With such strong support from developers and publishers after the first three months, Epic Games is confident it can win over more partners -- even those, like Electronic Arts, who are trying to establish their own stores.
"The key for them is they want a direct relationship with their customers and a fair share of the revenue from their games," Sweeney says. "They build their own ecosystems because they felt they weren't getting the deal they deserved on Steam.
"The world deserves lots of stores. It's all very healthy for the industry to see lots of competition on lots of different fronts. Just look at all the gamers who installed Origins for the first time to play Apex Legends, all the Korean gamers who probably installed Steam for the first time to play PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Great games drive stores."
"[Curation] needs to be a human process that takes quality into account so the customers can trust us to supply good games"
It turns out free games also drive stores, as Epic announced its first free offering -- Unknown Worlds' Subnautica -- was downloaded more than 4.5 million times during the two-week promotion, and Monomi Park's Slime Rancher is currently on track to beat it.
"The free games have been a huge success, much bigger than expected," says Sweeney. "We've gone around working with game developers and paid them for the opportunity to release their games for free for two weeks. That's brought in a huge number of new gamers.
"The wonderful thing is we're bringing in new gamers to the Epic Games Store more economically than we would if we paid Facebook or Google for ads. Instead of ads, free games are driving the store forward."
Sweeney is keen to get as many titles onto the Epic Games Store as possible, but this ambition is still tempered by the desire to offer a high-quality catalogue. Given the recent controversy over visual novel Rape Day and Valve's slow response, the Epic CEO is quick to assure such a title will never appear on his store.
"We are going to maintain a reasonable quality standard for games," he says. "It'll be open to games of all sizes, but not the junky asset flips or shock controversy games that are built just to make noise. PC is an open platform; there are lots of stores, so I don't feel like any particular store has a moral obligation to carry low quality or highly controversial projects."
Does this mean the Epic Games Store will have a greater focus on curation than Valve's marketplace, with more effort placed on monitoring what developers submit?
"Absolutely," Sweeney concludes. "This needs to be a human process that takes quality into account so the customers can trust us to supply good games."
