Epic Games has published its 2025 Year in Review for the Epic Games Store, and the headline number is hard to miss: $1.16 billion in player spending, up 5% from the year before. A record 78 million people used the storefront in December alone, and spending on games Epic didn’t even make jumped 57% to $400 million. Six years after launching as a scrappy, exclusivity-funded challenger to Steam, Epic’s PC storefront looks for the first time like a durable business rather than a loss-leader experiment.
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Epic Games Store Closes Out 2025 With Record Numbers
The report landed on February 3, 2026, and its core numbers were quickly corroborated by outside coverage from PC Gamer and games-industry trade site GamesMarket.global. PC players spent $1.16 billion on the Epic Games Store across 2025, monthly active users hit a record 78 million in December, and third-party game spending jumped 57% to $400 million.
The timing matters. Epic Games Store launched in December 2018 promising developers a better cut and players better prices, and for years critics dismissed it as a free-game giveaway machine propped up by Fortnite’s cash reserves. Steve Allison, Epic Games Store’s vice president, addressed that history directly while speaking at the State of Unreal keynote during Unreal Fest Chicago 2026: “2025 was a year of growth for the Epic Games Store, and we’re off to a great start in 2026.”
Not every metric moved in the same direction. Total gameplay hours on the storefront actually fell 14% year over year, a wrinkle that complicates the growth story. This piece breaks down what happened in 2025, how the Epic Games Store stacks up against Steam heading into 2026, and what the numbers signal for PC game distribution over the next year.
Inside the Numbers: $1.16 Billion Spend, $400 Million From Third-Party Games
The headline figure is straightforward. Players spent $1.16 billion on the Epic Games Store in 2025, up 6% from $1.09 billion in 2024 and $950 million in 2023. Allison confirmed the trajectory on stage: “And players spent $1.16 billion in the store across third-party and first-party titles. That’s up 6% year-over-year.”
The more interesting number sits inside that total. Third-party game spending, meaning purchases on titles Epic didn’t develop or publish itself, reached $400 million, up 57% from $250 million in 2024, which had itself dipped from $310 million in 2023. Allison called out the swing directly: “If you just look at third-party titles, player spending hit $400 million. That’s up 57% year-over-year.”
That reversal matters because third-party spending is the clearest measure of whether the Epic Games Store works as a general-purpose marketplace rather than a Fortnite and Rocket League storefront with extras bolted on. Epic also flagged that the $400 million figure understates real activity, since titles like Marvel Rivals, Valorant, and EA Sports FC 26 process payments through their own systems under Epic’s webshop model. Real player spending on the platform runs higher than the headline number suggests. For developers weighing a multi-platform release, that 57% swing is likely to draw more attention than the user count or total hours played.
78 Million Monthly Users and 317 Million PC Accounts
Epic Games Store hit 78 million monthly active users on PC in December 2025, an all-time record for the storefront. Allison confirmed the figure directly: “In our year in review, we reported that December monthly active users reached 78 million, an all-time record for the Epic Games Store.” PC Gamer’s own reporting backed the number, describing a storefront that “achieved a record high 78 monthly active users on PC.”
The full-year average tells a more modest story. Average MAU across 2025 was 67 million, down 1% year over year, while average daily active users came in at 31 million, down 2%. December, in other words, was a genuine spike, likely tied to holiday shopping and free-game promotions, rather than a sustained baseline shift.
Registered accounts grew more steadily. PC-specific registered accounts on the Epic Games Store reached 317 million by the end of 2025, up from 295 million the year before, a gain of roughly 7.5%. Zoom out to Epic’s full ecosystem, which folds in Fortnite, Rocket League, and other cross-platform properties, and the company counts nearly 972 million total accounts. That gap between 317 million PC storefront accounts and 972 million total accounts shows how much Epic still leans on Fortnite’s mobile and console audience rather than converting them into regular PC storefront customers.
Playtime Fell 14% Even as Spending Climbed
Not every metric in the report moved the right direction. Total gameplay hours logged on the Epic Games Store fell 14% year over year to 6.65 billion hours in 2025, even as player spending rose. Hours in third-party games specifically told a different story, climbing 4% to 2.78 billion, a figure Epic shared directly on its official account. Roughly 35% of those third-party hours came from titles where developers process their own payments through Epic’s webshop tools rather than the standard storefront checkout.
Read together, the numbers point to a shift in what the Epic Games Store actually is to players. Fewer total hours but more money spent suggests a catalog mix tilting away from free-to-play grinding, Fortnite chief among them, and toward premium and live-service purchases, where spending per hour is naturally higher. It also fits a storefront that’s converting more of its user base into typical PC gamers who buy titles and then play them elsewhere, rather than staying inside Epic’s ecosystem for every session.
Whether that trend continues depends heavily on the launcher rebuild Epic has planned for summer 2026, since a faster, more reliable client tends to keep people inside the app rather than launching games straight from a desktop shortcut.
The Free Games Programme’s Halo Effect Reaches Into Steam
Epic’s long-running strategy of giving away a free PC game roughly every week remains central to the business, and the 2025 numbers back that up. Players claimed 662 million titles through the Free Games Programme in 2025, an average value of $2,316 per player across the year if every claimed game were purchased individually. Epic said more than 77% of the games it gave away hit an all-time peak concurrent-user record on the storefront during their free week.
The more striking claim, also reported by GamesMarket.global, is that free-game weeks produced a measurable “halo effect” across the wider PC ecosystem, including a 40% lift in a title’s Steam concurrent users while it was simultaneously free on the Epic Games Store. That’s a striking admission. It suggests Epic’s giveaways don’t just drive traffic to its own storefront, they generate broader interest that spills over and benefits Valve’s platform too, likely because free promotions introduce players to games they then research, discuss, and sometimes buy or continue playing on whichever platform their friends use.
For publishers deciding whether a free Epic Games Store week is worth the lost revenue on a back-catalog title, that cross-platform lift is a real data point, even if it complicates the idea that giveaways are purely a tool for building Epic’s own audience at Steam’s expense.
Epic Games Store vs Steam: Revenue Share and Scale Compared
The core pitch Epic has made to developers since 2018 hasn’t changed: a smaller cut of revenue than Steam takes. Under Epic’s current model, developers keep 100% of the first $1 million in net revenue per product per year, a threshold that started June 1, 2025, and resets annually every January 1 going forward. After that threshold, the standard split is 88% to the developer and 12% to Epic. Developers who route in-game payments through their own systems using Epic’s webshop tools keep effectively all of that revenue.
Steam’s model, unchanged since Valve introduced tiered pricing in 2018, starts at 30% for the first $10 million in a title’s lifetime gross revenue, drops to 25% between $10 million and $50 million, and falls to 20% above $50 million. For a mid-size studio that never crosses $10 million in lifetime sales on a given title, that means paying Steam roughly two and a half times the rate it would pay Epic.
Where Steam still wins decisively is scale. Valve’s platform has logged more than 134,000 game releases in its history and set a new peak concurrent-user record of just over 42 million in January 2026, dwarfing anything the Epic Games Store reports. The table below lines up the two storefronts on the metrics that matter most to developers and players.
| Metric | Epic Games Store | Steam |
|---|---|---|
| Base revenue share | 88% developer / 12% Epic | 70% developer / 30% Valve (up to $10M) |
| Reduced-rate tier | 100% developer on first $1M per product, per year | 75% developer / 25% Valve ($10M–$50M) |
| Top tier | Flat 12% Epic cut after threshold | 80% developer / 20% Valve (above $50M) |
| Peak user figure | 78 million MAU (December 2025) | 42.04 million peak concurrent users (Jan. 11, 2026) |
| Catalog size | 6,000+ games | 134,000+ games released all-time |
| Own-payment option for developers | Yes, via Epic Web Shops | No equivalent program |
That gap is why Epic keeps leading with economics rather than audience size when it pitches developers, and why most studios still treat a Steam release as mandatory and an Epic Games Store release as a smart addition rather than a replacement. Our recent Steam Hardware Survey breakdown shows just how entrenched Valve’s platform remains among PC gamers.
The Launcher Problem Epic Is Finally Fixing
For all the financial momentum, Epic’s own leadership doesn’t dispute the storefront’s biggest weakness: the launcher itself. Developers and reviewers have criticized the Epic Games Store client for years over slow load times and a sparse feature set compared with Steam’s mature client. Epic is now rebuilding that client from the ground up, claiming performance improvements of 5 to 6.5 times over the current version, targeted for release in summer 2026.
The rebuild goes beyond raw speed. Epic’s 2026 roadmap includes community spaces inside the store, an expanded cross-platform chat system with avatars and player profiles, and private messaging. Starting in the second quarter, Epic plans to add voice chat and game-independent parties so friends can group up without both owning the same title. A cross-platform library spanning PC and mobile is planned for autumn 2026, alongside regional storefronts with localized game discovery.
It’s an ambitious list for a single year, and Epic has a track record of shipping roadmap items later than promised. But a company reporting record revenue still prioritizing basic client performance over flashier features suggests Epic’s own data tells it the launcher, not pricing or exclusives, is now the biggest thing standing between its current user base and Steam-level engagement.
Fortnite Becomes the Store’s Marketing Engine
Epic is leaning harder on its biggest asset for 2026: Fortnite’s audience. The company is launching a program in the first half of 2026 designed, in Epic’s words, to help developers sell more games on the Epic Games Store by leveraging the marketing power of Fortnite. Anyone who buys a participating game through the storefront gets a Fortnite cosmetic item and a matching avatar for their account profile. Confirmed launch partners include Capcom, miHoYo, Pearl Abyss, S-Game, MintRocket, and Kakao Games.
The logic is straightforward. Fortnite still commands one of the largest active player bases in gaming, and Epic has spent years turning it into a platform for crossovers, concerts, and now shopping incentives. Tying a Fortnite reward to a store purchase gives Epic a promotional lever no rival PC storefront can match, since none of the Epic Games Store’s competitors have anything close to Fortnite’s cultural reach or daily player counts to borrow from.
Whether it moves the needle on third-party spending the way the 57% jump did in 2025 is an open question. But it fits a pattern: Epic increasingly treats Fortnite less as a standalone hit and more as marketing infrastructure for the rest of the company’s PC and mobile ambitions, including the store itself.
Mobile Expansion and the Next Growth Frontier
The Epic Games Store’s PC business gets most of the attention, but mobile is where Epic has fought its longest and most public battles, including its dispute over app store fees that led to its return to Apple’s US App Store. The Epic Games App, a mobile companion to the PC storefront, debuted on iOS in December 2025 before expanding to Android in January 2026, built on regulatory openings Epic won in the EU and, more recently, in the United States.
Epic’s 2026 roadmap calls for mobile library management in the second quarter, along with third-party APIs and expanded self-publishing tools for mobile partners by summer. That’s a meaningfully faster mobile buildout than Epic managed on PC in its first few years, likely because the company can reuse infrastructure, payment tooling, and developer relationships it already built for the desktop storefront. It’s part of a broader industry shift toward mobile as gaming’s largest growth platform, a trend we track closely in our mobile gaming coverage.
Mobile is also where Epic’s flat, low revenue share could matter most. App Store and Google Play both still take a 30% cut in most markets even after years of regulatory pressure, roughly the same headline rate as Steam’s base tier. If Epic can offer developers a genuinely competitive mobile alternative in the markets where regulation allows it, the same economics that pulled $400 million in third-party PC spending could start to replicate on phones, a market worth dramatically more than PC gaming in raw dollar terms.
Historical Context: From 2018’s Exclusivity Wars to 2026
Epic Games Store launched in December 2018 with a blunt pitch: a 12% revenue cut instead of Steam’s then-flat 30%, funded by aggressive exclusivity deals that paid developers directly to skip Steam entirely. The strategy was controversial from day one. Players complained about a worse client and a fragmented library. Developers who took exclusivity money faced backlash. Valve responded within months by introducing its own tiered revenue cuts, the same 30/25/20% structure still in place today.
Seven years later, the exclusivity wars have mostly faded. Epic still funds first-party projects and the occasional timed exclusive, but the 2025 numbers show a company competing primarily on economics and features rather than paying developers to withhold games from rivals. That shift tracks with broader industry sentiment: exclusivity deals became increasingly unpopular with players without meaningfully denting Steam’s user base, while a lower revenue cut and free games proved a more durable way to build goodwill with both players and developers.
The Epic Games Store’s history is also inseparable from Epic’s antitrust fights with Apple and Google, which shaped the regulatory landscape that now lets the company push into mobile storefronts in the EU and, following its return to Apple’s US App Store, in the United States as well. What started as a PC-only experiment in 2018 is, by 2026, part of a much broader push to compete with app store gatekeepers across every platform Epic’s games ship on.
What Industry Voices Are Saying
Epic’s own store presentation, viewable in a separate Epic Games Store product update video, was direct about what keeps the growth going, telling developers they “can expect 100% revenue share for their first million sales, special collaborations with Epic Games, and an upcoming new layout to modernize the platform’s usability coming soon.”
That combination, aggressive economics paired with overdue product investment, is Epic’s entire pitch in one sentence. Outside coverage of the report captured the skepticism that still surrounds the storefront even amid record numbers, with reviewers pointing to the launcher’s shortcomings as the main reason many players avoid the store despite its lower fees. Neither Epic nor the outlets covering the report are claiming the company is close to challenging Steam’s scale. But the tone from Epic’s leadership in 2026 reads as more confident than in prior years, when its pitch leaned almost entirely on the revenue-share gap rather than concrete product wins like the free-games halo effect or the third-party spending jump.
Market Impact: What This Means for PC Game Distribution
Epic’s 2025 numbers land at a moment when overall consumer game spending has been under pressure. Our coverage of US video game spending falling 21% to $4.5 billion in June 2026 showed real softness in parts of the market this year, which makes Epic’s 6% storefront growth and 57% third-party jump stand out as a rare bright spot in PC-specific distribution. Additional detail on the 2025 figures, including the year-over-year totals, is also available directly from GameDev Reports’ breakdown of Epic’s own release.
The bigger structural story is what Epic’s numbers say about where PC gaming money actually goes. Steam still captures the overwhelming majority of PC digital spending, but a storefront pulling in $1.16 billion a year with a 12% take rate is a meaningful business on its own, and one that keeps pressure on Valve to justify its higher cut. Developers and publishers now routinely factor Epic Games Store availability into launch planning rather than treating it as an afterthought, particularly for live-service and free-to-play titles that benefit from Epic’s promotional tools and lower fees on early revenue.
The three-year trend below shows how consistently the storefront has grown since 2023, with 2025 marking its strongest year yet on both total and third-party spending.
| Year | Total Player Spending | Third-Party Spending | December MAU | Registered PC Accounts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | $950 million | $310 million | Not disclosed | Not disclosed |
| 2024 | $1.09 billion | $250 million | ~74 million | 295 million |
| 2025 | $1.16 billion | $400 million | 78 million (record) | 317 million |
For platform holders elsewhere, including console makers running their own digital storefronts and subscription services like Xbox Game Pass, Epic’s results reinforce a trend that’s shown up across gaming in 2026: storefront and subscription economics, not just hardware sales, increasingly decide who wins a platform argument.
5 Predictions for Epic Games Store’s Next Chapter
- The launcher rebuild decides 2026 momentum. If Epic ships the promised 5-6.5x performance improvement on schedule this summer, expect average MAU, not just the December spike, to climb toward the 78 million peak rather than sitting near the 67 million average seen in 2025.
- Third-party spending growth slows from 57%, but stays positive. That growth rate came off a down year in 2024, making a repeat unlikely. A more realistic 2026 range is high single digits to low double digits, still enough to keep pulling developers away from a Steam-only launch strategy.
- The Fortnite-cosmetic marketing program expands beyond its first six partners. If early results show a real lift in store traffic, expect Epic to open the program to more publishers by the end of 2026 rather than keeping it a boutique pilot.
- Mobile becomes Epic’s fastest-growing segment, even if it stays small in absolute terms. With the Epic Games App now live on iOS and Android and regulators continuing to chip away at Apple and Google’s control over app distribution, Epic’s mobile numbers in the 2026 Year in Review are likely to show the steepest growth curve of any segment, even as PC keeps generating most of the revenue.
- Steam’s overall dominance holds through 2026. Nothing in Epic’s report suggests a serious threat to Steam’s user base or catalog scale. The more realistic outcome is Epic continuing to grow as a profitable, developer-friendly alternative that keeps Valve’s pricing and features honest rather than displacing it outright.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much money did the Epic Games Store make in 2025?
Epic reported $1.16 billion in total player spending on the Epic Games Store in 2025, up 6% from $1.09 billion in 2024, according to the company’s official Year in Review published February 3, 2026.
How many monthly active users does the Epic Games Store have?
The storefront reached a record 78 million monthly active users in December 2025, though the average across the full year was lower, at 67 million.
What percentage does the Epic Games Store take from developer sales?
Epic takes a flat 12% of revenue after a developer’s first $1 million in net revenue per product per year, which the developer keeps in full. That compares with Steam’s tiered model of 30% up to $10 million, 25% up to $50 million, and 20% above that threshold.
Is the Epic Games Store bigger than Steam?
No. Steam remains far larger by every public measure, including catalog size, with more than 134,000 game releases all-time, and peak concurrent users, which hit a record 42 million in January 2026. The Epic Games Store’s 78 million monthly users and 6,000-plus game catalog make it a distant but growing second option on PC.
What is Epic’s Free Games Programme?
It’s Epic’s long-running practice of giving away a full PC game for free roughly every week. In 2025, players claimed 662 million free titles, and Epic said most of the games given away hit all-time peak player records on the store during their free week.
When is the Epic Games Store launcher redesign coming?
Epic has said the rebuilt launcher, which the company claims will run 5 to 6.5 times faster than the current version, is targeted for release in summer 2026, alongside new social features like community spaces and voice chat.
Can I buy games on the Epic Games Store on mobile?
Yes. The Epic Games App launched on iOS in December 2025 and expanded to Android in January 2026, letting players browse and manage their library on mobile, with additional features like third-party APIs planned for summer 2026.
Does Epic Games Store availability affect a game’s performance on Steam?
Epic’s own data suggests the opposite of cannibalization. The company reported a 40% lift in a title’s Steam concurrent users during weeks when the same game was free on the Epic Games Store, indicating the two platforms can drive traffic to each other rather than only compete for it.
Related Coverage
- Fortnite Returns to App Store, Apple 27% Fee Fight [2026]
- Steam Hardware Survey: 16GB GPUs Pass 8GB at 25.9% [2026]
- Valve Ends Physical Steam Gift Cards After 13 Years [2026]
- US Video Game Spending Falls 21% to $4.5B in June [2026]
- Steam Frame Waits as Steam Machine Ships at $1,049 [2026]
- Xbox Game Pass Stalls at 30M, Half of 77M Goal [2026]
