Epic Games Store Hits $1.16B, 3rd-Party Sales Up 57% [2026]

The Epic Games Store closed out 2025 with its best year on record, and the numbers landed at a moment when the fight for PC gaming’s storefront market is getting more competitive, not less. According to Epic’s own 2025 Year in Review, published February 3, 2026, players spent $1.16 billion on the storefront last year, third-party game spending jumped 57% to $400 million, and monthly active users hit a record 78 million in December alone.

Those figures matter beyond Epic’s internal scorecard. They arrive as Valve faces its own antitrust trial over Steam’s market power, as publishers weigh where to launch day-one, and as the broader PC gaming market keeps outgrowing consoles. This is a look at what Epic’s numbers actually show, how they stack up against Steam, and what they signal for developers and players through the rest of 2026.

Epic Games Store Closes 2025 With Record Spending

Epic’s headline number is straightforward: total player spending on the Epic Games Store reached $1.16 billion in 2025, up 6% from $1.09 billion in 2024 and $950 million in 2023. That’s three consecutive years of growth, though the pace has slowed – 2024’s jump over 2023 was roughly 15%, while 2025’s gain over 2024 was closer to 6%.

What changed is the mix. A growing share of that spending is no longer coming from Fortnite and Epic’s own titles – it’s coming from the thousands of third-party games now listed on the storefront. Epic said its catalog surpassed 6,000 games in 2025, and cross-platform accounts tied to the Epic Games ecosystem reached 972 million, with PC customers alone topping 317 million.

Those are big, ecosystem-wide numbers that include Fortnite’s massive account base, so they shouldn’t be read as 317 million people actively shopping the storefront every month. The more meaningful engagement figure is the 78 million monthly active user count Epic reported for December 2025 – the number that most directly maps to storefront activity rather than the broader Epic account graph.

Third-Party Sales Jump 57% as Epic Diversifies Beyond Fortnite

The most telling number in the whole report is the 57% jump in third-party game spending, from about $255 million in 2024 to $400 million in 2025 – a figure independently corroborated by PocketGamer.biz’s reporting on the record third-party spending. For a storefront that spent its first several years defined by Fortnite revenue, first-party exclusives and expensive paid-exclusivity deals, that shift toward third-party spending is the clearest sign yet that Epic’s pitch to publishers is landing.

“Players spent $1.16 billion on the Epic Games Store in 2025, up 6% from $1.09 billion in 2024 and $950 million in 2023.”
Epic Games, via Tech Insider

Engagement tells a similar story. Epic’s own summary of the report noted “a whopping 2.78 billion hours in third-party games,” as detailed in the company’s 2025 Year in Review recap on LinkedIn. That volume of third-party playtime is a meaningful shift for a platform that spent years being defined almost entirely by a single game.

Overall engagement on the store didn’t universally rise, though. According to GamesIndustry.biz’s coverage of the report, “while overall gameplay hours declined year over year, hours in third-party titles increased by 4%” – meaning the growth in third-party engagement happened against a backdrop of falling total playtime, most likely tied to Fortnite’s own usage patterns rather than a storefront-wide decline.

Monthly Active Users Hit a Record 78 Million

Epic’s December 2025 monthly active user count of 78 million is the highest the storefront has publicly reported. Gamespot’s coverage of the year-in-review data confirmed the storefront “achieved a record high 78 [million] monthly active users on PC,” as detailed in its gallery breakdown of the report.

Epic doesn’t publish a full historical MAU series, so it’s hard to chart a precise year-over-year growth curve the way the spending figures allow. But the fact that Epic chose to lead with “record” in its own framing suggests this is the highest active-user mark since the storefront launched in December 2018 – a launch that, at the time, shipped without basics like a shopping cart, user reviews or a wishlist.

Free Games Program Drives 662 Million Claims

Epic’s free-games program remains the storefront’s most visible user-acquisition tool, and the 2025 numbers show it running at serious scale. Players claimed 662 million free games in 2025 across 100 titles given away over the year, with the average player claiming an estimated $2,316 worth of games.

That per-player figure is a running total rather than a single-year giveaway value, but it illustrates why the program has become such a durable part of Epic’s playbook: it’s a recurring reason for lapsed users to open the launcher every week, and each visit is also a chance to see what else is on sale or newly listed. Epic has never published a running total of what the program has cost the company since 2019, so there’s no verified cumulative figure to compare 2025 against – but 662 million claims in a single year gives a sense of the scale Epic is now operating at.

Inside the 88/12 Model: Why Developers Are Taking Notice

Epic’s standard revenue split is 88/12 – developers keep 88% of revenue, Epic takes 12%. Since June 2025, Epic has sweetened that further: developers keep 100% of the first $1 million in annual revenue per product before the standard split kicks in. For a mid-sized indie release, that can be the difference between a break-even launch and a profitable one.

That cut structure has been Epic’s central argument to publishers since the store launched, and the 2025 third-party spending growth is the first strong evidence that the pitch is converting into real listings and real sales, not just favorable press. Epic’s terms aren’t dramatically different from where they’ve been for years – what’s changed is the number of publishers willing to list day-one rather than treating Epic as a secondary storefront.

From 2018 Exclusives War to a $1.16 Billion Storefront

It’s easy to forget how contentious the Epic Games Store’s early years were. When it launched in December 2018, Epic leaned heavily on paid timed-exclusivity deals to pull games – and players – away from Steam, a strategy that drew years of criticism from PC gamers who didn’t want to install a second launcher for one game. Epic also used Fortnite’s enormous player base and V-Bucks promotions to cross-promote the store, effectively subsidizing its growth with the world’s most popular battle royale.

Epic’s broader fight over app-store economics – including its long-running dispute with Apple and Google over mobile store fees, which began in 2020 – has always been intertwined with its pitch for the Epic Games Store itself: that a lower platform cut is better for developers and, eventually, for players. Seven years on, the exclusivity-deal era has largely faded, replaced by the cut-and-catalog strategy reflected in 2025’s third-party growth.

The store has also matured functionally. Cloud saves, achievements, a wishlist and refunds have all been added since 2019, closing much of the feature gap that used to be the top complaint from players asked to choose Epic over Steam.

Epic vs. Steam: How the Numbers Compare in 2026

Even with a record year, Epic’s scale is still a fraction of Steam’s. Valve’s storefront posted a record $11.1 billion in revenue in just the first half of 2026 alone – more than nine times what Epic generated across the entirety of 2025. That gap is the clearest evidence of how much ground Epic still has to make up, even after a record-breaking year.

Year	Total Player Spending	Third-Party Spending	YoY Growth	Monthly Active Users
2023	$950 million	Not disclosed	–	Not disclosed
2024	$1.09 billion	~$255 million	+14.7%	Not disclosed
2025	$1.16 billion	$400 million	+6.4%	78 million (Dec. 2025, record)

Steam’s advantage isn’t just current revenue – it’s depth of catalog and player habit. Shattered.io’s earlier coverage of Steam’s H1 2026 results found that older, back-catalog games drove 79% of that revenue, underscoring how much value Valve extracts from a library built up over two decades. Epic’s 6,000-plus games are a real catalog, but it’s still young next to Steam’s.

The comparison isn’t purely about who’s bigger, though. Shattered.io has previously broken down how Steam’s 30% standard cut compares with Epic’s 12% – and that gap in take-rate is exactly what’s fueling the third-party spending growth Epic is now reporting. Publishers aren’t abandoning Steam, but more of them are adding Epic as a simultaneous release target rather than skipping it.

Revenue share is the single biggest lever any storefront has to attract developers, and it’s where the platforms diverge most clearly. Here’s how the major PC storefronts compare on standard terms in 2026:

GOG and itch.io figures reflect widely reported industry-standard terms rather than platform-published rate cards.

Platform	Standard Developer Share	Notable Terms
Epic Games Store	88%	100% of the first $1M in annual revenue per product goes to the developer (since June 2025)
Steam	70% (rising with revenue)	70/30 up to $10M gross, 75/25 from $10M–$50M, 80/20 above $50M
GOG	~70% (industry-standard)	DRM-free distribution, no platform-exclusivity requirements
itch.io	Developer-set (commonly ~90%)	Creators can set the platform’s cut themselves, including to 0%

Epic’s terms are the most aggressive of the major curated storefronts – GOG and itch.io undercut Epic’s take-rate in some cases, but neither operates at Epic’s scale of user acquisition, marketing muscle or free-games budget. That combination of a low cut and real distribution power is what Epic is banking on to keep pulling third-party listings away from a Steam-only release strategy.

What Industry Voices Are Saying

Coverage of Epic’s 2025 Year in Review has largely focused on the same tension: strong growth in specific categories against a backdrop of an overall storefront that still trails Steam by a wide margin. As GamesIndustry.biz put it in its analysis of the report, engagement patterns shifted even as total playtime dipped – “while overall gameplay hours declined year over year, hours in third-party titles increased by 4%,” a sign that the growth is coming specifically from the part of the business Epic has spent years trying to build, not from Fortnite carrying the numbers.

Epic’s own framing, repeated across its 2025 Year in Review materials, leans hard on the third-party spending jump: “Player spending hit $400M (+57% increase) in third-party games.” That’s the number Epic wants developers to see, because it’s the strongest available evidence that listing on the Epic Games Store now translates into real sales rather than just a lower theoretical cut.

Market Impact: What This Means for Developers and Publishers

For developers deciding where to launch, Epic’s 2025 numbers make a stronger case than they could have a year or two ago. A storefront that can point to $400 million in verified third-party spending – up 57% – is a more credible day-one target than one still leaning primarily on projected reach. That’s especially relevant for mid-sized studios weighing whether a second launcher and a second set of platform tools are worth the engineering overhead.

The more likely outcome isn’t publishers abandoning Steam for Epic – it’s continued “multi-homing,” where a game ships simultaneously on both storefronts rather than picking one. Epic’s improved cut effectively functions as extra margin on every sale that comes through its launcher instead of Steam’s, with minimal added cost once a publisher has already built the infrastructure to support multiple stores.

There’s also a knock-on effect for the broader PC gaming market. Shattered.io’s coverage of the PC-versus-console divide found that PC gaming revenue kept climbing while console spending fell sharply in 2026, and a healthier, more competitive storefront landscape on PC – rather than one dominated entirely by a single platform – is part of what’s sustaining that growth.

The Regulatory Backdrop: Antitrust Pressure and the DMA

Epic’s growth story isn’t unfolding in a vacuum. Valve is currently defending Steam against an antitrust trial that Shattered.io has covered in depth, one that involves claims from roughly 32,000 developers and $3.1 billion in alleged damages tied to Steam’s market power and pricing rules. Epic itself has spent years arguing – in courtrooms and in its own marketing – that dominant storefronts extract too much value from developers, and its own 12% cut has always been offered as the practical counterexample.

Regulatory pressure doesn’t need to produce a courtroom loss for Valve to help Epic. Simply keeping the question of storefront market power in the news gives publishers another reason to test alternatives, and Epic remains the most established one on PC. Whether that translates into faster third-party growth in 2026 than in 2025 is one of the more interesting open questions the next Year in Review report should help answer.

Where Epic Still Trails Steam

None of Epic’s 2025 growth changes the fundamental scale gap. Steam’s $11.1 billion in H1 2026 revenue alone dwarfs Epic’s full-year $1.16 billion, and Steam’s back-catalog strength – old games doing the bulk of the work – is exactly the kind of long-tail advantage that takes a storefront years, not one good report, to build. Epic also still doesn’t disclose whether the storefront itself is profitable; the growth figures describe player spending and engagement, not Epic’s own margins on running the store, an open question Polygon has previously pressed Epic on in the context of third-party developer economics.

Community features are another gap. Steam’s user reviews, extensive modding support through the Workshop, and its trading and community market ecosystem remain differentiators that Epic hasn’t fully replicated, even after years of incremental feature additions. For a segment of PC gamers, those community layers – not just price or cut structure – are still the deciding factor in which launcher gets opened first.

What This Means for PC Gamers

For players, the practical upshot of Epic’s growth is more choice about where to buy the same game, and modestly more competitive pricing pressure across storefronts as Epic’s free-games program and periodic sales keep pushing on Steam’s own promotional calendar. It also means more third-party games are likely to appear on Epic at or near launch rather than months later, since publishers now have firmer data suggesting day-one Epic listings convert into real sales.

The tradeoff hasn’t disappeared, though: players who want reviews, an integrated marketplace or the deepest possible library of older titles will still find Steam more complete. Epic’s pitch remains narrower – a lower-cost, increasingly well-stocked alternative rather than a full Steam replacement.

5 Predictions for Epic Games Store Through 2027

Third-party spending keeps outpacing total growth. If more publishers list day-one to capture Epic’s 88/12 terms, third-party revenue is likely to keep growing faster than the storefront’s overall total through 2026 and into 2027.
The free-games program stays central. With 662 million claims in 2025 alone, expect Epic to keep leaning on weekly giveaways as its primary user-acquisition tool rather than shifting budget toward paid marketing or new exclusivity deals.
Multi-homing becomes the norm, not the exception. More publishers are likely to release simultaneously on Steam and Epic rather than choosing one, treating Epic’s lower cut as incremental margin rather than a replacement strategy.
Regulatory scrutiny of Steam indirectly helps Epic. Valve’s ongoing antitrust trial keeps storefront market power in the news, giving publishers and players more reason to treat Epic as a legitimate alternative rather than a niche option.
The scale gap with Steam won’t close by 2027. Steam’s back-catalog depth and single-half-year revenue already outstrip Epic’s full annual total; closing that gap would require multiple more years of sustained third-party growth at or above 2025’s 57% pace.

For more on the platforms shaping PC gaming in 2026, see Shattered.io’s full gaming coverage.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much revenue did the Epic Games Store make in 2025?

Players spent $1.16 billion on the Epic Games Store in 2025, according to Epic’s 2025 Year in Review, published February 3, 2026. That’s up 6% from $1.09 billion in 2024 and $950 million in 2023.

How many people use the Epic Games Store?

Epic reported a record 78 million monthly active users in December 2025. The broader Epic Games ecosystem, which includes Fortnite accounts, reported 972 million cross-platform accounts and more than 317 million PC customers in 2025.

What percentage does the Epic Games Store take from developers?

Epic’s standard split is 88/12 – developers keep 88% of revenue. Since June 2025, developers also keep 100% of the first $1 million in annual revenue per product before the standard split applies.

Steam uses a tiered model: 70/30 up to $10 million in gross revenue, 75/25 between $10 million and $50 million, and 80/20 above $50 million. Epic’s flat 88/12 split is more generous for most developers below the $10 million tier, especially combined with the $1 million no-cut threshold.

How much has Epic given away through free weekly games?

In 2025 alone, players claimed 662 million free games across 100 titles, with an average claimed value of $2,316 per player. Epic has not published a cumulative total for the program since it began in 2019.

Is the Epic Games Store still losing money?

Epic has not publicly disclosed whether the storefront itself is profitable. The 2025 Year in Review figures describe player spending and engagement, not Epic’s internal costs or margins on operating the store.

How big is the Epic Games Store’s game catalog?

The storefront’s catalog surpassed 6,000 games in 2025, up from a much smaller library in its early years, when it relied heavily on paid exclusivity deals to attract titles.

Will the Epic Games Store overtake Steam?

Not in the near term. Steam generated $11.1 billion in revenue in just the first half of 2026 – more than nine times Epic’s entire 2025 total. Epic’s growth is real, but it’s growth from a much smaller base against a competitor with a two-decade head start.