The Epic Games Store didn’t launch to warm audience. However, if you’re an older gamer like myself, you’ll likely remember how hated Steam was when it launched. If anything, I think Steam had a harder battle, yet look where we are now!
Epic saw its best year in 2020, hardly surprising given everyone was stuck at home playing games due to COVID. They saw over 160 million users, as well as up to 31.3 million daily active players. That’s an increase of 192% year on year. They even broke a new record for concurrent users, hitting 13 million, a HUGE leap up from their previous record of 9 million. They saw user playtime increase from 3.35 billion hours to 5.7 billion hours too. Again though, that’s likely more to do with COVID than their own marketing.
But, surely they’re all just there for the free games, right? Wrong, dead wrong. I must admit, I rarely play games on the platform, but I do sometimes. I login mostly to collect the freebies though, as I’m sure many of you do too.
However, users spend over 700 million USD on the store. 265 million of that (37%) was on 3rd party titles.
They’ve committed to continue with the free game giveaways in 2021. Amazingly, they gave away 103 different free games in 2020, which were claimed over 749 million times… that’s a LOT of freebies! They would have cost you just over $2400 to purchase at RRP!
The platform is growing well, and it’s only going to get better. Fingers crossed.
