During today’s reveal of Unreal Engine 5, Tim Sweeney announced that Epic Online Services are free for all developers, with no caveats, the industry giant incentivize all developers to adhere Epic’s proposal to make cross-play more accessible for all players and platforms. Tim Sweeney confirmed that, developers can now download the Epic Online Services SDK for any of the five platforms currently supported.
Epic Games goal is “to build cross-platform social ecosystem together with all the other developers in the industry”… “we want them (players) to reach all their friends everywhere but also build up friends across multiple games and that’s the really interesting thing about Epic Account Services that we’re launching.” Said Tim Sweeney during the Unreal Engine 5 reveal at Summer Game Fest.
Epic Online Services are designed to be open and modular. The services are built to work with any store or platform, so your game doesn’t need to be on the Epic Games Store or use Epic Games accounts. Developers who join Epic Online Service will be able to use their own identity provider via OpenID, or choose an out-of-the-box integration with Apple, Discord, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox, Steam, or Epic Games. Epic Games has partnered directly with the major console platforms to provide a set of services that are ready to use with all supported platforms.
There is no catch. We built many of these services for Fortnite and are now operating at enormous economies of scale, and we also rely on these services for the Epic Games Store. Now, we are happy to offer these services to game developers for free with the goal of encouraging wider adoption of all of Epic’s offerings, and of making cross-play, cross-progression, and other open and interconnected, online features more accessible to everyone. Ultimately, when developers choose to use Epic Account Services, Epic and all participating partners benefit by growing a cross-platform account base and social graph available to all.
Source: Epic Games
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