By Lauren Feiner , a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She spent 5 years covering

Epic will expand its mobile game store by helping cover developer iOS fees

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2025-01-23 20:00:07

By Lauren Feiner , a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She spent 5 years covering tech policy at CNBC, writing about antitrust, privacy, and content moderation reform.

Epic Games plans to add nearly 20 third-party games onto its mobile app store worldwide on Android and in the European Union on iOS and launching its free games program on mobile beginning with Bloons TD 6 and Dungeon of the Endless: Apogee. It’s also promising to pay some iOS fees for developers that are part of the program to overcome what Epic calls a major hurdle to moving outside the App Store.

“Our aim here isn’t just to launch a bunch of different stores in different places, but to build a single, cross-platform store in which, within the era of multi-platform games, if you buy a game or digital items in one place, you have the ability to own them everywhere,” Epic CEO Tim Sweeney told reporters during a press briefing. Under the program, Epic will offer new free games in the store each month before eventually switching to a weekly schedule.

However, the games aren’t actually in the store yet — Epic said on Thursday that it “ran into a few bugs that we’re working through now” and “we’ll provide an update once the games are live and ready to play!”