One More Storefront, Different Terms

When Epic Games launched its mobile game store in the European Union in the summer of 2024, the company chose Stockholm as its legal base — a deliberate structural decision that placed it within the EU's single market and brought it under the Digital Markets Act's new third-party distribution rules. The store went live on iOS in August 2024, one of the first alternative app marketplaces to follow AltStore PAL through the door the DMA had forced open.

Epic published its commission terms before launch: zero percent on game revenue for developers, with Epic covering Apple's Core Technology Fee — the €0.50 per install charge that Apple introduced in January 2024 for apps distributed outside the App Store in the EU — for qualifying titles on its platform. The pitch was structurally the same as the Epic Games Store on PC, where Epic had spent years competing against Steam by undercutting its 30 percent take with a 12 percent rate. On mobile, Epic went further, absorbing the CTF liability rather than passing it to developers, at least initially and for games meeting its publishing criteria.

A rack of Android test devices on a laboratory bench, screens lit, photographed from slightly above to show the row of displays
A bench of Android test devices. A store is a distribution channel before it is a shopfront.Photo: Ludovic Delot / Pexels

The opening catalogue was narrow. Fortnite was the headline title — Epic's own flagship, and the game whose removal from the App Store in August 2020 had set the legal confrontation with Apple in motion. A handful of third-party titles accompanied it, but the store launched as a Fortnite delivery vehicle more than a broad marketplace. Tim Sweeney, Epic's chief executive, had made little secret that recovering iOS distribution for Fortnite in markets where it was legally possible was the company's primary objective.

Uptake figures for alternative marketplaces in the EU have been limited; Apple has not published install data broken down by distributor, and independent estimates from firms such as Sensor Tower have noted that alternative marketplace downloads remain a small fraction of total EU iOS volume. The friction is structural: users must enable alternative marketplace installation through iOS settings, a multi-step process Apple is required to permit under the DMA but has no incentive to streamline.

Chronology

  1. August 2020Fortnite removed from App Store; Epic files suit against Apple
  2. March 2024DMA obligations take effect; alternative marketplace framework opens
  3. August 2024Epic Games Store launches on iOS in the EU, headquartered in Stockholm

The Epic Games Store's EU launch demonstrated that the regulatory opening and a commercially viable alternative marketplace are not the same thing. The DMA created the legal right; the Core Technology Fee and installation friction shaped what developers and users actually encountered on the other side of it.