#EPIC GAMES ACTIVE USERS UPDATE#
#EPIC GAMES ACTIVE USERS FREE#

On average, the cost of acquiring each new user was $2.36. Epic gave the developers $1.4 million, and roughly 17% of the players were new to the Epic store. Epic Games antitrust case, Subnautica had more than 804,000 users when Epic Games gave away the game on its then-new Epic Games Store. Based on court documents in the Apple vs. We’re happy with that.”īut Epic Games started spending a lot to steer gamers to the store. We sell games, just like a grocery store sells groceries on a 2% profit margin.

We don’t see ourselves as a platform necessarily. We felt it achieved a better balance that was appropriate for a retailer. “It’s a source of profit because the payment processing and support costs are well under our total percent. We felt like that was a good deal for developers,” he said. In 2018 we launched it to developers with this 88%-12% revenue sharing. “Fortnite’s success enabled us to open it up. The problem was that without a lot of customers visiting the store, it didn’t have much opportunity to grow, Sweeney said.

#EPIC GAMES ACTIVE USERS FREE#

The cost of free and exclusive games Epic Games Store deals at the outset. “We always had this idea we would turn it into a store because we felt other developers would like having an efficient distribution vehicle for their stuff,” Sweeney said. Microsoft eventually lowered its royalty from 30% to 12%, and the others made smaller moves to change their fees based on volume. In contrast to Steam, Apple and Google, Epic Games charged a 12% royalty to developers, compared to the usual 30%. Then, in December 2018, Epic launched the Epic Games Store for third-party game makers. After that big hit, Epic Games opened the store up to other developers. The strategy paid off big time when Epic’s battle royale version of Fortnite turned into a smash hit and generated tens of billions of dollars in revenue in the last five years. In 2016, it released Paragon on that store, and in 2017 it released Fortnite. In 2012, the company decided to move to making online games, Sweeney said, and by 2014 it launched its own store to distribute the Unreal game engine. Those games helped highlight the features of the game engine for other developers.īut at first, starting more than a decade ago, it was just for Epic’s games. Unlike Unity, Epic Games always made its own games alongside its Unreal Game Engine. Sweeney said that the store began as a distribution vehicle for Epic’s own games. The Epic Games Store history Epic Games Store versus Steam back during the launch days. It’s an unblocking event for the store going much wider than it’s gone so far,” Sweeney said. They don’t have to work with us directly.

#EPIC GAMES ACTIVE USERS UPDATE#

“Not only can they submit their own game, but maintain their own presence and constantly update the materials.

These tools are available to any developer or publisher with games meeting the store’s requirements, such as content ratings. Developers can head straight to the Epic Developer Portal to release a game using the self-service publishing tools. The company will still curate higher-profile games.īut the tools will allow developers to rate their own games and have the market verify those ratings. As a practical matter, as the number of game submissions grows, Epic can’t keep up with the demands for curation. Now it’s Epic’s chance to enable the same kind of growth on the Epic Games Store as Steam saw when it unlocked self-publishing. “It’s on us to make our services attractive enough that developers choose to use them, rather than forcing them through payment terms, like we’re fighting in the case of Apple.” We think that if we have enough of these services to choose from, then we’ll be successful,” he said. “We just want to help developers build awesome experiences. When Steam enabled self-publishing in 2017, the number of games released per years on Valve’s service skyrocketed, Sweeney said. Sweeney said he believes that tools will make the Epic Games Store more competitive than its rival Steam, which has about twice as many users and enabled self-publishing years ago, first with Steam Greenlight and then with its replacement Steam Direct. With these tools, developers can now have a chance to reach that audience more easily and publish their games at lower costs. To date, the store has had 230 million players. Sweeney also said the store reaches an audience of 68 million monthly active users, up from 34 million in 2022.

Epic games active users