One of the things that generally went undiscussed in the Epic Games Store launch with its 12/88% revenue split is the fact that it allows revenue kick-backs for partners.

> ## Connect with Creators
>YouTube content creators, Twitch streamers, bloggers, and others are at the leading edge of game discovery. The 10,000-strong Epic Games Support-A-Creator program helps you reach creators, so they can help you reach players. If you opt to participate, creators who refer players to buy your game will receive a share of the revenue that you set (tracked by code or affiliate marketing link). To jumpstart the creator economy, Epic will cover the first 5% of creator revenue-sharing for the first 24 months.

*From the [Epic Games Store announcement](https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/announcing-the-epic-games-store).*

I don't know of any other video game digital market that does this, though some are rather opaque about their exact business practices: I know that Humble Bundle has a referral system, but I'm not familiar with how it works.

Back in the day when I was a featured reviewer at DriveThruRPG, there was a 5% referral bonus on everything on the platform, and it was one of the things that really made reviewing worth it for people who might otherwise have done something else with their time. I never made any serious cash off of the system, but it was enough to occasionally purchase a title I'd had my eyes on.

One of the things that's really nice about this is that it provides an extrinsic reward to writing reviews. I still write reviews all the time, but I also write a post every day, so that's kind of a moot point since I'm writing anyway and sometimes I just need a good topic to fill the space.

It also provides tools for content creators to monetize their work; in the day of AdBlock (and demonetization), having a secondary stream of profits is always nice. Steem does that nicely for us, but we're also pretty low-overhead in content creation, versus someone like a streamer who has to edit videos and upload them (to say nothing of hardware costs).

The only thing that I'm leery about is how this might impact some of the reviewer behavior. With 5%, it was definitely more profitable to make trustworthy reviews, but it sounds like the developer will have the ability to choose an arbitrary amount for revenue sharing, which makes me a little worried that developers might set very high revenue sharing for the sake of convincing influencers to give a more positive report, creating more of a temptation to churn out false positive reviews instead of really criticizing games.