There are now over 160 million Epic Games Store PC users, Epic said. Daily active users are up 192 per cent to 31.3 million, with a peak of 13 million concurrent players in 2020 (up from seven million in 2019).
Steam, on the other hand, hit 62.6 million daily active users, with peak concurrent users hitting 24.8 million last year.
Epic's surge in growth sparked an increase in purchasing and playtime, as you'd expect. The company said that in 2020, PC customers on the Epic Games Store spent over $700m, of which third-party games represented 37 per cent at $265m.
Epic offers publishers and developers a higher cut of revenue than Valve. Epic hands out 88 per cent of the share to the developer / publisher, with Epic's 12 per cent covering the operating costs of the store and its profit.
By default, Steam takes a 30 per cent cut, although developers can keep 75 per cent of the revenue if their game generates $10m, and 80 per cent if the revenue exceeds $10m.
The Epic Games Store's huge growth is fuelled in part by the eye-catching free games it offers on a regular basis. Epic gave away 103 games in 2020 (for a value of $2407), with over 749m games claimed by users in the year.
The most popular games on the Epic Games Store in 2020 included the company's own Fortnite, as expected, as well as some games that launched first on PC on the platform, such as Assassin's Creed Valhalla and Borderlands 3.
