Free games help Epic Games Store hit 61m monthly active users
Big deal.
The Epic Games Store has over 61 million monthly active users on PC, Epic has revealed.
It hit an average peak concurrent users on PC figure of 13 million.
The Epic Games Store's impressive numbers were fuelled by The Vault campaign, which ran from 14th May to 18th June. This promotion featured a free game each week players could download and keep forever, and four of the games included were huge: Grand Theft Auto 5, Ark: Survival Evolved, Civilization 6 and Borderlands: The Handsome Collection.
It's also worth noting Epic's incredibly popular battle royale, Fortnite is played via the Epic Games Store on PC, too.
The Epic Games Store launched in December 2018 and quickly hit the headlines for its aggressive timed exclusivity deals aimed at taking business away from Valve's Steam.
Epic has offered developers generous deals for exclusivity, and an 88 per cent cut of revenue for titles published through its store. In contrast, Valve offers developers 70 per cent.
In July 2019, Rebellion's Jason Kingsley, who had signed an exclusivity deal with Epic for the PC version of Zombie Army 4, said: "Generally I think I would prefer not to do exclusives but I understand Epic's position with it, and quite frankly they are paying through the nose to build their store.
"All credit to them, it's fantastic, and we'll take some of their money, thank you very much."
Clearly, Epic's aggressive strategy is bringing users to its store. But how does it compare to Steam? According to Valve, Steam has 100m users. Three months ago, Steam set its all-time user concurrent peak of 24.5 million.
So, impressive gains by Epic - but it still has some way to go before it catches up with Steam.