The battle for dominance in the PC market between Steam and the Epic Games Store has a big winner: consumers. Not only does Steam keep pushing itself to create great new features, but Epic continues to deliver games to entice people to use the Play Store.
So who would have thought of that? Well, it looks like it works. Epic summed up a hugely successful 2021 in a recent blog update. Notable figures include 194 million new total users and 31.1 million active daily users, an increase of 34 million users compared to 2020. Peak users crossed 13 million in 2021, which means Epic is closing the gap between itself and Steam’s 29 million concurrent users.
Epic nearly doubled its store listings to 917 games (much less than Steam’s 50,000+ games). Spending on the store rose 20% to $840 million, most of which came from third-party game sales.
On the free-to-play front, Epic gave 89 free games a total of 765 million times in 2021. These 89 games are worth $2,120 USD, which is more than the millions of dollars spent giving free games to players. Of these free games, 76 broke all-time concurrent user records.
Despite Epic’s huge cost, the Epic Games Store will continue to offer free games for all of 2022. We will continue to expect a new free game every week from now until December. To entice people to download the launcher, Epic has spent hundreds of millions of dollars between free game giveaways and timed specials. Epic plans to continue doing both for the foreseeable future and doesn’t even think about giving up until 2027.
Right now you can download the action machine game Daemon X Machina for free until February 3, the next free games will be Yooka-Laylee and Impossible Lair.
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