epic games has just announced that it will allow its users to create games for the Epic Games Store. Valve currently allows users to create their own games as well, but Epic’s self-publishing requirements are a bit different.
To a large extent, Epic allows users to create whatever they want, although there are two exceptions. The first rule is that no pornographic content allowed in a game, and the second is that if you create a title multiplayer, should be playable on other pc stores.
ValveFor its part, it doesn’t require multiplayer games to be playable on other PC platforms, and the free Steamworks multiplayer API only works on Valve’s digital store.
CEO of Epic, Tim Sweeneystrongly criticized the decision and told PC Gamer that “Steam created a real problem for the industry” with Steamworks.
“They have a classic blocking strategy where they create services that only work with their store and use the fact that they have the majority of the market share to encourage everyone to release games that don’t work on d ‘other stores,’ he explained. “It happened to us very early on with several multiplayer games coming to the Epic Games Store. Steamworks didn’t work on our store so they either had a reduced set of multiplayer features or none at all or were just limited to a much smaller audience at the time, the release date for the Epic Games Store, so there were a lot of multiplayer games that really felt like they were broke.
Despite these criticisms, Steam is still incredibly popular, but now that Epic offers self-publishing tools, we could see a migration of creators and users to the platform.