%. Despite these efforts, tens of millions of PC gamers continue to prefer Steam, which, although criticized for hypocritically banning “problematic” games, remains more lenient than the Epic Games Store when it comes to listing adult content, making it more appealing.
Epic’s attempt to attract attention with its low 5% royalty fee has largely failed. Under the new terms, developers must launch their games on the Epic Games Store on day one or earlier if they accept Epic’s financial incentives for exclusivity, limiting the game’s availability on other PC platforms.
The program takes effect on January 1, 2025, for games published on the Epic Games Store starting that year. If developers launch an Unreal Engine game on other PC or Android stores but don’t offer it on Epic’s platform, the royalty rate reverts back to its standard 5% rate.
For iOS games, Epic is currently waiving the simultaneous release requirement, citing Apple’s Core Technology Fee, which developers would need to pay if they listed their games on Epic’s iOS store. Should Epic change its policy for iOS in the future, developers will receive a four-month notice.
Epic Games already waives Unreal Engine royalties on sales made through the Epic Games Store, where Epic also handles payment processing, offering developers yet another incentive to launch on its platform. Unreal Engine developers are only required to pay royalties after their game generates more than $1 million in revenue.
The newly reduced Unreal Engine royalty rates might also appeal to developers who have lost trust in platforms like Godot or Unity, particularly after Unity’s controversial (and now-canceled) runtime fee pricing model.
Despite this, I remain skeptical. Epic Games recently made a controversial decision to phase out the free availability of Megascans, a vital resource for developers, by merging Quixel with the Unreal Engine Marketplace, Sketchfab, and ArtStation into a single service called Fab.
This shift marks the end of a long-standing benefit that had been invaluable to indie developers and small teams, who relied on Megascans’ cost-effective tools, models, and assets to build high-quality projects.
For solo developers, this is a significant loss. Megascans, a comprehensive library of photorealistic 2D and 3D assets created by Quixel, has been widely used in industries such as film, game development, and architecture. The library includes detailed 3D models, vegetation, and high-quality surface textures created using photogrammetry, enabling developers to craft hyper-realistic environments efficiently.
These assets have been instrumental in helping creators save time while achieving top-tier visuals in games, aligning with the core purpose of Unreal Engine, despite its own set of flaws.
One of the key issues with Unreal Engine 5, particularly in the realm of PC ports, is poor optimization and performance, even from well-established game development studios. Despite Unreal Engine’s commercial viability and suitability for solo developers, indie projects, and AAA releases, developers often struggle to optimize their games effectively.
PC versions of Unreal Engine 5 titles have gained a notorious reputation for subpar performance, frequently requiring upscaling technologies like AMD FSR, NVIDIA DLSS, or Intel XeSS to act as a synthetic band-aid. These tools help boost performance by mitigating issues like overdraw, but the reliance on them highlights underlying inefficiencies in how developers handle the engine’s capabilities.
The standout features of Unreal Engine 5 are undoubtedly its Lumen and Nanite technologies. Nanite is UE5’s solution for efficiently handling meshes with highly detailed geometry, but it appears to have been insufficiently optimized at launch. Lumen, UE5’s built-in global illumination system, also presents challenges, particularly because it disrupts traditional LODs, leaving Nanite as the primary method for optimizing meshes by automatically generating LODs.
When Nanite and Lumen are used together, they impose a significant performance burden. Lumen dramatically increases draw calls when used with traditional models, which Nanite can alleviate but only for static meshes. Nanite doesn’t work with skeletal meshes, creating further limitations.
Additionally, Nanite suffers from severe overdraw issues, where the GPU is overwhelmed by rendering one triangle per pixel, resulting in performance bottlenecks.
This is why upscaling technologies like FSR and DLSS are used as a crutch to mitigate Unreal Engine 5’s performance issues. As render resolution increases, these problem, overdraw become more severe. Lowering the render resolution via upscaling can alleviate some of the overdraw, but developers are still leaving anywhere from 20% to 50% of potential performance untapped.
Much of this stems from a general lack of expertise: artists failing to optimize meshes and materials, programmers lacking the ability to implement basic engine functions efficiently, level designers overusing unique assets, and gameplay designers inflating games with unnecessary features rather than focusing on core gameplay. All of these factors contribute to even worse performance.
Unreal Engine 5 is left in a strange place because of these issues. As it stands, the best options seem to be either implementing a custom global illumination system (like DDGI) and avoiding Nanite altogether in favor of traditional LODs, or sticking with UE4’s more stable systems, bypassing Lumen, Nanite, and even Chaos physics, opting instead for NVIDIA’s PhysX plugin.
This approach allows for better performance across a broader range of system specifications, which could ultimately result in better sales due to improved playability.
Epic Games has shown itself to be a company that cannot be fully trusted. Unreal Engine 5 is still immature, and its complexities make it impractical for commercial projects, let alone solo development. It demands convoluted workarounds, such as using third-party tools like Retopoflow with Blender to automatically optimize assets, because Epic has failed to provide sufficient tools for developers out of the box.
On top of that, their business practices like leveraging exclusivity deals, have alienated gamers, and they’re hemorrhaging money in the process.
While Epic’s standard 5% royalty for Unreal Engine games was already low, their marketplace commission of 12% is less than half of what Valve charges, plus additional Unreal Engine fees if applicable. Epic claims they’ll provide more details on the royalty reduction, which takes effect January 1, 2025, so developers can “plan accordingly.”
However, reducing the fee from 5% to 3.5% is unlikely to attract more developers to the platform. It feels more like a sign of Epic’s desperation to convince small-scale developers to prioritize their storefront, offering waived royalties for the first six months of exclusivity. But this tactic seems insufficient to drive meaningful change.
