The Epic First Run programme allows developers of any size to claim 100% of revenue if they agree to make their game exclusive on the Epic Games Store for six months.
After the six months are up, the game will revert to the standard Epic Games Store revenue split of 88% for the developer and 12% for Epic Games.
I’m not so sure, this seems like a less compelling deal than what Epic was offering before, which didn’t seem to be working out so well for devs.
Before, they were outright paying for exclusivity, offering studios and publishers huge sums of money to make up for the revenue they lose by not being on Steam, and then some. And they often paid for 12+ months of exclusivity. You were guaranteed profitability regardless of whether or not your game actually succeeded.
In order to break even in the new program, your game needs to retain 70% of the customers that would have bought it day 1 on Steam instead. That seems an impossibly high target to hit, given how much Epic has struggled to make EGS succeed even when they were thowing a lot more money around.