Epic Games has just posted a 2025 year-in-review report for the Epic Games Store (EGS). Headliner stats include player spending up 57% on third-party PC games (which importantly doesn’t include Fortnite), reaching record spending of $400 million over the course of the year. This doesn’t include popular live-service titles such as Marvel Rivals, Valorant, GTA V, and EA Sports FC 26.

It was in May last year when CEO Tim Sweeney called the launcher “clunky,” and there have been some notable improvements since then. In 2026, the devs promise to bring even more features to the platform, including cross-platform support across PC and mobile, and regional storefronts with localized game discovery.

Epic will continue to make changes and try to rival Steam

Developers that process their own in-game payments, such as the live-service games named above, retain 100% of the revenue, making the $400 million milestone more impressive than you’d first think. Epic has long provided benefits like these to developers to help grow its library, in direct competition with Steam, which continues to take a 30% cut from all gross revenue across game sales, in-game purchases, and DLC. This value drops as low as 20% once a game earns over $50 million.

In the fall, we’re adding a cross-platform library for players across PC and mobile, and we’re introducing regional storefronts with localized discovery.

Source: Epic Games

Epic’s weekly free games are also a big draw for many PC gamers, who log in each week to claim whatever is up for grabs. Interestingly, the initiative has actually proven to cause a spike in Steam sales, especially when free games on the EGS are also discontinued on Steam, albeit by a smaller amount. One dev said they sold “like 200% more” over the holiday period on Steam, despite the game being 100% off on Epic.

Regardless, Epic seems keen to power on with its free games program, which saw players claim 662 million titles over the course of last year, with over 77% of those free games hitting an all-time peak for concurrent users (CCU) while they were free. Epic even directly refers to the interaction with Steam, noting that there was a “40% lift in Steam CCU while the title was free on the Epic Games Store” – no game in particular is referenced in this statistic.

To create a better social experience for players, we’re creating community spaces in the Epic Games Store and enhancing cross-platform text chat with features like avatars, player profiles, and private messaging. These social capabilities will be extended to Epic Online Services, opening up text chat for other developers to include in their games later this year. In Q2, we will add voice chat and game-independent parties to our social framework.

Source: Epic Games

In 2025, some long-overdue features were added to the Epic Games Store – preloading games and gifting games to your friends. These have long been staples on Steam, so it was nice to see them finally added to EGS. Epic says it is “focused on delivering long-requested features and deeper platform improvements” in 2026, which already includes better social and community tools.

About the Author

Jack Goodall

At PC Guide, Jack is mostly responsible for reporting on hardware deals. He also specializes in monitors, TVs, and headsets and can be found putting his findings together in a review or best-of guide.