Spotify is now available on the Epic Games Store, signaling developer Epic’s ambitions to turn what has so far been strictly a games store into a more general app distribution platform. The Spotify app is free to download on the Epic Games Store, just like it is on the App Store, Google Play, or as a direct download for your PC or Mac.
Spotify’s availability on the Epic Games Store arrives as Epic is in prolonged legal battles with Apple and Google over the business models of each company’s respective app store. Epic has sued both companies over the removal of the mobile version of Fortnite, alleging antitrust violations and arguing that developers can and should be able to process their own payments and circumvent giving 30 percent of all in-app revenue to the store owner.
The Epic Games Store is still a relatively new digital distribution platform, having launched in December 2018 as a rival to Valve’s Steam. But from the jump, Epic offered more generous payouts to developers, taking only 12 percent of a developer’s revenues for its cut instead of the 30 percent taken in many cases by Valve, as well as Apple and Google.
As of January, the Epic Games Store has more than 100 million users, and presumably, that number has grown due in part to Epic’s plentiful sales and giveaways. (A GTA V giveaway in May was so popular that it resulted in a multi-hour store outage.)
With the Epic Game Store’s growing user base, developer-friendly fee structure, and the fact that it now hosts one of the most popular apps in the world, Epic seems to be making the case that non-gaming developers should consider its distribution platform as a viable alternative to other app stores.
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