The Epic Games Store released a series of statistics to show how its game store grew in 2020 compared to 2019, its launch year. He announced that there are more than 160 million accounts now on the PC, up from 108 million registered users in 2019. The number of monthly active users has almost doubled, from 32 million in December 2019 to 56 million last month. Epic also saw its daily active user count rise to 31.3 million, which the company claims was a 192 percent increase. Its peak simultaneous player count reached 13 million in 2020, almost doubling its peak of 7 million in 2019.
It is no surprise to anyone that distributing free games every week is a good way to get people back to your store. (It also helps when your store is the only supplier of Fifteen days on the PC.) There were 103 free games last year, and players claimed more than 749 million copies. And good news: Epic has pledged to continue this popular tradition of giving titles in 2021.
All of this to say that the Epic Games Store is growing. Players spent $ 700 million on the PC game store in 2020, with $ 265 million being the actual amount spent by players on third party games not made by Epic (excluding coupons and promotions used in those games, as well as the value of Epic’s own funding for those developers).
Looking ahead, Epic says it is working to make it easier for developers to publish games on the Epic Games Store. For everyone else, he says he’s working on community-oriented features, including a review of his social components, player profiles and updates on his achievements and wish list features. Perhaps, it will expand its efforts to host more than just games, too.
Except for some totally unpredictable change in the tide over the next 10 years, Steam will always have higher numbers than the Epic Games Store. But its solid performance in 2020 proves that there is room in the industry for another competitor to keep growing. And it seems to validate that the ways in which Epic’s strategy differs from Valve (making deals for exclusive games with a fixed term, paying developers more per game) are still resonating among developers and publishers.