Epic Games Store at Nearly Eight: 662 Million Free Games Later, Is It Working?

Every Thursday for nearly eight years, millions of PC players have opened the same tab to see what Epic is giving away. In 2025 alone, the Epic Games Store handed out 100 free games, and players claimed them 662 million times. By Epic's own count, a player who took every one would have collected games worth $2,316.

That generosity has always come with a question: is it building a real business, or just a very large mailing list? Epic's 2025 Year in Review, published early this year, gives the clearest answer yet. The short version: the store is growing, but slowly, and the biggest change is happening in how much money it leaves with developers.

The numbers

Here is what Epic reported for 2025 on PC:

• Player spending on the store reached $1.16 billion, up 6%.
• Spending on third-party games, meaning everything not made by Epic, hit $400 million, up 57% and an all-time high.
• Monthly active users peaked at 78 million in December 2025, a record. Average monthly users were 67 million, down 1%, and average daily users 31 million, down 2%.
• More than 317 million people have used the store on PC, and Epic counts 972 million accounts across platforms.
• The catalogue passed 6,000 games.

Read together, those figures say something important. Most of Epic's PC spending is still Fortnite and Epic's own games. But third-party spending is the number Epic most wants to grow, because it shows whether players treat the store as a place to buy games, not just to claim them. A 57% jump is the strongest sign yet that they are starting to.

The 12% bet, and then 0%

When Epic opened the store in December 2018, its pitch to developers was simple: it would take 12% of each sale, compared with the 30% standard on Steam. Developers keep 88%.

In June 2025, Epic went further. Developers now pay no revenue share on their first $1,000,000 of Epic Games Store revenue per game, per year. Above that, the usual 88/12 split applies. For a small indie studio, that means the store takes nothing at all on a modest hit.

Epic also lets developers use their own payment systems for in-game purchases, and takes 0% of those sales. In 2025, 35% of hours played in third-party games on the store were in games that used their own payments, mostly big free-to-play titles.

Webshops and rewards

The same June 2025 update introduced webshops: storefronts hosted on the Epic Games Store where developers can sell digital items directly. Developers can link players from their games to these webshops on any platform that allows it, including iOS in the EU and US after recent court rulings. Buyers earn 5% back in Epic Rewards on webshop purchases, the same loyalty credit offered across the store.

That puts Epic in a slightly different business from Steam. Instead of only selling games, it is trying to become the payment and storefront layer for live-service games, wherever they are played.

The exclusives era

The early Epic store was famous for something else: timed exclusives. Epic paid to keep certain big PC releases off Steam for a year, which angered many players who did not want a second launcher. That strategy has faded, and the store now competes more on fees, free games and features such as achievements that it lacked at launch.

The habit problem has not gone away. Steam still dominates PC gaming, as we explain in our history of Steam. Gameplay hours on the Epic store fell 14% in 2025 to 6.65 billion, even as third-party hours rose 4% to a record 2.78 billion. Fortnite, in other words, was played less on PC, while other games were played more.

Why it matters

The Epic Games Store matters even to people who never open it. Its existence has made the 30% platform fee look like a choice rather than a law of nature, and that argument now runs through courtrooms and regulators, including the antitrust cases against Valve.

WGC's take: nearly eight years in, Epic has not beaten Steam, and probably will not. But it does not need to. A store where third-party spending grows by half in a year, and where a small developer pays nothing on its first million, is a healthy second option. For players, the weekly free game is still the best deal in PC gaming. For developers, the 0% first-$1-million rule may be the best deal in any store.