What started as a quixotic attempt at competing with Valve’s Steam in 2018 has now become a little less quixotic as Epic posts its “Year in Review” for 2024, boasting numbers that show marked improvement from previous years. The marketplace is still nowhere near Steam’s numbers, but is no longer left behind in the cold despite the comparatively diminutive marketshare.
In terms of good news, Epic says that the store has reached 295 million users on PC and nearly 900 million cross-platform accounts when including things like other devices that play Fortnite (mobile, console, etc). This represents growth of about 100 million from the previous year, boasting a 67 million monthly average user rate. Epic says this is a 6% raise over 2023, but they declined to provide a MAU for the entirety of 2023, instead just focusing on December.
In less good news comparing the years, Epic’s revenue for third-party game sales on PC has gone down from $310 million go $255 million, a massive 18% drop year-over-year. Considering this is the bread and butter of online stores and largely where they make their money, the math only really works out to assuming that the increase in users primarily being for Epic’s own games. Total revenue going up from $950 million to $1.09 billion while third-party revenue goes down kind of bares that out.
In terms of player spend and engagement, the top three titles are all Free-to-Play: Hoyoverse’s Genshin Impact claims the top spot, followed by Epic’s own Rocket League, and then Hoyoverse again with Honkai Star Rail. The first paid game on the list is Grand Theft Auto V, the most profitable piece of media of all time.
In the near future, Epic plans to improve their mobile apps, which is the result of a currently-ongoing war the publisher has been waging against Google and Apple. The PC client will also finally be adding features such as voice chat, text chat, out-of-game invites, and pre-loading.
While the numbers can be interpreted either way depending on where you decide to focus, the falling third-party revenue is absolutely a cause for concern. It’s likely that individual games on Steam or first-party stores on consoles made more in 2024 than all of Epic’s third-party revenue in totality. Unless this trend reverses, it is difficult to see Epic continuing to sell third-party games at all when the vast, vast majority of their revenue comes from their own titles like Fortnite, Rocket League, and Fall Guys.
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