Epic Games has revealed a number of statistics that speak to the growth and success of the Epic Games Store in 2020. The company also reiterated that it will continue to release free games every week on the store in 2021.
By Epic’s latest count, the Epic Games Store has now reached 160 million users on PC, with daily active users rising by 192% to 31.3 million. The company also disclosed that the Epic Games Store reached a new peak concurrent user record of 13 million in 2020, which compares to 25 million for Steam. Monthly active users in December specifically hit 56 million, compared to 32 million in December 2019.
Part of what has helped fuel the growth of the Epic Games Store is how the company pursues exclusives that you can only get on its store. These will continue in the future, as Epic has announced partnerships with the developers of Control, The Last Guardian, and Limbo for their next games.
Additionally, Epic said that Epic Games Store users collectively spent more than $700 million on the store in 2020, with third-party games making up 37%, or $265 million.
In terms of play time, users collectively spent 5.7 billion hours playing games on the Epic Games Store in 2020, up from 3.35 billion hours in 2019.
The total number of games on the Epic Games Store jumped from 190 in 2019 to 471 in 2020. Looking to 2021, Epic said it plans to “rapidly expand” the number of titles available on the store. To that end, the company is working with developers to provide them self-publishing tools to streamline publishing on Epic Games Store.
“Much of the development work this year is centered on opening the store to developers that want to publish titles on the store,” Epic said. “We want a smooth, seamless experience for developers looking to bring their titles to the Epic Games Store. This unlocks the ability for Epic Games Store customers to purchase the games they want, when they want while developers enjoy a much fairer revenue share split.”
Epic also said it will continue to release free games every week on the Epic Games Store in 2021. In 2020, Epic released 103 free games and they were collectively downloaded more than 749 million times. One of the biggest bright spots was Star Wars: Battlefront II, which saw an astonishing 19 million downloads by itself for its free week. The latest free game is Dandara.
Looking to 2021, Epic said it is planning a number of new features for the Epic Games Store, including a “social overhaul,” advancements to achievements and player profiles, and improvements to wishlists. Epic is also reportedly planning changes to the shopping cart experience.
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