Gather'round, children, and let me tell you a story about the old bugaboo we used to call DRM. Digital Rights Management was the beast under every gamer's bed in the mid-2000s, an invisible bit of software baked into game discs that dictated and tracked player behavior under the guise of preventing piracy. DRM software, like SecuROM, limited the times a game could be downloaded and forced players to regularly connect to the internet for authentication checks, at a time when less than half of American adults had reliable broadband connections. DRM features soured the releases of BioShock, Mass Effect and Spore, and by 2010, anti-piracy software had rendered Assassin's Creed 2 and Splinter-Cell: Conviction unplayable. When Microsoft attempted to release the Xbox One with always-on DRM features in 2013, intense vitriol from fans forced the company to reverse its plans at the 11th hour.

The Epic Games Store launched just over four years ago, building an appeal for users on high-profile exclusives and tons of freebies, and appeal for developers and publishers with a more lucrative revenue split. While it's been growing in terms of both users and catalog, it's still a fraction of the size of the de facto standard for PC gaming, Steam. Today Epic is leveling the playing field for one of Steam's biggest draws, as it allows indie developers to post their own games to the store without the need for a publisher. The setup for Epic is similar to Steam: Pay $100 to submit a game, create a landing page, input some business info, and submit your game for review. Notably, the Epic Games Store is preserving the well-publicized 88/12 revenue split for indie developers (which beats out the usual 70/30 split of Steam, the Apple App Store, the Google Play Store, and most other digital storefronts).