Epic released 2020 year in review stats for the Epic Games Store. Although the numbers showed growth both in total and daily user numbers, when it came to actual revenue, they fell flat. Let us take a more in-depth look.
Epic Store had 160 million registered users, 52 million more than 2019. We also know that in December of these 160 million people 56 million of them logged in at least once. There also some social media numbers that are quite frankly useless.
Here is the thing: although the numbers are good, an online store’s first objective is to you know…sell stuff. In that regard considering the circumstances of 2020 Epic Store has been a total failure.
Epic Stores 2020 revenue was 700 million dollars while 2019’s revenue was 680 million dollars. This means despite the huge increase in user numbers total revenue only increased by 20 million dollars. It means in percentages player numbers had an increase of 48% while revenue only increased by 2%. Epic should really be glad that it is not a publicly traded company because if it was, investors would have raised some serious red flags.
This year saw a massive increase in gaming revenue due to people staying at home. Which makes these numbers even worse. Oh and these numbers don’t take voucher codes into account. So when it comes to third party games, total revenues could be even less (this fact does not affect third party developers revenue, only Epic).
So what is the reason behind this disparity? Free games. A lot of people I know, myself included, treat Epic Store as a free games launcher. That is probably true in your case too. Most of Epic’s user base is either a Fortnite player or a free rider. If the situation continues like this, Epic will never even come close to its goal of breaking Steam’s market dominance while making a lot of people angry with its “exclusive games”.
I only bought 2 games this year (both with 10$ voucher) and two things are still apparent. Epic games lack a lot of features that Steam has & because there is no community hub people cannot establish that personal connection with the platform, making Epic Store is just a store… This would have been fine if it wasn’t competing with Steam.
Not everything is bad though. Epic has plans to improve the store in many different aspects such as achievements, player profiles, Wishlist improvements and social overhauls. Overall, when it comes to Epic Store, I will be cautiously pessimistic, but hey I wouldn’t be mad if I was proven wrong…
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