The Epic Games Store doesn’t see a ton of shopping. It sees a good amount – about 1.6% more than it did in 2019, apparently. This is definitely typical of a platform that almost tripled its userbase in that same timespan.
The main draw of the storefront is all the giveaways it does. They keep it nice and simple – make an account, and grab your games. But still, somehow, people prefer to give Valve money anyway.
At least, that’s what the memes say. But it also comes from the gamedevs who see boosted revenue during an Epic Games Store giveaway. When Epic gives something a 0$ price tag, people are choosing to boost that price if it means using Steam instead. Fun!
In case you didn’t click that link in the above paragraph, that statistic comes from the CEO of New Blood Interactive, Dave Oshry. New Blood is the publisher for a number of games, but the relevant one today is Blood West, which had a freebie deal on the Epic Games Store a while back.
Oshry says that, while the game was freely downloadable on Epic, it saw a 200% spike in sales on Steam.
“I used to think EGS was a Marketing Black Hole but turns out having your game be free on Epic is great advertising for Steam sales!”
Dave Oshry
With stats like that, offering a game for free on the Epic Games Store sounds like a pretty solid prospect – just not for the reasons you’d expect. If all games offered on the storefront experience what Blood West experienced, then Steam’s devs and owners alike are all sharing a cut of the profits when Epic decides to post a 0$ price tag.
Epic Games Store Users Insist On Not Using The Epic Games Store
Meanwhile, growth on Epic’s online storefront, for the most part, is not driven by paying customers. They get a nonzero boost from having all those people on their platform, of course, but converting free-game-grabbers into big-money-spenders has proven especially troublesome.
They’ve certainly got games. Are they epic? There’s a solid case to be made. Is it a store? Or is it just an app that occasionally pops up on your computer with a “click here a for free videogame” button? Seems like most of its users know where they stand on that issue.
A selection of stats were compiled & presented over on Reddit, by user HearMeOut-13. It doesn’t take a degree in statistics to read this picture. One line goes up, and the other, not so much.
According to this, the Epic Games Store saw its best year in 2022, but even then, users were still climbing slightly faster than the platform’s profits, indicating a shrinking amount of dollars-earned-per-user. After 2022, the gulf only got wider and wider. People are still signing up, and many of them are doing it to become freeloaders.
If the platform’s goal is to shake Valve’s vicegrip on the digital gaming market, it’s safe to say they haven’t done that great a job of it. But hey, 255 million dollars in revenue is far from nothing. Surely the business folk behind the platform will be satisfied with this, right?
