Epic Games Store gives away free games every week, which many people should know, and sometimes they also release some famous 3A games. game, to attract a large number of players to register and receive, like the previous“Hogwarts Legacy” Limited FreeIt also briefly caused the official website to crash. The purpose of Epic’s generosity is very clear, it just wants to usefree games, attracting players from other platforms to spend money on EGS.
But does this strategy really work? Recently, a former Epic employee directly broke the news: Most players come here to receive free games and go back after receiving them. Steam .
Image source:TechPowerUp
A former Epic Games Store employee admitted: Players only come to receive free games and then return to Steam after receiving them.
According to foreign media TechPowerUp reports, two former Epic employees revealed that EGS has actually known a cruel fact for a long time. Free game activities can indeed bring about a short-term surge in the number of users, but these users will hardly stay, let alone spend money to buy games on EGS.
The behavior pattern of players is very fixed, that is, log in to their EGS account, receive free games, turn off EGS, and open Steam to continue playing. In other words, in the eyes of many players, EGS is just a platform to get games for free.
Image source:TechPowerUp
This statement is actually consistent with the data.eTeknix Compiled financial information points out that from 2019 to 2024, the number of registered users of EGS surged from 108 million to 295 million, a growth rate of 173%. It seems very good, but the revenue of third-party games only grew slightly from 251 million U.S. dollars to 255 million U.S. dollars, with a growth rate of only 1.6%:
In addition, third-party revenue actually climbed to US$355 million in 2022, but then declined for two consecutive years, and even declined by 18% in 2024 compared with 2023. In other words, the number of users has almost tripled, but the number of people who are actually willing to spend money to buy games has not only not increased, but is even decreasing.
Epic Vice President Steve Allison has also publicly admitted that EGS is currently “barely profitable.”
Judging from actual player activity data, the gap between EGS and Steam is also very large.
Steam hit a record high of 42.31 million simultaneous online users on March 22, 2026, with approximately 132 million monthly active users, approximately 69 million daily active users, and a game catalog of more than 100,000 games. In terms of market share, Steam currently holds about 75% of the market share among PC gaming platforms.
For the EGS part, there are about 78 million monthly active PC users and about 31.5 million daily active users. The game catalog only has about 4,000 games, and the PC game market only accounts for about 7.5%. Although EGS has 295 million registered users on its books, the proportion of actual users is actually quite low. More than 75% of its revenue comes from Epic’s own games such as Fortnite.
Tom’s Hardware also mentioned a very interesting data comparison before: the number of active users of EGS in one month can be reached by Steam in about two to three days.
Source: KOCPC Chinese