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In an exclusive interview with Gamespot’s Tamoor Hussain at the Play For All summer gaming event, Epic Games’ CEO Tim Sweeney said that they are bringing the Epic Games Store to mobile!
The store’s presence on mobile devices could be a place outside of the Google Play or App Store where developers who have partnered with Epic for exclusive releases can make their games available.
“We’d like to bring the [Epic Games] Store to iOS in the future, and we will bring it to Android,” Sweeney said. “We think it’s a good way to help the industry [move] forward and it’s another way where Epic as a game developer had built up this audience around Fortnite and learned how to operate a distribution platform on PC and Android.
“Now, as we’ve done with many things from the Unreal Engine to the Epic Online services, we open it up to all other developers to use with their games and are trying to serve the industry and provide a really interesting alternative to the ecosystem.”
Could the EGS or Epic Games Store exclusive titles on Android and Apple devices potentially be removed from the Google Play and App Store entirely? On PC, any time a game is exclusive to Epic’s store, it’s not allowed to be sold or even displayed on Steam or any other platform, so this would make sense. Before Epic released their in-house Battle Royale game to the Play Store recently, they withheld it to keep Google from undercutting them for 30% of the profits to host it there. It’s just a thought for now, but could we really see Epic slip on boxing gloves for a mobile fight too? It’s much too early to tell, so we’ll have to wait it out to see.
Any games housed in this version of the Epic Games Store will need to be developed for mobile, of course, so this announcement in no way hints at your full Epic library being available to you on your mobile device. We already see a taste of what the offerings could look like though with Fortnite and Battle Breakers. A full-fledged, popular FPS game like this running on mobile shows hope for mobile and PC gamers maybe, just maybe, getting along one day and playing in the same sandbox. I think that’s a future I can get behind.
The EGS could also offer games to have tighter integration with Epic’s online services and provide standalone updates outside of the Play Store. In fact, the transformation is already underway. Below, you can see that Fortnite tweeted that their game installer on Android has basically been transformed into the Epic Games app, allowing Fortnite and Battle Breakers to be downloaded directly from it. You can pick up the app HERE if you visit from your phone.
Any time an app is announced for Android, we can be sure that it will more than likely see compatibility with Chromebooks before long, if not right out of the gate. Fortnite has unfortunately been an exception to that rule, given the fact that it needed to be sideloaded onto your device until recently and until Chrome OS 80 you had to switch your Chromebook into developer mode to even think about installing apps from unknown sources, but Chromebooks have run the Google Play Store natively for several years now and developer support is picking up steam. What I’m saying is that as exciting as it is to have the Epic Games Store on my phone, I’m way more excited about the prospect of having it on my Chromebook. What a time to be alive. What are your thoughts on this? Let us know in the comments section below and watch this spot for future updates!
