Epic Games did a round of announcements yesterday. To begin with, self-publishing tools are coming to the Epic Games Store, allowing developers to easily add their games to the store for a mere $100 fee (which is the same that Valve demands on Steam).

　　Interested game developers can take a look at the full self-publishing overview here. There are a few notable differences to Steam, such as pornography being banned and PC crossplay being mandatory for multiplayer games, with Epic allowing custom crossplay implementation, third-party SDKs, or their own free Epic Online Services.

　　Regarding this latter point, PC Gamer reports Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney criticizing the Steamworks API for creating problems with PC crossplay in multiplayer games.

　　They have a classic lock-in strategy where they build these services that only work with their store, and they use the fact that they have the majority market share in order to encourage everybody to ship games that have a broken experience in other stores. And we were bitten by this early on with a number of multiplayer games coming to the Epic Games Store. Steamworks didn't work on our store, so they had either a reduced set of multiplayer features or none, or they were just limited to a much smaller audience back in the launch days of the Epic Games Store, so you had a lot of multiplayer games that really felt like they were broken.

　　Sweeney also shared an update on the company's exclusivity strategy. The reason there are far fewer EGS exclusives nowadays is that Epic noticed only big titles (like Borderlands 3, for example) really swayed a large portion of users over to their store. In contrast, smaller games often didn't do much. Some future EGS exclusives include Alan Wake 2 and new games from genDESIGN, PlayDead, and Mediatonic, which Epic acquired in 2021.

　　In 2022, the EGS grew to 230 million users, a 36 million increase from the previous year. Monthly Active Users or MAUs, one of the most widely utilized metrics in the gaming industry, also rose from 62 million in 2021 to 68 million in 2022. Game developers released 626 new titles last year on EGS, nearly doubling the total amount of games available for purchase.

　　The Free Games Program, which is set to continue throughout 2023, released 99 freebies worth around $2,240. Epic also confirmed a few of the improvements coming to the EGS launcher this year, such as substantially quicker load times, subscription services support, and content hubs.