Epic Games has appointed Martin Keely, who spent seven years in senior leadership at Activision Blizzard and finished as SVP of Battle.net and Technology Services, as vice president and general manager of the Epic Games Store and Epic Online Services. The company announced the appointment on July 27. Keely fills the seat vacated by Steve Allison, who launched the storefront in 2018 and left Epic this month after eight years to become chief business officer at Saber Interactive.

Keely is not starting from a blank slate. Since at least November 2025, Epic's engineering team has been rebuilding the store's client from the ground up under the name Launcher V2. That rebuild is now in private beta, and internal testing shows cold starts running five times faster than the current client, with system-tray restoration running six and a half times faster. The core architectural problem is well documented: the current launcher pings backend servers on every click — opening the library, browsing the store, loading a game page — creating lag that contrasts sharply with Steam's more responsive client. Launcher V2 replaces that server-polling model with local state caching, so routine navigation resolves without a round trip to Epic's servers. The rebuild also adds community spaces, cross-platform text chat with avatars and player profiles, and private messaging — capabilities developers can extend through Epic Online Services into their own games.

Two mandates, not one

The other half of Keely's portfolio matters as much as the storefront. Epic Online Services is a free, engine-agnostic backend SDK used by thousands of games regardless of which storefront they sell through. It provides authentication, matchmaking, sessions and lobbies, leaderboards, achievements, voice chat and anti-cheat, and it works with Unreal Engine, Unity and custom engines across PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, iOS and Android. When Tim Sweeney celebrated the hire on X, invoking "Team Open linking up to make everything work across platforms, stores, engines, and ecosystems," he was pointing at EOS as much as the store.

The skill transfer from Battle.net is real but imperfect. Battle.net serves a handful of Blizzard titles to a homogeneous player base under a single publisher's control. The Epic Games Store carries more than 6,000 games from more than 3,000 independent developers, and EOS serves that entire population across every major platform — a fundamentally broader infrastructure and partner-management problem.

The numbers behind the hire

In a tribute posted on X, Sweeney credited Allison with building the store to 78 million monthly active users, an all-time record hit in December 2025. Third-party player spending grew 57% year over year in 2025 to a record $400 million. Below the surface, the picture is more complicated. Steam holds approximately 74% of the global PC digital game distribution market by revenue, by industry estimates, while the Epic Games Store sits at roughly 3%. Steam's monthly active user base is around 132 million against EGS's 78 million. Total gameplay hours across all Epic Games Store titles fell to 6.65 billion in 2025 from 7.72 billion in 2024 — even as monthly active users grew — suggesting many users log in to claim free games without becoming habitual platform users.

That engagement gap, not launcher speed, may be the harder management challenge. A faster launcher retains a user who is already engaged; it cannot by itself convert a free-game claimant into a paid buyer.

Keely's background

Before Blizzard, Keely served as executive vice president of product and technology at The Walt Disney Company, ran operations at Major League Gaming and was general manager at Fullscreen Media. At Blizzard he held three successive SVP roles — ecommerce, planning and strategy; media network; and finally Battle.net and Technology Services. Confirming the appointment on LinkedIn, Keely said he wants to deliver "new capabilities that elevate player, creator and developer experiences" and to help shape "an open and sustainable gaming ecosystem."

His predecessor's exit was described across the industry as voluntary. Allison, who joined Epic from Telltale Games in 2018, said he was "extremely impressed" with Saber's ability to produce games at "30-50% the cost of industry norms." Saber CEO Matthew Karch credited Allison with having "done more to shape and modernize the game industry than anyone else I know."

The economics underneath

The store's 12% revenue split — versus Steam's standard 30% — is viable largely because Fortnite revenue cross-subsidizes the platform. Epic has layered on additional incentives: since June 2025 developers pay zero revenue on their first $1 million in annual sales, with the 12% rate applying above that threshold. Epic First Run grants 100% of net revenue for six months in exchange for timed exclusivity, and "Launch Everywhere with Epic" cuts Unreal Engine royalties from 5% to 3.5% for developers publishing on EGS simultaneously with other platforms. The developer proposition is compelling on paper; Keely's task is making the user side matter enough to match it.

The hire also lands inside a larger platform play. At State of Unreal on June 17, 2026, Epic laid out the Unreal Engine 6 roadmap — merging the UE5 codebase with the Unreal Editor for Fortnite, shifting the core programming model from C++ to the Verse language, and targeting content portability across games. UE6 is targeting Early Access by late 2027, with a full commercial release expected 12 to 18 months later. Sweeney framed Keely's mandate as readying the store and EOS to anchor that cross-game economy.

Whether a storefront holding roughly 3% of the PC market can anchor that infrastructure before Valve or Microsoft move on the same territory remains the open question. For now, the near-term signal to watch is Launcher V2's move from private beta to general availability — Epic's roadmap targeted initial improvements for summer 2026, but no release date has been announced.