Epic Games is opening the floodgates to its digital store, and it may be an issue

Epic Games has proven itself a worthy competitor of the leading PC games storefront, Steam. Now, they’re trying to be more open to other aspiring developers.

The Epic store has been around for five years now and they recently launched a way for developers to self-publish their games in the store.

In a blog posted on March 9, the gaming studio shared a few guidelines that need to be met for games to be published. The basic ones include PC crossplay, which allows players to play with others regardless of where it was purchased. Another basic one would be the Epic Games Stores Achievements and the age ratings.

One thing that’s vague is prohibited content. Under this, Epic plans to deny content that features hateful or discriminatory content, illegal content, content that has copyright infringement, games that are used to scam people, and malware.

The problem comes from another aspect under this category: pornography. Pornography is very hard to define seeing as there is a lot of media nowadays that feature sex scenes but aren’t considered adult-only, and video games are no exception to this. Modern games like The Witcher 3 and Grand Theft Auto V all feature scenes that contain sexual content, with the latter even having a strip club section. However, they aren’t considered pornographic and are considered more developer freedom than anything else.

Further diving deep into the content guidelines of Epic, they’ve added that games with Adults Only ratings are considered prohibited content in the storefront. This clears up some confusion surrounding the guideline but can still be quite vague. How many sex scenes would make a game have an Adults Only rating? How sexual can it get? Lots of questions still floating around without a well-defined answer.

Epic, in closing, said that they will reserve the right to reject games they feel aren’t sufficient in quality and functionality—what that could mean remains to be seen.