Anticipated features are coming to the Epic Games Store announced at Unreal Fest 2025

Preloading and Gifting look to be the next steps for the Epic Games Store, with Social features being a high priority

Unreal Fest kicked off today in Orlando at the Orange County Convention Centre, with this we got first hand look at what the future of the Epic Games Store looks like and what their team is focusing on as priorities for the rest of 2025.

Creators will be given the ability to access FAB through the Epic Games Launcher, this looks to function similarly to the already established Unreal tab within the launcher, meaning that the launcher will now handle game purchasing, download and launching, Unreal Engine downloading and updating and managing of FAB assets such as downloading and exporting.

General Manager of the Epic Games Store, Steve Allison took the stage multiple times today to discuss the incentives that Epic provides to developers and to highlight what will be coming down the line in the form of features for the Epic Games Store, something that has been strongly mentioned as a sore point for using the launcher. In the State of Unreal, the incentives that we were reminded of was:

• Epic First Run, an optional 6 month exclusivity that gives developers 100% of the revenue, no matter how much revenue is taken
• Launch Everywhere with Epic, games that are developed using Unreal Engine that launch on Epic Games Store at the same time as other platforms (Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, Switch) will have their Unreal Engine royalty percentages reduced from 5% to 3.5% on all copies sold on every platform.
• Any sales of Unreal Engine games will be charged 0% royalty fees on copies sold on Epic Games Store
• Developers that use their own payment processing for microtransactions keep 100% of the revenue.

That was the meat of all the incentives that Epic are using to ensure that developers/publishers do not want to skip out on at least putting their games on Epic Games Store. Alongside all of this information Mr Allison reiterated their newest incentive. Developers will keep 100% of their revenue up to the first $1 million, after which Epic will then take their 12% cut, the lowest of all storefronts. This is applied per title, so developers that have 3 games released will get 100% of the revenue up to $1 million for each title, you’d think Epic would be done throwing money at this point, but this resets every year. Allison mentions that we’re in unprecedented times, game development is taking longer, costing more and more, and profitability is becoming razor thin, which is why Epic are providing all of these incentives, helping ensure developers have a fighting chance.

That’s not to say that this is all being done out of the kindness of Tim Sweeney and Epic’s heart, it might be easy to forget that at the end of the day Epic are a business that need to ensure that they are making enough money to keep their internal operations going. If everyone was to adopt this same strategy, Epic themselves would undoubtably benefit massively from this, Fortnite could be placed on any storefront imaginable and Epic could reap as much of the profit as they could.

Epic weren’t done just yet

As mentioned before, one of the loudest and most warranted complaints about the Epic Games Store is it’s lack of features, there is little to no social features you can’t chat with people on your friends list, you can’t change your profile picture in it’s current iteration. Arguably it’s not a high priority since many people would rather opt to using other programs such as Discord to facilitate conversations with friends, but it’s also fair to argue that this feature should still exist for people that don’t want to leave it to another program.

After the bombshells dropped by Steve Allison about essentially trying to give as much money as possible to developers for just putting their game on Epic Games Store he would highlight the upcoming feature focuses and this is where it gets juicy for customers. At the end of March, Epic released what they call “Download Manager 2.0”, an updated download manager that looked to fix some of the sorest issues to do with the launchers downloading process, now giving users the options to schedule automatic updates, change their default installation with ease, and reorganise their download list to prioritise what you want to download first. A massive step up from what used to exist that’s for sure.

Now the team has set their sights on improving the social side of the Epic Games Store with what is described as “Multi-platform social”, unified social features between the Epic Games Store Mobile app and Epic Games Store PC application, this part of the presentation it’s mentioned that you can text chat, voice chat, party up, and even change your profile pictures, something that has been heavily requested by the community. When giving a time frame for release Steve Allison only gives a time frame of “this year”, which could very well mean that it’s likely to slip into 2026. Continuing with more heavily requested features, preloading of pre-purchased games is a very real feature that was given a more concrete date of shipping, coming in September, no longer will Epic users have to wait until the game is officially released to begin the download of a game, instead having it ready to go. An eye opening statement given by Steve Allison on why preloading is so important is when a game is sold on both Epic Games Store and Steam and pre-loading opens they have seen refunds happening in the 10,000’s! Entirely because there is no pre-loading available on the Epic Games Store. The last thing that was on the roadmap for this year was Gifting, which is aiming to release before the Christmas Holidays, which is most likely being targeted as that’s the time where money spending is at it’s highest and tis’ the season to be jolly.

Further updates at a different time

Later in the day Steve Allison was back hosting joined alongside Kyle Billings the Directors of Portfolio Strategy and Business Operations for Epic Games having a deeper dive talk about what is coming for the Epic Games Store this year and into the future. This did contain information already covered in the State of Unreal, but there were a number of interesting inclusions that will be coming down the pipeline. One of these mentioned is the introduction of “Wallet Cards”. Epic Games Store has an Epic Wallet, much like Steam has their Steam Wallet, but the only way you can add money to that right now is directly through a card, this update looks to change that by altering how Fortnite game cards work. Instead of giving V-Bucks, it’ll instead load up into your Epic Wallet which can then be used for buying games, DLC or microtransactions on the Epic Games Store. A great way for customers who would rather not give their card details to companies online, or if wanting to provide a gift for a child who doesn’t have their own spending money or a debit/credit card to make purchases, a nice quality of life that might convert people buying exclusively for Fortnite to buying other games on the store.

The last noteworthy feature that was mentioned was a native authenticator that would be part of the Epic Games Store mobile app, allowing users to scan a QR code and login securely and quickly, something that when launches I would urge everyone to use, although I do hope that with this inclusion they don’t get rid of the current two factor authentication app linking, it’s nice having the option to use a 3rd party app if possible.

A bright future

With this list it seems that Epic are finally taking customer facing features of their storefront seriously, they’ve previously been a very developer focused storefront, giving generous terms, working on features and quality of life changes that benefit them the most, but it seems like ignoring the customer facing side is no longer an option and I look forward to seeing what the teams can deliver.

Alongside this lovely information on what’s coming for the Epic Games Store, the presentation was filled with goodies for Unreal Engine, outlining what’s coming next for the engine and it’s 5.6 and beyond releases. Alongside this a 15 minute tech demo of CD Projekt Red’s next game in the longstanding Witcher series was shown off, check out The Witcher 4 developed in Unreal Engine here: