The Epic Games Store might still feel to some like just a glorified Fortnite launcher. It was until recently the only way to play Epic’s hit battle royale on PC and that’s certainly what many of the people downloading the client use it for. But there’s a growing contingent of players that use it for playing other PC games as well. In fact, while total gameplay hours spent on the store fell a whopping 14 percent last year, total hours spent on non-Epic games was actually up 4 percent. This is one of the details Epic VP Steve Allison is focused on when I talk to him about the company’s new 2025 year-in-review report published this week.
“Sixty percent of our audience are dual users,” he tells me. “They use Steam and the Epic Games Store. Forty percent don’t. But not all the 40 percent are Fortnite players. A lot of them are coming off of games like Riot’s games or Minecraft or Roblox or things like that. I’m actually always pretty surprised at how big that incremental group is. But for those dual players, there’s an interesting thing. In the totality of the story, what I can tell you is of the average monthly active users of 67 million, only about 26 percent of those players are Fortnite players. The rest are third-party.”
It’s the end of the day. Allison, a 30-year industry veteran with stints at Atari, Midway, and Telltale, is clearly exhausted from briefing journalists all day about the pitch to make more people actually want to use the Epic Games Store. “The launcher sucks. Let’s call it what it is,” he told Eurogamer. “We’re ripping the guts out” and replacing it with something better, he told Polygon. “Our goal isn’t to dance on Steam’s grave,” he told IGN. So what is the goal, exactly? And why is it taking so long to get there?
If Steam is Google, Epic feels like PC gaming’s Bing
Released back in 2018 with an announcement at the Game Awards, there was a brief groundswell of hype around how the Fortnite maker might offer a meaningful competitor to Steam’s dominance in the PC gaming marketplace. Valve’s storefront is an incredibly powerful engine for game discovery that can also be a cesspool attracting some of the worst people on the internet. Maybe Epic could curate the best of PC gaming without toxic dregs? But many years later it’s still missing key features and feels a bit like a massive but empty mall. There’s tons of vendors hawking their wares but no real sense of a community.
2026 is supposed to be the year that changes, or at least starts to. Epic is promising sweeping overhauls to the underlying infrastructure of the store to make it load faster and run better. More ambitious are the “community spaces” it claims will spring up when it ships voice chat and parties that exist at the platform layer outside of within any particular game you’re playing. Other incoming features include avatars, player profiles, and private messaging. Yes, it’s taken Epic eight years to unlock these 2000s-era online gaming features.
I asked Allison why. He blamed, in so many words, Epic’s five-year-long crusade to get Apple and Google’s mobile storefronts to allow competing storefronts and third-party payment processing. “The litigation gave us the opportunity to bring the mobile stores,” he said. “That was a part of the vision from jump, but we just couldn’t get to it. The minute we could get to it, we pivoted to it really hard. That’s the kind of company Epic is, it pivots hard and fast, and that came at the expense of getting some of those [features].”
Mobile versions of the Epic Game Store came to iOS devices in the EU and Android devices everywhere last year, and the company’s long-term strategy is to make the launcher part of a connected network that exists beyond any single platform. A unified text chat system rolled out last year and a shared library of cross-platform games people can play on both mobile and PC is coming in the future. “It’s taken a while,” Allison, who’s been along for the entire ride, admitted. “It’s going to be on us to earn those players back by hopefully doing cool shit, and we’ll, we’ll get there, but I think we’re finally doing the work that’s expected of us, and hopefully we can make some of those players come around again.”
Staying exclusive while others go multiplatform
But even if the Epic Games Store can hypothetically match Steam feature-for-feature, or even exceed it, there’s still no guarantee it will be enough to overcome the entrenched networking effects and decades of player investment that give Valve’s storefront an advantage. Early on, Epic tried to coerce players to switch with a series of controversial timed exclusives, like Borderlands 3, that mostly just pissed people off and hurt sales. Allison confirmed that strategy is in the past and exclusives aren’t a priority moving forward.
“There’s 20,000 releases a year on PC, we could pick wrong 1,000 times and end up with $0 so we needed to focus no matter,” he said. “I understand how people felt about it, but that was a purposeful strategy that really worked for the beginning of the store, but it has really moved on from that.” It doesn’t sound like that means Epic-published games like Alan Wake 2 will ever be coming to Steam, however. Epic-funded games “will always be on the Epic Games Store as long as we have a publishing deal in place with our partners,” he said when I asked.
Epic now relies mostly on carrots instead of sticks to lure over PC gamers. Its monthly free games were recently dunked on for reportedly helping to fuel sales for the Steam versions, but Epic isn’t shying away from that attention. Its year-in-review report openly boasts about the lift games get across multiple platforms when they are given away for free on the Epic Games Store. In 2025, the company gave away 100 different games that were claimed a total of 662 million times. It estimates the total value per player in claimed games was $2,316.
It doesn’t sound like Epic plans to turn that money spigot off anytime soon. The free drinks, even for people who continue to spend most of their time on Steam, will continue. But is it having any effect? Allison told Gamesradar that less than 20 percent of users who collect the free games then go on to spend money buying others afterwards. That’s an expensive user acquisition strategy, though it certainly earns you a lot more positive PR than spending hundreds of millions to market clicker games on mobile.
A CEO who tweets too much
One thing Epic isn’t rushing to copy from Valve, however, is its AI disclosure policy. Developers on Valve’s storefront are required to tell players when a game includes assets made with generative AI (LLMs for coding and other work doesn’t count). Epic CEO Tim Sweeney recently made fun of these rules, saying they “make no sense” when, he contends, all games will eventually use genAI in their production. “I don’t disagree with that,” Allison said. I understand how the discourse and conversation are going, but it’s it. I don’t want to say it’s a fool’s errand, but it’s a very, very difficult thing to accurately police.”
He continued, “If they’re using it to fire people and all those kinds of things that people are worried about, that’s a terrible thing that we don’t endorse. But we don’t think that that’s how AI is going to be used in game development. We think that it’s going to help a lot of these smaller teams make awesome shit, like, like we haven’t seen from a six- or 10-man team, and we’re in a period of time where we’re starting to see the impact of the current situation in the industry on large teams. So we’re not going to require people to disclose it. It’s really up to the developer what they want to disclose.”
Sweeney also took a swing at Steam after a class-action lawsuit in the UK over regional pricing was allowed to move forward. He called Steam’s 30-percent commission on game sales “junk fees,” likening them to the monopoly rent-seeking on iOS and Android that he spent years fighting Apple and Google over in court. But no PC gamer would liken Steam’s robust game discovery mechanisms to Apple’s poor stewardship of the App Store, and unlike on mobile, Steam is kicking the Epic Games Store’s ass without locking players out of competing stores on PC. If Valve is a business built on junk fees, it’s because players and developers have thus far been all too eager to pay them.
It’s sometimes hard to know how much to distinguish Epic’s grand strategy from Sweeney’s own ideological crusades. Earlier this month, the CEO came to Elon Musk’s defense against, of all things, regulatory attempts to restrict AI-generated CSAM material from spreading on X. He likened the creation of sexualized images of kids to AI “going off the rails” and noted that no AI tools are “perfect” while arguing against calls for the app’s removal from storefronts. He then got angry at websites for quoting him. In a follow-up email after our interview, I asked whether Allison agreed with that reasoning and whether it’s hard having a boss who tweets so much. He declined to comment.
A bigger slice of a growing PC gaming pie
The Epic Games Store’s ambitions for 2026 gesture at something much bigger than it’s ever been. One new pitch to developers is to compliment free game giveaways with more free in-game rewards for Fortnite. Buying Crimson Desert, the upcoming open-world action-adventure game, will get players exclusive cosmetics in the battle royale. The goal is to find new ways to leverage the success of the one to build up the latter. Those giveaways, the messaging integration, and the upcoming voice-chat parties feature remind me a lot of Discord. Epic’s goal might not be to topple Steam after all. It might be to leapfrog it by becoming the next gaming social media platform that also happens to sell some games.
Allison says the company’s not thinking in zero-sum terms. PC and mobile gaming is growing while consoles plateau. His view is that these platforms can all grow together. “Our goal was to compete with Steam and if things worked out that PC gaming would grow as a result of having real competition.” He said he’s proud of how far the store has come since launch, when Fortnite had 8 million monthly active users and the store was at zero. Now the Epic Games Store’s 67 million users a month averages about half of where Steam is as at while each keeps growing.
“They’re like 140 million, not sure exactly, because of how much bot traffic they have, but it’s still significant. It’s close to double, and we’re at that level,” Allison said. “So PC gaming has grown substantially since we’ve entered the market. We believe it’s because we’re competing. And, you know, we would be thrilled to be in a bigger pool of PC gaming that is much bigger than it was in 2018, which is where I think that’s going to continue to go. We’re starting to see console consumption behavior shift to PC and mobile. And so look, if Steam keeps growing and we keep growing, we’ll be super stoked, I will be happy. And our goals are really to get to be about 25, 30 percent of all PC gaming on the PC side of the business. And if we do, if you push past that, that’s awesome, but it’s like that will still be a multi-billion-dollar business in third party, and I think PC gaming will be better for it.”
