The fight for PC market supremacy between Valve's Steam and the Epic Games Store has one big winner: consumers. Not only does Steam continue to push itself to create great new features, but Epic keeps giving away games to convince people to use its Game Store.
And who woulda thought? It's working. Epic just recapped an extremely successful 2021 in a recent blog update. Notable figures include a 34 million user increase over 2020 to a new grand total of 194 million users, and active daily users increasing to 31.1 million. Peak users broke 13 million in 2021, which means Epic is actually closing the gap between itself and Steam's 29 million concurrent users.
Epic almost doubled its store listings to 917 games (far fewer than Steam's 50,000+). Spending on the store increased 20% to $840 million, with much of that coming from third-party game sales.
On the free game front, Epic gave away 89 free games a total of 765 million times in 2021. Those 89 games are valued at $2,120, which amounts to many more millions of dollars spent giving gamers free titles. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 76 of those freely-given games broke their all-time concurrent user records.
Despite the massive cost to Epic, the Epic Games Store will continue to give away free games for all of 2022. Expect a new free game every week from now until December, which more than overcomes the personal cost of having yet another launcher on your PC.
And make no mistake, this is a very serious cost. To convince people to download the launcher, Epic has spent hundreds of millions of dollars between free game giveaways and timed exclusives. Epic plans to keep doing both for the foreseeable future and doesn't even expect to break even until sometime in 2027.
Right now you can download the action mech game Daemon X Machina for free until February 3, with the next freebie being Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair.