Each month you may go on the Epic Video games Retailer and snag a often fairly respectable sport for completely free. It’s not clear if this largesse is meaningfully shifting the needle within the firm’s battle to ascertain itself as a competitor to Steam, however it’s definitely a pleasant bonus. And after gifting away $2,229 price of free video games throughout the whole lot of 2024, the Fortnite maker reiterated that it has no plans to cease the giveaways anytime quickly.
“Our Free Video games Program has continued to ship PC favorites to new audiences for the fifth yr working,” the corporate wrote in a brand new recap of stats from the final yr. “Epic gamers stocked their libraries with over $2,000 USD price of nice PC titles throughout 89 giveaways. This system shouldn’t be slowing down and can proceed in 2025, on each PC and cellular.”
2024’s free Epic video games included Management, The Callisto Protocol, Marvel’s Midnight Suns, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and tons extra outdated and up to date releases, from small indies to big-name blockbusters. Epic experiences that 595 million free video games had been claimed through the yr. Prior to now, the corporate has revealed that such giveaways can value it tens of thousands and thousands. And the library Epic Video games Retailer customers can amass this manner is greater than sufficient to theoretically preserve them busy till they die.
However elsewhere, the information exhibits that Epic Video games Retailer continues to be primarily a car for current Epic-owned and -operated hits like Fortnite and Rocket League. Each had been within the prime 5 most-played video games on the platform, alongside Genshin Impression, Honkai: Star Rail, and Grand Theft Auto V. The corporate reported $1.09 billion spent by 295 million PC gamers on the Epic Video games Retailer final yr, however solely $255 million of that went to third-party video games. For comparability, Microsoft estimated Valve’s annual income at over $6 billion again in 2021.
So the Epic Video games Retailer continues to be very a lot a Fortnite launcher with a ton of different cool stuff grafted onto it, however it’s definitely not only a Fortnite launcher. And with that in thoughts, the corporate additionally signaled what’s forward for its digital storefront in 2025. The roadmap consists of an overhaul of discoverability, new social options, the addition of pre-loading and a brand new obtain supervisor, in addition to the flexibility to lastly present video games to different folks.
All of that is being finished with the intent to seamlessly combine it throughout an Epic Video games Retailer cellular app as the corporate lobbies regulators the world over to pressure iOS and Android to play good with it. We’ll see if, as that grand imaginative and prescient comes nearer to being a actuality, the Epic Video games Retailer lastly turns into a extra central pressure to be reckoned with in PC gaming. For now, it’s nonetheless an incredible place to snag tons of cool video games free of charge.
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