The Epic Games Store’s director of publishing strategy, Sergey Galyonkin (known as the person behind ‘SteamSpy’), has clarified a few points regarding how the storefront will target influencers and consumers.
This comes after a ResetEra user provided a translated summary of an episode of “How Games Are Made,” a Russian-language podcast co-hosted by Galyonkin, where he apparently discussed what developers and users can expect from Epic this year in terms of features.
It’s worth noting that the ResetEra thread is a summarized, roughly translated account of the podcast, and so the points given should be taken with a grain of salt.
Epic currently has a system that allows developers to provide influencers with game codes that come with referral links to the game, offering the influencers a cut of a game’s sale when the link is used.
As of right now Epic covers the default 5 percent cut, although developers can decrease or increase that cut. The program is reportedly not intended to be permanent, leading to speculation that devs will be asked to cover all costs in the future, with indies paying up to 20 percent in order to have their games marketed by influencers.
Epic also takes a 12 percent cut of revenue from games sold on the storefront, with the Support-A-Creator program being optional. As of right now, the pricing system is also optional, so devs are able to decide if they want to give influencers anything from 0 to 100 percent of the revenue for every game they help sell.
Galyonkin took to Twitter to clarify.
“Right now a significant part of marketing budgets of big games is allocated to pay influencers,” Galyonkin said on Twitter. “Those are one-off deals. I think having a way for influencers to be able to stream any game and make money without relying solely on big publishers would be awesome.”
“Support-A-Creator program for Fortnite allows some creators to make enough money to go full-time. My hope is by extending it to Epic Games store titles and getting more games on board, we’ll reach the point where it’s possible for more creators.”
“Our goal is to empower smaller devs to have the same access to creators that only big publishers right now can afford. It’s not in any way mandatory, we’re just leveling the playing field, giving devs the tools.”
“On the other hand, it also levels the playing field for mid-sized and small creators. We found that ROI on small and mid-sized creators is actually better when running promotional campaigns, but there are so many of them, most devs can’t manage that. We’ll give them the tools.”