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Today Epic Games announced its own self-publishing program which enters closed beta. The program will allow developers to publish games on the Epic Store without the assistance of Epic employees so long as it meets several requirements, such as not being porn.
To qualify for self-publishing, a game just needs to meet a few requirements. For example, it has to install and run properly. Its content has to match its product-page description. And if it’s multiplayer, it has to play nice with Steam, Itch.io, or any other PC versions of the game. And yeah, no pornography, “illegal content,” hateful or discriminatory stuff, IP-infringing material, or literal scams. Damn, such a high bar.
Normally, I would pass on this story. However, this decision represents an interesting shift in the relationship between the Epic Store and Valve’s Steam platform, its primary competitor. When the Epic Store launched, it did so promising a more rigorous quality control process than Steam, which has seen an onslaught of messy, unfinished, and outright malicious games through its own self publishing system. This, along with normal business bullshit, is what started the ridiculous console wars-esque beef between two websites where you can buy video games.
The introduction of a self publishing system doesn’t directly contradict previous claims around curation, but it does suggest Epic is planning on moving in a more hands-off direction going forward. The Epic Store’s content standards seem slightly more stringent, or at least better enforced, than Steam’s, which supposedly serves as a meaningful differentiator between the two stores. But let’s be real, that’s just been a marketing line from Epic, and isn’t actually viable long-term.
The other complicating factor in this story is Itch.io’s presence on the Epic Store. If you’re unfamiliar, Itch.io is an independent digital storefront which allows for smaller developers and creators to publish basically whatever they want. This includes video games, development assets, PDFs of tabletop role-playing games, browser-based games, and a whole slew of other shit that the English language has yet to find a name for.
Source: Kotaku
