Epic Games Store adds 194 million PC users, has given away 765 million games in 2021

The Epic Games Store reveals the figures for the year 2021, and they are quite spectacular. But it doesn’t say if the store is profitable…

Competing with Steam is a really hard task. We could say almost impossible. Most players prefer to have the games in a single library, to the point that they give up benefits like buying games without DRM (without copy protection), as offered by stores like GoG.

Epic Games Store has competed in the only way that can be done to attract customers: with exclusive games, and giving away games every week. This can only be done by a company like Epic, which makes billions from games like Fortnite, and the Unreal Engine, which is used by thousands of games.

2021 seems to have been a great year for PC store. It already adds up 194 million PC users, 34 million more than in 2020.

The number of daily users reached a maximum of 31.1 million, and the number of simultaneous users reached 13.2 million.

In December it reached a maximum of 62 million active monthly users, which represents an increase of 11% compared to 56 million in 2020.

The catalog of Epic Games Store reaches the 917 titles, twice as much as 2020. Players spent 840 million dollars in the store, 20% more than in 2020.

It seems that giving games pays off, although the cost to Epic has to be huge. In 2021 he gave away 89 games, which add up to a value of $2,120. In total the players downloaded 765 million free games. Some of these games increased their player base by 13 times.

With the Christmas offers, where Epic gave away a coupon of 10 euros for each game purchased, more than 31 million people bought 159 million items.

On a technical level, the store added new features in 2021 such as The shopping cart (you no longer have to buy games one at a time), and the achievements, available in about 25 sets.

By 2022 they want to add things like further library customization, and voice chat.

The data looks favorable, but Epic has not revealed key information, such as store profitability.

He spends hundreds of millions of dollars paying for exclusive games, on the games he gives away, and on the €10 coupons in the sales. Everything indicates that, at the moment, the Epic Games Store continues without giving benefits. But it must be recognized that competing with Steam is very hard.

At least for the players, this competition is a blessing: The rivalry increases the offers, and in the Epic Games Store you can get a free game a week, and abundant coupons of 10 euros.