Yesterday, Epic published the Epic Games Store year-in-review post, revealing new records for sales of third-party games (+57% over last year), total PC users (over 317 million), and monthly active users (MAUs; 78 million in December 2025, when the giveaway of Hogwarts Legacy added around six million users). That said, while playtime spent with third-party games increased by 4%, total engagement across all Epic Games Store titles dropped by 14%, signaling a decrease in first-party engagement of games like Fortnite and Rocket League.
Website GamesIndustry.biz was able to interview Epic Games Store General Manager Steve Allison, who admitted that the goal is not (and perhaps never was) to topple Valve's Steam platform, which remains the market leader on PC:
Steam is a huge part of the PC ecosystem. It's not going away. We're not going to topple Steam.
During the interview, Allison acknowledged the criticism the store regularly gets from PC gamers when compared to Steam itself. He also revealed that Epic decided to completely remake the Epic Games Launcher in October 2025; the new version, which should finally let users see their libraries load almost instantly, is expected to be released in May or June.
We get so much criticism. I hate reading it, but I also appreciate it. It's not untrue. We were building incredibly rapidly on top of a foundation that was originally designed just to support Fortnite and Paragon, and we've continued to build on a house of cards. [The Launcher] is really slow. It's built on this old framework… and we've poked at it and optimized it, and I think we've done the best that we could with that. So we decided in October last year to rip the whole foundation down and rebuild it.
When it comes to the future growth of the Epic Games Store, Allison points to the mobile versions that launched in August 2024, but also reckons there's a lot of room for improvement on PC:
Mobile will be a big vector of growth, but like I said, I think we have room to get to a hundred million MAU on PC over the next four years, and I think we have a lot of room to get to 20–30% spend share. So you'll see us being pretty aggressive on our spend share on PC.
In our related coverage, find out the real reason why many PC users prefer Steam versus the Epic Games Store, according to The Astronauts CEO Adrian Chmielarz.
In other Epic Games news, remember that alleged hack from last year? Well, it turns out the ransomware group Mogilevich flat-out lied in an attempt to scam (and gain notoriety).
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.
