Epic Games Store has got another year under its belt and judging by the recently revealed financial results, Sweeney and Co are firing on all cylinders.
The company announced that more than 160 million users joined Epic Games Store in 2020, spending more than $700 million in the process.
Out of the $700 million, third-party games accounted for $265 million. This is about 37 per cent of the total figure, which in addition to being great news pretty much destroys the claims that Fortnite is the source of all Epic's funding.
Daily active players saw a 192 per cent jump from 2019, and the number of monthly active users in December was 56 million, up from 32 million.
Epic Games Store's number of games more than doubled from 2019, having jumped from 190 to 471 in 2020. During this period, there were 103 free games that were picked up by more than 749 million times, roughly 7.2 million per freebie on average.
Sweeney and Co ruffled quite a few feathers with Epic Games Store, most notably those of diehard Steam fans who saw the move as an anti-Valve initiative. While that's not entirely untrue given Epic's insistence on disrupting the 30 per cent store cut, even GabeN himself said that competition is good as it keeps everyone honest.
Epic Games
For all the accusations of unfair play, anti-gamer behaviour, and whatnot, it has to be said that Epic Games Store is the first one to become an actual Steam competitor.
After years of attempts to catch up with Steam via regular means, EA's Origin, Ubisoft's U-Play, CDPR's GOG and a few others eventually had to come to terms that Steam can't be caught via regular means. Of course, it will still be a while before we can say that Epic Games Store and Steam are on equal footing, but as things stand - they're still further off than anyone else who tried.
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