Epic knows its game store social features ‘suck,’ but it wants to fix that

Epic’s game store is finally on mobile. Next up, the company plans to add features that make people want to use it — on both mobile and PC.

A key thing Epic Games wants to introduce is what store boss Steve Allison calls a “social framework” — think the types of social and chat features you see on consoles or Steam.

“Our social features on PC suck,” Allison says in an interview with The Verge. “Let’s call it what it is.” Social features are the “battery that powers Fortnite,” Allison says, and Epic wants to “take that battle-tested social framework and move it up from Fortnite up to the store level.” The idea is that you’ll be able to party up and chat with your Epic Games friends across devices, theoretically meaning that friends on Android, iOS, and PC could all hang out through the Epic Games platform (not just Fortnite).

We might be waiting a while to try the social features out, though, as Allison says they won’t arrive until at least after summer 2025.

More immediately, Epic is planning to bring its free games program to mobile sometime in the fourth quarter (which, if you’re watching the calendar, is this quarter!). Unlike on PC, free mobile games may not be offered weekly to start, though they’ll probably move to weekly once Epic launches tools to self-publish on its mobile store. (That feature will probably launch in the first half of 2025, Allison said in a Tuesday panel at Unreal Fest.) Some free games might only be available on Android because of Apple’s core technology fee, which could sting developers with costs they may not be able to pay. 

Third-party games are set to appear in the mobile Epic Games Store in the fourth quarter as well (Allison has previously pegged the launch for December). During the Unreal Fest panel, Allison said that Epic aims to have 10 to 50 games available at launch. Yes, that’s a broad range, and Allison tells The Verge that the big “gating factor” is implementing payments. Since most mobile developers rely on Google or Apple’s payment processing platforms, they have to evaluate using Epic’s payment processing platforms or others. During the Unreal Fest keynote, though, Epic shared one game coming to its mobile stores: ARK: Ultimate Mobile Edition.

Epic seems to be seeing forward momentum with the store overall, announcing during the keynote that it hit a record 70 million monthly active users in September. However, given the roadblocks Apple and Android phone makers put up to installing third-party stores on their mobile platforms, Epic isn’t seeing the volume of mobile store installs it had hoped.

At the launch of the mobile stores in August, Allison said that Epic was aiming for 100 million net new Epic Games Store mobile installations by the end of the year, but Sweeney said recently that there have only been 10 million mobile installs. Allison believes that the new features coming in the fourth quarter could encourage more users to push through the friction. But he adds that, with the friction, getting to that 100 million installs by the end of the year “is likely impossible.”