As many of you are probably well aware of at this point, my primary platform for playing video games is PC. In the modern age, Steam, run by the Valve Corporation, has dominated the market to the extent that many people have accused the store of having an effective monopoly over the gaming market on PC. While other stores exist, they have all paled compared to the Steam userbase and are not considered to be true competitors. Enter the Epic Games Store which has sought to break this seeming monopoly through free games and exclusives funded through the success of Fortnite. I’ve spoken before about how I considered the Epic Games Store’s existence to be a good thing but I have also expressed reservations over the feasibility of the store in the long term. Taking all of this into account, as well as some new information that has been provided, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the state of the Epic Games Store as we enter 2021.
In the interest of full transparency, I should mention that I’m still not registered with the Epic Games Store. I still consider the Epic Games Store as a whole to be a substandard experience compared to Steam and even some other smaller distributors. However, I would hope the fact that I consider Epic Games Store’s existence to be good for the industry as well as how I’m willing to criticise Valve a sign that I’m going to be as impartial with this information as I can be.
Starting off, Epic Games have conveniently provided a variety of information with regards to how the Epic Games Store has performed in 2020 and while it can be expected that the information provided attempts to portray the Epic Games Store as a whole in a positive light, I thought it might be interesting to compare it to the information they provided for their performance in 2019.
A lot of this information looks impressive, and to be fair much of it is, with total consumers growing from 108 million to over 160 million, over 56 million monthly active users in December 2020 and significant growth across their social media platforms, particularly their Instagram which more than doubled in the space of a year! However, when looking at this new information, something in particular stood out to me. The most important aspect of any store, that being the revenue, only grew from $680 million to $700 million. More critically, third-party games only grew from $251 million to $265 million. Other sources of media have noted this as well, pointing out that many of these new consumers seem only interested in playing the free games that Epic Games is distributing.
I also thought it was quite interesting that their new chart dropped the upcoming exclusives section from the previous year. I wasn’t the only one who had noticed that as PC Gamer similarly stated that they assumed that Epic Games’ exclusivity strategy was winding down. Instead, Epic Games stated that they’re increasing the number of exclusives in the future and we got a sneak peak to this future on the 11th of February when they announced not only Binary Smoke and Axiom Verge 2 but scored quite the coup with the announcement that the Kingdom Hearts series was coming to the platform. While I and many others disagree with the price tags associated with these Kingdom Hearts titles, I have no doubt that this release will do well for the Epic Games Store as a whole.
However, I remain quite concerned about the future of this store. Not only do I think that Epic Games should start reducing the amount of free games they are giving away, which they’re continuing in 2021, in order to reduce costs as well as encourage users to spend money on the games being sold in the store but they need to seriously begin working on the state of the store as a whole. While the store has improved quite a bit since its initial incarnation with performance improvements, OpenCritic review integration, wishlist support and more, the store remains surprisingly underdeveloped compared to many others. Epic Games initially were quite open with how they were updating the store by using Trello but they have continuously missed their deadlines for improvements to the Epic Games Store with many seemingly basic features absent and have changed the deadlines from such as “4-6 months” to the more vague “up next” and “future development”.
Competition is healthy for any market and I want to reiterate that the Epic Games Store’s existence is good for all users of Steam as it drives Valve to improve their platform. However, the stagnant revenue growth looks like a bad sign for the future of the Epic Games Store and one that will need to be addressed. It’ll be interesting to see if exclusives such as the Kingdom Hearts series as well as the many other unannounced titles Epic Games have will help drive revenue up by next year but I still remain concerned for the Epic Games Store and hope that they hasten their updates for the store itself. Let me know your thoughts on the state of Epic Games Store in 2021, your thoughts on the statistics provided by Epic Games, what you think of Kingdom Hearts coming to PC as an Epic Games Store exclusive and any additional information you might have on the topic.
Thanks for reading and if you wish to seek any of the titles I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use amazon.co.uk or amazon.com for all of your needs! Also feel free to follow my curator page on Steam “JRPG Reviews” for thoughts and opinions on any JRPGs that I play and my YouTube channel “Victory Achieved Gaming” where I guide my friend through challenging games.