The future of the Epic Store is very bright, currently Epic says they have up to 500 million user accounts.
Epic Games announced Wednesday that it now has more than 500 million Epic Games accounts. It’s a notable milestone as Epic continues to build out the Epic Games Store as a competitor to Steam and bring in new players to titles like Fortnite and Rocket League. However, Epic didn’t share further details about that 500 million figure, so it’s unclear how many of those accounts represent segments like people who only play Epic’s own games (such as like Fortnite) or those who just use Epic’s store.
The company has devoted a large amount of resources to growing its PC game store, thus attracting more account signups since its launch in December 2018. For example, a document from Epic test v. Apple, shows that in 2020 alone, Epic had $330 million in unsupported costs from paying developers to gift their games on its store.
Another document shows that more than 7 million people have tried the Epic Games Store because of the Grand Theft Auto V giveaway even though the 8 hour outage happened because the free players increased too much. Epic has committed to giving away free games back in 2022, so it seems the company continues to think the cost is completely worth it to bring back their platform users.
Epic is also heavily using its Unreal Engine developer tools, the company having announced that 48% of “announced next-gen games” are being built on the platform.