The company that has established itself as the main competitor of the behemoth Steam takes stock of its year 2020, marked - as for everyone else - by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Logically, digital platforms have clearly benefited from the delicate health situation that we have been experiencing for almost a year. Between the containment phases and the curfew periods, the population has been clearly encouraged to stay at home and digital entertainment has obviously been solicited. Thus, services such as Netflix have seen their usage increase greatly and the same goes for platforms dedicated to video games. Today, it's the Epic Games Store that takes stock of its year 2020 through an infographic full of insights.
First of all, we learn that the Epic Games Store has significantly increased its number of users - 160 million active - and that in December alone, 56 million users used the platform. A figure that is clearly on the rise, but which must be put into perspective by comparing it to Steam's performance: 120 million active users in the same month of December. Another value frequently used to highlight the performance of a particular platform is the peak of simultaneously active users: it is 13 million players in 2020 on the Epic Games Store, while it was "only" 7 million in 2019. Here again, we can compare this value to the 25 million regularly reached by Steam to gauge the margin of progress of the Epic Games Store.
It should also be noted that despite this good growth in audience, the Epic Games Store is slow to convert it into revenue. Indeed, if the latter have increased over a year, the increase remains marginal: from 680 million dollars in 2019 to 700 million dollars in 2020. More "worrying", the platform's revenues are still largely dependent on the success of Fortnite, the flagship game of the studio Epic Games. Thus, we learn that "only" 265 million dollars were spent on third-party games. So it seems clear that despite the incentives and exclusives, a large part of the players only come to the Epic Games Store to get the weekly free game.
