According to the Year In Review post on Epic’s site, PC customers “spent over $700 million of which third party games represented 37% at $265 million.” Epic say all of their numbers are on the up though, including the total number of users. “There are now over 160 million Epic Games Store PC users. Daily active users are up 192% to 31.3 million daily active players, with a peak CCU 13 million concurrent players this year (up from 7M in 2019). Monthly active users in December rose from 32 million in 2019 to 56 million.” The number of games available on the platform also grew from 190 in 2019 to 471 in 2020. They also made available 103 free games, and over 749 million free games were claimed. That’s an insane number of free games, and I wonder how many of them folks bothered to ever actually boot up after claiming. The post also gives a brief list of new features they hope to add to the store in 2021, including wishlist improvements, achievements, player profiles, and if the trolley emoji is anything to go by, a proper shopping basket. Wouldn’t that be nice. I boot up the Epic Games Store once every few months to play something exclusive on there (Hitman 3, this time), and to uninstall whatever game I forgot I’d downloaded the last time I was on there (Phantom Brigade, this time). I am happy Steam has competition, but as a user it offers me no incentive to use the store bar said exclusives. Meanwhile, Itch.io continues to foster types of game and a development scene that arguably wouldn’t exist without it.
