Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney has stated that there will be Epic Games Store moderators who will be enforcing a “reasonably high quality filter” on games that will appear on the store. That’s right: the man behind the folks who’ve brought you Fortnite, the Unreal Engine, and so much more has essentially declared the Epic Games Store a shovelware-free zone. The company will be maintaining a strict focus on quality games that their customers will enjoy — even when they eventually create a self-publishing system.
“So we’re not going to see asset flips, and we’re going to explicitly say no to porn games or other intentionally controversial games,” Sweeney told Gamasutra. “We’re perfectly fine with M-rated experiences like GTA or Far Cry, but we’re not the place for the other stuff. For the bigger anti-social things.”
Key to their strategy will be a team of Epic Games Store moderators who will actually enforce these policies. It’s pretty easy going right now as they are only accepting submissions from established developers, but they eventually plan to open up the store to self-publishing. It will, of course, come with several caveats, with one of those being a mandate for quality games only. Hopefully, Mr. Sweeney believes that the Epic Games Store moderators will be able to uphold an “Epic quality standard.”
“We’re not discriminating against any games based on their speech because the PC is an open platform,” Mr. Sweeney continued. “If we don’t choose to carry their game, they can release it directly to customers, or sell it through other stores if they choose.”
The Epic Games Store has its fair share of problems and plenty of people willing to criticize them, but the future of the store will be shaped so that game quality isn’t one of them. Between the plans for Epic Games Store moderators and a number of other features outlined on their roadmap, it may very well shape up to be a halfway decent digital game store in a year or two.
