Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney recently spoke at the Coalition for App Fairness conference in Seoul where he called for a unified digital store for game platforms. Sweeney stated that Epic Games had already begun working with publishers and service providers to create this vision of a unified store where customers could be confident that their purchases would work across all platforms. The system described by Sweeney would be a radical departure from existing ecosystems such as Xbox, PlayStation, Steam, Nintendo, and Epic where digital purchases are often limited to an individual companies platform.
This new system would allow games purchased from any ecosystem to be fully playable on all supported platforms without requiring multiple purchases. The success of this vision is entirely dependent on game studios signing up to the program which will likely be a hard sell given the expected fall in sales. While there are limited options currently exist for cross-buy games the movie industry has implemented a similar program with Movies Anywhere which boasts large studios such as Disney, Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros.
Tim SweeneyWhat the world really needs now is a single store that works with all platforms