Every month you can go on the Epic Games Store and snag a usually pretty decent game for absolutely free. It’s not clear if this largesse is meaningfully moving the needle in the company’s battle to establish itself as a competitor to Steam, but it’s certainly a nice bonus. And after giving away $2,229 worth of free games across the entirety of 2024, the Fortnite maker reiterated that it has no plans to stop the giveaways anytime soon.
“Our Free Games Program has continued to deliver PC favorites to new audiences for the 5th year running,” the company wrote in a new recap of stats from the last year. “Epic players stocked their libraries with over $2,000 USD worth of great PC titles across 89 giveaways. The program is not slowing down and will continue in 2025, on both PC and mobile.”
2024's free Epic games included Control, The Callisto Protocol, Marvel’s Midnight Suns, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and tons more old and recent releases, from small indies to big-name blockbusters. Epic reports that 595 million free games were claimed during the year. In the past, the company has revealed that such giveaways can cost it tens of millions. And the library Epic Games Store users can amass this way is more than enough to theoretically keep them busy until they die.
But elsewhere, the data shows that Epic Games Store is still primarily a vehicle for existing Epic-owned and -operated hits like Fortnite and Rocket League. Both were in the top five most-played games on the platform, alongside Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, and Grand Theft Auto V. The company reported $1.09 billion spent by 295 million PC players on the Epic Games Store last year, but only $255 million of that went to third-party games. For comparison, Microsoft estimated Valve’s annual revenue at over $6 billion back in 2021.
So the Epic Games Store is still very much a Fortnite launcher with a ton of other cool stuff grafted onto it, but it’s certainly not just a Fortnite launcher. And with that in mind, the company also signaled what’s ahead for its digital storefront in 2025. The roadmap includes an overhaul of discoverability, new social features, the addition of pre-loading and a new download manager, as well as the ability to finally gift games to other people.
All of this is being done with the intent to seamlessly integrate it across an Epic Games Store mobile app as the company lobbies regulators the world over to force iOS and Android to play nice with it. We’ll see if, as that grand vision comes closer to being a reality, the Epic Games Store finally becomes a more central force to be reckoned with in PC gaming. For now, it’s still a great place to snag tons of cool games for free.
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