INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
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Action game Ashen will be available via the Epic store
Fortnite
creator Epic Games has opened an online store to sell video games for PCs.The store has been set up to rival the massive online Steam run by
developer Valve that offers thousands of PC games.Epic said it would charge less commission for listing games, so more cash would be
So far, only three games from other developers are available, but Epic plans to expand the list quickly
No adult contentAs well as its own games, Fortnite and Unreal, the first games for sale in the Epic store are:AshenHadesHello Neighbor: Hide
and SeekAll three are new games
Hades, from the Supergiant studio, was unknown before appearing on the service.Three other games that were released some time ago -
Darksiders III, Subnautica and Super Meat Boy - will soon be added to the catalogue
Both Subnautica and Super Meat Boy will be free to play for a few weeks
Epic said it planned to give customers a free game every fortnight
Speaking to tech news site Ars Technica, Epic boss Tim Sweeney said the store would expand "more broadly" in 2019
He said Epic's process for adding games to the service would focus on the "technical side of things and general quality"
The only types of games it would restrict would be those featuring "adult-only" content.Magic moneyTop players of the hugely popular Magic:
The Gathering card game will soon be able to take each other on in two separate pro-leagues.Overseen by Wizards of the Coast, which created
The Magic Pro League will include 32 of the world's best players of the game who will compete in weekly matches as well as major
tournaments.The first tournament will take place at the Pax East gaming show in Boston in 2019
Wizards said $1m in prizes would be up for grabs.The main page for the Epic store lists another nine games as "coming soon"
These include Journey which before now had been a Sony PlayStation exclusive
Many of the others are already released and are available via Steam and other online stores
Epic said it aimed to differentiate itself from Steam by only taking a 12% commission on sales
By contrast, Valve asks for 30% of the money paid for games sold via its service
The "much more generous offering" had sparked interest among independent developers, wrote Dustin Bailey on the PCGamesN website."Exactly
how that pans out in the long term remains to be seen, but this is a promising start," he added.Currently, the Epic store is by no means a
significant rival for Steam which has more than 20,000 games in its catalogue and regularly has more than 18 million people online playing
It is believed to have about 125 million registered users.However, Fortnite is hugely popular and has a global player base of about 200
At its most popular, about 8 million people were playing the game at one time
