Epic Games claims to have surpassed 500 million user accounts in total, but these accounts include all accounts on PC, consoles and mobile devices, so it’s a little watery. For example, players can play Fortnite on consoles as long as they have an “unnamed” Epic Game account, which doesn’t have a name or even a corresponding email. When all these accounts add up, Stronghold Heroes alone has 350 million users, more than half of the 500 million total.
The number of Epic Store users, which is truly significant to Epic Games, reached 194 million last year, an increase of 34% compared to the previous year. Among them, the number of peak daily active users was 31.1 million, and the number of simultaneous online users at peak was 13.2 million. For comparison, Steam surpassed the 1 billion total account mark in 2019, while last year’s average daily logged-in players was 62.6 million, while online players peaked at 24.8 million.
Epic will continue to give away games for free as a primary means of attracting users to open accounts on the Epic Store. Last year Epic gave away a total of 89 different games, totaling 765 million plays. Among them, just giving away “GTA V” for free brought Epic 7 million new registered accounts, and other free big broadcasts such as “Civilization VI”, “World War Z”, “Subnautica”, etc. It also brought in some new users. In addition, Rocket League’s transition to a free-to-play mode also contributed to the increase in user numbers.
Players spent a total of $840 million on the Epic Game Store in 2021, a 20% increase from 2020. However, just over a third of that was spent on third-party games. Finally, regarding the Unreal Engine part, Epic said that in addition to a 40% increase in Unreal Engine downloads last year, 48% of the current generation games that have been published are based on Unreal Engine.