Hello, everyone. Welcome back after lunch. I hope everyone had a good lunch. I hope you're having a good Unreal Fest so far. Our session is going to cover the Epic Games Store and our back-end services offering, which is called Epic Online Services. My name is Rajen Kishna. I work at Epic Games. I help studios and publishers all over the world to be successful using Epic Online Services and to distribute their games on the Epic Games Store. And I have with me Kyle. Hey, all. I'm Kyle. I work really closely with our BD team marketing product to really guide the store roadmap and help ensure that the content that our players want to engage with is available and discoverable.
Sort of today, like to set the stage, Raj and I will be discussing two important topics, the Epic Game Store and Epic Online Services. However, before we dive into those topics, I'd like to take a few moments to emphasize the importance of the Epic Game Store within the larger Epic ecosystem. few moments to emphasize the importance of the Epic Game Store within the larger Epic ecosystem. The Epic Game Store serves as a key component of a broader mission within Epic. We strive to provide creators with the tools to bring their ideas to life and a storefront to distribute those ideas. Epic has a 27-year history of empowering creatives. As we've grown and expanded over the years, our commitment to that empowerment remains steadfast. Through the Epic Game Store launched in 2018 and our suite of services, we support the growth and success of our creators. We succeed when our creators succeed. When creators can bring their ideas to life and proceed to successfully share those games to the world, that's a win condition for us. We work tirelessly to empower our creators and democratize video game development and distribution. So whether you're completely new to Epic or you're using our full suite of products, we thank you for coming on this journey with us.
All right, so let's dive first into the Epic Game Store. So we genuinely believe that a competitive PC marketplace is absolutely critical to the PC games industry. A few things that I want to note when we think about this distribution landscape. First, through our first party games, Fortnite, Rocket League, Fall Guys, we have an incremental audience of players that are beginning their PC gaming journey through the Epic Games Store. With our industry-leading revenue share, other distribution platforms have also come out with more favorable terms for developers. And finally, given economic headwinds facing the industry, margin expansion and increased reach is a key component to success in the long-term health of our partners. Additionally, I will note that the opportunity that exists in the Epic Game Store if your game is built in Unreal. While there's a few caveats to this sentence, engine royalties are waived on your game sales on the Epic Game Store. This benefit to our engine partners is designed to encourage you to bring your games to the Epic Game Store and maximize any opportunity you have there.
So throughout the talk today, you're gonna see a really common thread, and that's our unwavering commitment to the Epic Games Store for the long haul. So I have to say it, we're not going anywhere. In 2024, we have plans to level up both the partner and player experience, and we think that the things that we're going to talk about are really exciting for everyone. So back in 2018, when we first launched the store, the vision was clear. Create a viable PC game storefront, be able to maintain that at scale, and provide our developer partners their fair share of revenue. Now, as the storefront continues to scale, we want to make sure that we're taking the right steps to ensure that we are a crucial component of your business. So the bottom line is we can't succeed in our mission if you don't succeed. Your active participation at the Epic Game Store is absolutely critical to long-term success for both of us. And we have exciting plans for the future of the Epic Game Store, and I'm glad that I get to share those with you today.
So business recap, we'll do it real quick. So earlier this year, we announced that 2022 we had reached a peak M8 monthly active users of 68 million. And we also reached a peak daily active users of 34 million. So I'm not ready to share any new information surrounding our active users. We prefer to do that during our year in review. But I do want to call out some other interesting third quarter results. So through content, you can't get anywhere else. So our first party games, free games program, our exclusives, we've been consistently adding new users to the ecosystem. In the third quarter alone we averaged 2.4 million new users per month. So as we look forward, you know, thinking about the end of the year, our target is to hit 70 million monthly active users.
Now that said, when it comes to growing the third-party ecosystem, what really matters is the volume of players that are actively engaged in third-party content. So currently 67% of our player base is playing third-party games and 50% of them are exclusively playing third-party games. These numbers for me highlight the significance of the third-party games ecosystem and the importance of fostering that growth.
So with all that laid, let's take a few moments to focus on some of the ongoing and future investments that we have into the Epic Games Store. So first off in March, we introduced the first iteration of our self-publishing tools. This for us was a significant milestone as it empowered our partners to have control of the end-to-end lifecycle of their products. And as we move into 2024, you can expect to see more features being rolled out. Most of these additions will support additional product configurations, but they'll also enhance the overall reliability and usability of the toolset.
In May, we introduced the Discount Pricing Management Tool or as we fondly call it, DPMT. This was a crucial development that allowed our partners to independently manage discounts as part of either Epic-led campaigns, so you can think of like holiday sale, mega sale, or even just create their own custom campaigns. This work was pivotal in ensuring our ability to support your promotional and discounting plans, especially as the catalog on the store continues to scale.
And then finally, in May we also launched Epic Rewards. So Epic Rewards is the first program of its kind on PC. When we sat back and thought about it, you know, it was really essential for us to acknowledge that our players are an important component of the ecosystem, right? And so we wanted to ensure that there was a pathway for us to show our appreciation or award their loyalty. So with Epic Rewards, players receive a 5% grant on back to them on all of their spending, which they can use at their discretion on any future transaction that uses our payment system. It's also important to note that this 5% is fully funded by EPIC and is not deducted from our partners revenue share.
All right so let's kind of reflect on the rest of 2023. Many of these ongoing initiatives are ones that focus on quality of life for our users. They improve improvements to wish list comms, improving our search, expanding and improving merchandising services. We don't have a whole lot left in the year, right? We're in October. So we'll talk about next year in more detail in a second. But there is one topic that resonates with everyone, including myself, and holds great importance, and that's launcher performance. We all understand that a smooth and efficient launcher is important to everyone.
So, our efforts to improve launcher performance have been yielding incredibly encouraging results. We kicked this off back in January with a clear focus of reducing load times for critical pathways that directly impacted user experience. Throughout last year, we noticed, and I think other players and users also noticed, that performance was deteriorating. And addressing that became the number one priority for our team. So our concentration started with improving cold start times, and then we're going from there to improve systray restore timings. So I'm super stoked to say that we have reduced cold start from 13 seconds back in February to just under five seconds with our last test in August. There's some caveats here, like these tests are run against machines that have fresh installs. There's a lot of variability once you have things like background processes, library size, your machine config. The team's actively working to solve this variability, but right now we're looking really, really positive in terms of cold start. Moving forward, the next phase of work revolves around narrowing the gap in SysTray Restore, specifically SysTray Restore to library. And you can start to see all that bear fruit in 2024.
All right, so looking ahead to next year. There is a lot on this list that we're targeting for next year. We could probably be here for the next 53 minutes talking about this list. I recommend just coming and talking to me at the booth because I'll be there and I love talking about everything here. There's two things I do want to call out directly. Everybody wants it. A new download manager is coming early next year. So you'll be able to manage your queue, set patch install times, prioritize your titles. Effectively everything that you would want from a download manager it is coming early next year. Stay tuned. Additionally social shopping is incredibly important to our users and other users that we talk to in the PC game space and so it's really important for us to make sure that our players know what their friends are playing and engaging with so they can make a fully informed purchase decision. So you'll start to see more social aspects start to propagate on the store throughout next year and then that way you can and we're also going to launch an activity feed so you can kind of keep track of like what your friends are up to.
So other than that like I'm not going to delve into too much of any of these items. I'm more than happy to wax poetic downstairs. Feel free to find me at the Epic Developer Services booth. I'll be there a lot.
All right, so let's talk about looking into the future, right? As I said, we're not going anywhere. Our commitment to the store is unwavering. So some of the things I want to call out to make sure that everyone knows that we're dedicated to this. Like first, the free games program's gonna continue through 2023 and beyond. I'm not ready to share additional details of what next year looks like, but we will be doing something. And then I'm also really excited to share both Epic First Run and Now on Epic. Epic First Run we announced back at Gamescom, and Now on Epic is a program that we designed to capture back catalog that is currently absent.
All right, so to be a successful storefront, and I think it's pretty transparent to everyone here, it's all about the games, right? And it's all about connecting players to the games that they want to play. The inception of Epic First Run and now in Epic can really be traced to one fundamental principle. We want our partners to bring every PC title to the Epic Game Store. And as our partners consider their release strategy and their SKU plans, we want to demonstrate that the Epic Game Store presents an exciting and unique opportunity to invest their full effort in bringing these games to market.
So, Epic First Run, announced back at Gamescom. This is an optional exclusivity program for new release titles. Our partners have the opportunity to participate in Epic First Run by choosing their launcher titles as an Epic Games Store PC exclusive. It's a six-month exclusivity window, encouraging our partners to throw their full weight behind their titles during those crucial early months post-launch. We want our partners to take full advantage of this exclusivity window and really try and maximize and realize the revenue when it matters the most.
The flip side of that coin would then be Now on Epic. So if Epic first run is us catching all new release titles, Epic, now on Epic, closes the delta between ourselves and other third party PC platforms. Mechanically, the program operates the same as Epic First Run, but it's completely targeted at titles released prior to October 16th. So we understand, and we have a lot of talks of our partners, managing another catalog title that you've previously released on another storefront represents some sort of nebulous ROI. So now, on Epic, alleviates that risk. Bring three or more titles over, launch with a franchise sale, a publisher sale, do some sort of introductory pricing, and you'll boost your net revenue from user spending from 88 to 100. And if you don't have three titles that are currently live on other PC storefronts, you just need to bring your whole catalog over. So, unlike Epic First Run, where we have not stated a date when that program will conclude, now on Epic we'll only run for one calendar year. So get away, strike while the iron's hot.
As we start to think about the different programs that we have going on in the store and we think about Epic Rewards and our players, the key to really maximizing success, it lies in your hands. So we serve as a really powerful distribution and merchandising platform, but our role is to complement your overall marketing strategy. And we will support your efforts. So as you begin to construct your go-to-market and your release plans, you need to invest that extra effort and proactive planning into the Epic Game Store in order to yield long-term results.
It's important to recognize that products launched on the Epic Game Store require a strong marketing and PR presence to effectively reach a target audience. And while we can help with discoverability, it's really ideal that players know what they're looking for before they hit the store. So you know, what we always tell our partners is like, you should consider your presence on the Epic Games Store as a complement to your off-store strategy. Our teams are all here to empower and support you and help you like navigate that path to success, but ultimately it does rely on you to put that extra effort in.
So throughout the last five years, we've had the opportunity to experience a number of PC exclusives on the Epic Game Store. So when considering Epic First Run, we conducted analysis of the titles that have launched exclusively and had a particularly successful launch. Not surprisingly, all these titles shared a really common factor. Our partners had a really solid go-to-market plan, and they dedicated their full efforts into maximizing their success during their exclusivity window.
So on average, the titles that managed to execute against their GTM, make sure that they had strong influencer marketing support, do everything, what I would call everything right, they captured the majority of their first 24 months revenue during their 12 month exclusivity window without damaging their lifetime sales performance. So when we would work with our partners, we would know what their expectations would be for lifetime sales performance, and we would work backwards against that. And we learned that if you do everything right, you don't damage performance by coming exclusive to the store, you have two different sales curves, effectively.
We want nothing more than our partners to thrive here, and we firmly believe that Epic First Run is a real critical component in helping our partners hit that stated goal. And then, we encourage our partners to do everything they can, and we're here to support you every step of the way.
So let's dive into some of the best practices that our partners tend to follow to find success on the store. And these practices apply whether you're gonna sim ship your title or you're gonna participate via Epic First Run. There's really three fundamentals.
First, launch all of your upcoming titles on the store. And if I could convince you, please, please, please bring your catalog over. Bringing your catalog over and launching all your titles, it just maximizes your presence and your exposure on the store. And also, for our users, it becomes a, I don't wonder if the game is here, I know it's here. Secondly, actively promote that your titles are available on the Epic Games Store. Leverage your social channels, your own channels, amplify with ours, and get your game in front of the widest audience possible. We'll talk more about that in a second. And then finally, emphasize and encourage wishlist and pre-purchase behavior on the Epic Game Store and engage with your audience to build that anticipation.
So when bringing your game to market it's it's critical to align your platform announcements and product page launches as closely as possible. By doing so what you do is you provide players to have sufficient time to make these decisions, make informed choices, and having a coordinated approach makes a unified and cohesive launch. One particular scenario I like to call out regularly, don't have a store page up on another platform or storefront for months ahead of time and then throw your Epic Games Store store page up just days before. Our users will not know where they can get the game. They will default to other storefronts. You really want to make sure that our players have the opportunity to discover and engage with your content. And furthermore, you want our teams, like our marketing team, to be able to build any excitement around your game.
Once again, if you're not participating in Epic First Run, make sure that you're optimizing your sim-ship strategy. This means releasing your game, multiple storefronts, same time. This means engaging with the biz dev team, engaging with the marketing team, and making sure that you're doing everything you can to maximize your exposure.
So I'm gonna use SimShip a lot because this sort of works across both SimShip and Epic First Run, but the first thing is when you have your SimShip strategy and cohesive release plan, really make sure you launch your coming soon page simultaneously with all other PC storefronts that you are gonna bring your title to. This approach allows our users to just become aware of the title. That anticipation leads up to the release. They can talk to their friends and say, where are you gonna play this game at? Really doesn't matter because of multiplayer, and Rajan will talk about that. But it's all really important to be cohesive and unified in the way that you bring that game to market.
In fact, our internal data and some of the third party data sources that we work with, it highlights that if you get your store page up and actively promoted at least six weeks prior to launch, you typically generate eight and a half times more revenue than if you just effectively throw it over the wall. And then make sure that you are doing everything you can to provide early visibility. Bringing your store page up just a week before, even if it's on both platforms, it's not ideal. You need that exposure to market, and you need time for people to get used to things.
It is essential to incorporate the Epic Game Store branding and backlink to your Epic Game Store page from all of your own channels. Please, please, please avoid the generic PC logo. Even if you're just gonna put our logo and other PC storefronts next to each other, that's fine. Just avoid the generic PC logo. It really gets me. And then by doing so, what you do is your community is fully informed on where they can find these games. Again, you're just directing players to the platform where you can capture the highest amount of net revenue and expand your margin. So by doing these two things, you make it convenient for your audience to access and purchase your content directly from the Epic Game Store.
After you've taken all of the necessary steps to optimize the reach of your game, the next step you can do is request support from the marketing team. And this is really just like chase after those biggest beats, right? You're first available for pre-purchase, now available for wishlist, whatever those beats may be. When available, we will provide promotional opportunities across our social, across the storefront, and we'll make sure that we do the best thing we can to further and boost your awareness and engagement. And then after the game is live, participate in key store promotional events. You know as I said earlier, holiday sale, mega sale, Halloween sale. You need just you need to maintain that elevated level of awareness for your for your games. These opportunities provide significant visibility to your products and serve as important avenues to continue to attract players to your games. You can leverage the discount pricing management tool in the developer portal, and there will be open calls for our big events. And then you can also set up your own publisher-initiated discounts. I would implore you to stay engaged with the promotions team and just make sure that you're always in constant communication knowing what's going on at the store. So when you choose to participate in promotional events, you know, it's really important to actively promote your involvement. On average, participating titles see a three and a half times revenue lift month over month when they participate in these events. Our social team strives to promote every title that is participating in our events, but really there's limited time frames to do that. So it's really doubly important for you to amplify and raise awareness that you're participating in MegaSale during that four week period. It's a really powerful way to generate excitement.
All right, so this is the most businessy slide that I'm gonna give you guys. So when you think about your launch strategy from a pure net revenue perspective, like I like to think about things in terms of like the net revenue frontier. That frontier lies between the blue and the purple lines. So a paying player on the Epic Game Store is worth more to your bottom line than a person paying for games on any other PC storefront. So making sure that you ship all your titles than a person paying for games on any other PC storefront. So making sure that you ship all your titles on the Epic Game Store is crucial to avoid minimizing that frontier. So, same ship your titles, follow best practices that have been outlined. You end up creating this optimal condition to maximize that net revenue frontier. As the store continues to scale, our aim is to contribute 30% of your titles unit sales. Given our industry-leading rev share, if we contribute 30% of your unit sales, we contribute over 40% of your PC revenue, which is why this is so important. And now I would like to pass it off to Rajen who will guide you through the store requirements and Epic Online Services.
All right, thank you Kyle. So store requirements may sound a little bit ominous at first but I think the important thing to keep in mind is that the reason why we have these requirements is because we want to be, we want players to be confident that when they play their games through the Epic Game Store, their experience is consistent and rewarding for them.
So there's two main things to really keep in mind when you think about integration with the Epic Game Store from your game's perspective. And the first one is really enabling your players to play wherever and whoever they want. Fortnite was one of the first games that kind of pioneered the cross-platform play movement. You can be able to play everywhere, play with your same friends. And ever since, more and more games have adopted this model, but also player expectations have risen, and they expect this from all the different games that are out there. Nowadays, they want to be able to play on their platform of choice, but they also want to be able to keep their progress across these different platforms, play with their friends, it doesn't matter which platform my friends are on.
So because of this, and we truly believe in this concept of cross-play, we do have you know a commitment into our store so players can be confident that if they purchase games on the Epic Games Store, that these expectations are met, like regardless of what game they choose to play. We do require that all of the multiplayer games that ship on the Epic Game Store, that they implement cross-play. And this really means that at a minimum, we need cross-play to be functional across PC storefronts because that's the most analogous platform that we play on. But we strongly encourage that where you can and where it makes sense to extend that cross-play functionality to consoles as well, just so everyone can get unified in that same multiplayer experience.
Now there's a QR code here, there's a link at the bottom, I'm sure you can find this stuff in our documentation as well, but the core essence of this requirement really is twofold. One, if your game does matchmaking, make sure that that matchmaking by default includes all of the players in the same pool. This just guarantees by default that anyone going and hopping into your game, they have access to the most broad set of matches available and that they're gonna have a great time. And second, if your game support friend-based game invites, so I can invite my friend directly to a game or join their game directly, that mechanism should work functionally the same across different platforms, but also across different friend ecosystems. So for example, if I play your game on Steam and there's an in-game UI for me to invite Kyle to my game, I should also expect the same in-game UI to offer functionality to invite my Epic friends as well, so I can have access to everyone at the same place.
We don't have any requirements or restrictions on how you achieve this functionality. Again, our goal is just to ensure that player experience, but you can solve this problem however you need. But we do have some tooling available if you choose to use that in Epic Online Services and Epic Games accounts, which I'll come back to in a second.
The second requirement is all about rewarding player time investment with Epic Game Store achievements. Achievements have become pervasive across all these different platforms, and there's different mechanisms or different solutions to it, but there's some form of achievements in pretty much all the different platforms. And players, again, they're expecting these things, but we also see that games that do offer achievements to players, players tend to play a little bit more into your game and put a little bit more time just to chase that last achievement or just to do that special thing. But it also gives you an opportunity to guide players towards certain actions and reward that behavior if they succeed.
Because we want to ensure that consistency across the different platforms, we do require that if you support achievements on any other PC storefront, that you support Epic Games Store achievements on our platform as well. These achievements obviously need to be substantially similar, so again, people can have the same achievements across different platforms.
Now the Epic Games Store Achievements platform basically enables you to distribute 1,000 XP of value throughout your achievements that you offer in your base game. And these can be distributed in increments of 5 XP, between 5 to 200 per achievement. This gives you some flexibility in how rewarding certain things you offer to your players is. And then if you have additional needs for additional XP, let's say you're creating downloadable content or you're having expansions that are coming out, you can reach out to us and we can add more to that pool of 1,000. That 1,000 XP is really set for the base game and then we can have additional XP on top of that.
Once you unlock all the 1,000 XP in your base game, players will actually get an additional platinum achievement that's granted by the system. You don't have to set this one up, which will grant 250 XP. So the total that they can earn for a base game is 1,250 XP. And on top of all that, if you use the Epic Games overlay in your game, then achievements in the Epic Games achievement system will actually have a satisfying sound and unlock animation like this.
The implementation for this stuff is twofold again. One is you have to implement Epic Online Services achievements in your game code. So this is the part where you crack open your code and you actually implement things in there. Epic Online Services achievements is kind of a platform agnostic system for achievements. So even if you just want to support achievements across different platforms, you can use this mechanism to implement that across. But that is kind of the code piece to it. Once you have all that stuff implemented into your code, you would go into the Epic Game Store developer portal, and you can set up those XP values for your achievements, which would transform them into Epic Game Store achievements, which would lead to the accrual of that XP as well. And additionally, on top of all that, to streamline the process and kind of speed things up where needed, we do have tooling available. So you can import your Steam achievement definitions from Steam and kind of streamline that process of getting that kick started on our store.
Now I mentioned Epic Online Services a few times and I didn't really introduce it, so kind of let's dig a little bit into that and what it is and why it should matter to you at all. Now, Epic Online Services is a set of free, open, and modular services that really are meant to empower your back-end needs, so all the stuff, the functionality that you would need on the back-end, and run those things at scale. Epic Online Services engine and platform agnostic so you can use these services wherever it makes sense for you across PC, mobile, as well as consoles.
As Kyle mentioned our core motivation of offering this to you and especially for free right we'll get to in second, is to provide you with the right tools to bring your ideas to life without you having to spend a bunch of time on building out infrastructure and building out these back-end services yourself. The features that we have available in Epic Online Services, they're all born from us creating Fortnite and running those services that we need for Fortnite at scale in the back end. And all these things we saw that we're solving all these challenges for our own game, but it's definitely gonna be beneficial to more game developers. So we decided to make those features available to everyone while already running these services at scale. So you kind of get that for free as well.
Now I mentioned free a couple times and the question I always get when I talk about this stuff to anyone is, why is Epic doing this for free exactly? Like, what's the catch? And I mean, the answer really is simple. Like, there is no catch. Our goal is really to connect players and to grow communities together, which is also why we kind of pioneered that stuff for cross-play. Because we want to make sure that you are able to focus on creating your unique experiences, and you don't have to spend a bunch of time, like, building out these services that everyone would basically have to build out for themselves. It's a similar service that everyone creates. Let's take that away from you so you can build out the unique experiences that we all just love to enjoy as well. We're all players at the end of the day as well.
Zooming in a little bit on Epic Online Services, there are a couple of different ways for how you can categorize these things, but the most important one really is highlighted here on the left and right side of this slide in the bigger blocks. And those are kind of the ways that you're probably already thinking and planning out your game anyway, right? You're asking questions like, are we going to support multiplayer in our game? What can we do to moderate bad player behavior if that pops up into our game? Or how do we even offer a social ecosystem into our game as well?
I'm not going to go through each individual service here because we'd be here all day, but the important thing to note from this slide is that everything that you see on this slide is built up to be modular. So if your game needs leaderboards, anti-cheat, and a friend system in your game, perfect. Pick those services, implement those services. You don't have to use any of the other ones. If you want to use more, you're more than welcome to. But let's say if your game only needs voice chat, perfect. You can pick that one as well and then go from there and expand your needs as they grow.
At the bottom here, you'll see Epic Games Store services highlighted and it's included in the Epic Online Services SDK. This is really functionality that you use to interact with the Epic Games Store. So let's say you're selling your games on the Epic Games Store and you want to do ownership validation for DLC that people purchase or any consumables that people purchase, you can do that from that same SDK. Again, important to note here is that it is an optional component in here, and everything that you see at the top of this slide is store and platform agnostic, like I mentioned. So there's additional functionality if you want to integrate into the Epic Game Store. All the other stuff you can use across all your different platforms. So you can really power that cross-play experience.
And then last but not least, at the very bottom, you'll see Kids Web Services. And Kids Web Services really gives you access to the world-class functionality that we use in our own games and our own experiences to make sure that youth audiences have safe access to your game. These are things like parent verification and consent management. If you have experiences where you need to make sure that that's controlled in your game, or just adult verification in general, you can leverage that functionality without having to build that out, without having to figure out what all the rules and regulations in each individual country where you want to sell your game is. You can have all that functionality and just lean on our service provider for that. Now, there's a session tomorrow from our colleague Paul Nunn at 9 a.m. So, if you want to learn more about Kids Web Services, definitely go check that out. He's also going to be at our booth in the Expo in the Epic Developer Services booth. So, if you have additional questions, feel free to pop by.
Now, in the previous slide, you probably also noticed the two kind of big things at the top there, the two main categories that we have in our services offering, which are game services and Epic Account Services. And the important thing to hear, to take away from this slide, is that the experience is kind of determined by you. Everything that's in the game services category are all services that are open and transparently usable with any of the identity providers that your game chooses to support. Let's say you have access to Xbox as an identity provider on your Xbox platform, you can use game services transparently with that account system without requiring anything else. Same thing goes for Steam or we even support OpenID if you have your own identity provider for that. On the other hand you have Epic Account Services which lean a lot on kind of the social things that we offer within our own ecosystem. So this leans on Epic Games accounts which is our account system and currently there's over 750 million users in that ecosystem already. And imagine all the different friend connections that they have. So you can leverage all that stuff up front and just implement that in your game and have that instant connection for people. And of course, Epic Games accounts are also supported on the game services side. So if you do both, then that's all neatly integrated together as well.
Now the keen eye among you have maybe looked at that slide with all the different service names and thought about, what about dedicated servers? Or what about inventory management? Or what about bug reporting? And so we recognize that each game has unique needs. And we may not offer a solution for all these questions that you have. And there's other service providers out there that do. And we want to enable you to use Epic Online Services at the heart of your online services strategy but also make it as easy as possible for you to connect those things with these other services that you may need from other providers. So we've seen quite a few studios that do that integration already between Epic Online Services and some other service providers. One of the goals that we have internally is to make sure that we create and we improve our documentation to make that process as seamless as possible so you have all the right knowledge in-house to how to connect these things together and how to be successful combining them.
Like I mentioned before, cross-play is a very important topic for us and you know there's all these expectations from players that they have, like I said, like they want to use all their different devices, they want to you know use the same account system everywhere, keep their progress, play with all their friends. All of these things individually, all of these expectations come with their own challenges for you as a developer to deal with. And Epic Online Services is really set up in a way to deal with all those questions and deal with all those challenges and help you along the way to provide that. On top of all the individual things that you can do with the individual features that we have available, there's also an Epic overlay which kind of ties together that whole social experience together into one single UI that's consistent between the different platforms. So we started creating or we started releasing this seamless experience back with our Epic Online Services SDK version 1.15 that was last year on PC and we recently expanded that support across all major console platforms with version 1.16 this August. So this means that you are now enabled to use the Epic overlay across all these different supported platforms and to have players seamlessly interact with both their Epic friends as well as their native platform friends from that single UX. So they can manage their friends, they can join games, they can invite others to games, all from that same consistent experience across these different platforms and different games.
Now the overlay and the underlying EOS, Epic Online Services functionality, it does implement the native platform's trust, safety, and privacy guidelines, and on top of our own. So you leverage that functionality for free as well. So you are more adherent to the requirements there. And again, you can tap into that ecosystem of friend and friend connection. So when players finish installing your game, they log in with their known account, they can immediately start playing with their friends that they already made.
Now, this Unreal Fest session is titled Getting the Most Out of Epic Games Store and Epic Online Services, so I do want to have one slide that goes one level deeper. One of the things that we see a lot is that once people start using Epic Online Services at the Epic Games Store and our tooling, which is the developer portal, which is kind of where you mainly, mostly you can set up all your different services and configurations, that there's a lot of terminology that's thrown at you, and sometimes it's kind of hard to distinguish how that all fits together in a hierarchy. So I want to walk through it really quick to give you kind of a sense of where everything lies.
So everything starts at the top with an organization, and that organization kind of represents your company, your studio, your publisher, et cetera. That's the level where you define who has access to the developer portal, right? Like who can access what functionality in the game, and it has some things in there obviously for legal agreements and those types of things. Underneath that organization, an organization can have one or multiple products, and the product really represents your game in this case, and that is set up there. Within each product, you have access to one or more sandboxes. And sandboxes are the thing that isolates identity provider setup, basically, from an Epic Online Services perspective, as well as is used for Epic Games Store. So if you are in the Epic Games Store, you distribute your game, you set up things in the dev sandbox and kind of push things through stage and live to get things to a live state. If you're only using Epic Online Services and you're not distributing on an Epic Game Store, you only have access to the live sandbox by default until you do onboard onto the Epic Game Store.
Now, within each sandbox, there's this notion of deployments, and this is a really important one because within Epic Online Services, a deployment really determines what the configuration is of all the services and the features that you need, as well as what player data is attached to that specific configuration. So for example, your live game may be using a specific deployment which has all of your live player data, but you want a different deployment for your QA department. Maybe you want to your live player data, but you want a different deployment for your QA department, right? Maybe you don't want to separate that player data, you want to be able to look at what achievements they earned more easily in that deployment, that's the right way to separate out that data as well.
Going back up a little bit to the product, a product has one or multiple clients, and a client is kind of the definition you're probably familiar with interacting with any kind of service that's out there. The client defines what access is available for what you're trying to do in terms of functionality and that's determined in the client policy. So a good example always is you would have one client and client policy for your shipping game which is the binaries that you distribute to your players, which is inherently an untrusted environment. But you want a separate client that maybe has more access to manage all players that you use on your trusted backend. So players would not have that functionality obviously available to do malicious things if they want to. And then lastly, if you're using Epic Account Services, there's a notion of Epic Account Services application, and that application really controls how the consent management flow works to your player. So if you want access to the player's friends list, for example, to display that in your game, that's stuff that you would set up in that application, and there's a thing in there that's called brand settings, which determines how that consent is represented to your player. So what is your game icon, what is your privacy policy URL? So when they do see that consent pop-up dialog, they will know, oh, this is the game that I'm trying to give consent to, and this is their privacy policy.
Now that's a lot of information about Epic Online Services, I realize, luckily this talk is recorded if you want to go back to it. But if you go away with anything here in terms of Epic Online Services, there are four things to kind of remember to keep in mind. Epic Online Services is flexible, so it integrates with your existing workflow and it works with many different engines. Epic Online Services can be used on any different platform or storefront. So you can use it to ship everywhere that you need. You keep more control of your game and player data. That's all kind of consolidated for you in one place, if possible. So it's easy for you to manage that data. And then lastly, it's built in a modular way. So you can pick whatever you need and grow whenever you want. Well, with that being said, thank you all for coming to our talk. And I hope you have a great rest of Unreal Fest.
This is from this video on Youtube, transcribed with OpenAI's Whisper, and cut into paragraphs by Google's Bard.