We know: So far, Steam is still one of the world's largest PC gaming platforms. However, it still has a competitor, that is, Epic Games, which many players don't like, but is really good. This game platform has been giving away free games for a long time, and at the same time it uses a limited-time exclusive strategy to grab users with Steam. What is the effect?
Recently Epic Games released relevant data for 2020, let us take a look. At present, more than 160 million players have registered on the Epic Games store, and the number of daily active players has grown by 192% to 31.3 million! At the same time, the platform generated more than 700 million US dollars in revenue last year, of which third-party games accounted for 37%. The game time of players using the Epic Games platform has also grown by 70%, reaching 5.7 billion hours!
The above data growth is very eye-catching, which means that more and more players are starting to use the Epic Games store. The content that players can play in the Epic Games store has also increased. As of the end of 2020, there are 471 games on the platform, of which 103 have been given to players for free. Although the growth of the Epic Games store cannot be ignored, it is still not so optimistic.
Although it is officially announced that it will join the achievement system, player profile system, etc. in 2021, while optimizing the wish list, and will continue to give away games, the experience of the Epic Games store is still not very good, far less than Steam, after all, the foundation is not the same. In addition, although the data from the Epic Games store is eye-catching, some key data reflects the current problems of the platform.
First of all, the number of games on Epic Games is far from that on steam. There are currently more than 40,000 games on steam, while there are only 471 in the Epic Games store. If steam is a big game supermarket, then the Epic Games store is just a small shop. Everyone usually visits big supermarkets, and occasionally go to small shops to see if there are free activities.
Secondly, we compared the data of 2020 and 2019 and found that the number of players on the Epic Games platform has increased by 48%, from the original 108 million to 160 million. This is indeed a very strong increase. However, the revenue of the Epic Games platform in 2019 has already reached 680 million U.S. dollars. As mentioned above, it is 700 million U.S. dollars this year, an increase of only 3%. Everyone has seen that most Epic players are here to receive free games.
Finally, 37% of the above-mentioned $700 million comes from third-party games, which means that 63% of the revenue comes from their own representative product "Fortnite" and the popular and popular game "Rocket League" acquired last year. Those games that signed time-limited exclusive contracts with developers only made a total of $265 million. This number seems to be a lot, but in order to sign time-limited exclusive contracts, Epic also paid a very high cost! For example, a player used part of the information given by the fundraising platform to reverse the amount of funds given to the "Phoenix Point" development team by the Epic Games exclusive contract, which is approximately $2.25 million. This game is only a small and medium-sized product, such as "Borderland 3", "Metro: Exodus", "Hitman 3" and other masterpieces naturally spend more money.
In addition, due to the special environment last year, the data of the game platform is very good. For example, compared with 2019, Steam's revenue increased by 21%, while Epic Games only increased by 3%. This makes people think of one thing, that is, once the Epic Games platform does not send games for free, how many players will stick to it here instead of going to the big supermarket Steam? Welcome to browse more game news buyosrs.gold!