Epic has released statistics for the Epic Games Store – and they show impressive growth.
Monthly active users increased from 32 million in 2019 to 56 million in December 2020, Epic announced on a blog.
It’s a big leap, but the Epic Games Store still has a long way to go before it reaches the market leader Steam. Earlier this month, Valve announced that Steam had more than 120 million active users per month.
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There are now more than 160 million PC users in the Epic Games Store, Epic said. Daily active users increased 192 percent to 31.3 million, with a peak of 13 million simultaneous players in 2020 (from seven million in 2019).
Steam, on the other hand, reached 62.6 million daily active users, with the peak of simultaneous users reaching 24.8 million last year.
Epic’s growth spurt led to an increase in purchases and playing time, as expected. The company said that in 2020, PC customers at the Epic Games Store spent more than $ 700 million, of which third-party games accounted for 37%, at $ 265 million.
Epic offers publishers and developers more revenue than Valve. Epic distributes 88 percent of the stock to the developer / publisher, with 12 percent of Epic covering the store’s operating costs and profit.
By default, Steam has a 30 percent cut, although developers can keep 75 percent of revenue if their game generates $ 10 million and 80 percent if revenue exceeds $ 10 million.
Last year, the Epic Games Store community played 70% more than hours, with a total game time of 5.70 billion hours in 2020, compared to 3.35 billion hours in 2019.
Again, for comparison, Steam saw 31.3 billion hours of gameplay in 2020, and the number of games purchased increased by 21.4 percent in 2019.
The huge growth of the Epic Games Store is fueled in part by the attractive free games it regularly offers. Epic distributed 103 games in 2020 (for $ 2,407), with more than 749 million games claimed by users in the year.
The most popular games from the Epic Games Store in 2020 included the company’s own Fortnite, as expected, as well as some games that were first released for PC on the platform, such as Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Borderlands 3.
Looking ahead, Epic said it will expand the number of games on the Epic Games Store, providing developers with automatic publishing tools for the platform.
Epic added that it is improving existing resources, such as Wishlists and Achievements in 2021. Player profiles and a social review are also in progress.