Epic Games Store Grows, But Game Sales Lag
▼ Summary
– The Epic Games Store’s user base grew massively from 108 million in 2019 to 295 million in 2024, but third-party revenue only increased by 1.6% in that period.
– This revenue stagnation is largely attributed to Epic’s heavy reliance on free game giveaways, which trained users to claim free titles without spending money.
– The platform launched with and has been slowly adding basic features like reviews and achievements, but it still lags behind Steam’s comprehensive user experience.
– Unlike Epic, Xbox’s PC strategy relies on Game Pass subscriptions, which has shown strong growth, indicating an audience willing to spend.
– Steam remains the dominant PC storefront due to its user-focused features, and while Epic and Xbox coexist, neither is positioned to take significant market share from it.
The Epic Games Store has seen its user base skyrocket from 108 million to a staggering 295 million accounts between 2019 and 2024, yet this explosive growth masks a critical weakness. Revenue from third-party game sales on the platform barely budged, increasing by only 1.6% over the same five-year period. This stark disconnect highlights a fundamental challenge: Epic’s aggressive strategy of weekly free game giveaways successfully brought in millions of users, but it also trained a vast portion of its audience to log in, claim a free title, and log out without ever making a purchase.
A closer look at the platform’s history explains this dynamic. Launched in 2018 as a competitor to Valve’s dominant Steam store, the Epic Games Store initially tried to win market share by securing exclusive releases and offering developers a more favorable revenue split. While the latter policy remains, the former tactic did little to endear the store to players. Instead, Epic’s primary user-acquisition tool became its now-famous free game promotions. This approach worked brilliantly for boosting sign-up numbers but inadvertently positioned the store as a giveaway hub rather than a primary marketplace.
Compounding this issue was the store’s slow development of basic features that PC gamers have come to expect. For years, the Epic Games Store launched without fundamental social and community tools. Essential features like user reviews, wishlists, and a shopping cart were added years after the platform’s debut, with some, like gifting and messaging, only arriving very recently. The store still lacks family sharing and robust mod support. For many users, this created a perception that the platform offered an inferior experience compared to the mature and feature-rich Steam ecosystem, giving them little reason to stay logged in or browse for paid games.
The situation presents a contrast with another Steam competitor, the Xbox app on PC. While both platforms lack some of Steam’s conveniences, Microsoft’s strategy has centered on its Game Pass subscription service, which has seen substantial growth. This model fosters ongoing engagement and revenue, rather than conditioning users to expect something for nothing. Furthermore, Xbox is investing in a long-term vision of a unified ecosystem across console, PC, and cloud, aiming to blend its library with platforms like Steam rather than replace them outright.
For now, Steam’s position as the primary PC gaming storefront remains largely unchallenged. Its user-centric design, vast feature set, and massive community have created a stable environment that players are reluctant to leave. Both Epic and Xbox appear to have accepted this reality, shifting their strategies from direct confrontation to finding complementary niches. Epic, for instance, has positioned itself as a more open platform for emerging trends, allowing NFT-based games and publicly supporting the use of AI in game development, areas where Steam has taken a more restrictive stance.
Ultimately, the Epic Games Store’s story is one of impressive user growth that hasn’t translated into a corresponding commercial success. It has become, for a significant segment of its audience, a specialized launcher for free content. While the platform is far from a failure, it generated over a billion dollars in revenue in 2024, its trajectory demonstrates the difficulty of changing consumer behavior once it’s been established. Epic successfully taught millions to visit, but it now faces the much harder task of teaching them to spend.
(Source: Windows Central)
