Early last month, Ubisoft announced that it would launch its upcoming Tom Clancy's The Division 2 game exclusively on Epic Games’ new store. The move caused a bit of controversy, but Ubisoft told investors in an earnings call yesterday with investors that the the company made the right move ditching Valve’s Steam, as pre-orders have drastically increased compared to the first Division game.
Ubisoft’s Epic Games Success Story
During the call with investors, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said that the primary reason for stopping the distribution of its games on the Steam store was to increase exposure to its own Uplay store, as reported by VG247. However, at the same time it provided the company with an opportunity to partner with Epic Games for launching Division 2 on Epic’s store.
The partnership seems to have been a success, according to Guillemot, as so far PC pre-orders for Division 2 have already been significantly higher than that of the first game in the series. More importantly for Ubisoft, PC pre-orders from its own store are six times higher compared to the previous game.
“We believe this deal is a long-term positive for Ubisoft,” the CEO said, according to VG247.
Epic Store Offers Better Terms
It’s no surprise that Ubisoft believes that the Epic Games store offers a better deal than Steam, as a much lower commission rate compared to Steam has been Epic’s main competitive advantage from the store’s launch day.
Epic’s store takes only a 12 percent cut from sales, and on top of that, the developers that use its Unreal Engine are exempt from the engine’s 5 percent revenue commission rate, too. This is compared to Steam’s 30 percent cut for most games.
Steam recently introduced a variable commission rate for developers who sell game copies in the millions, but even those rates are still much higher than the rate Epic charges everyone.
