High hat

Image credit: Epic / Rock Paper Shotgun

Epic have discussed their latest plans for growing the Epic Games Store’s audience and stealing more eyeballs from industry overlords Steam. One side of it is launching a proper unified multiplatform store and shared libraries across PC and mobile, alongside better performance and features such as voice chat. The other side of it is channelling the brand clout of Fortnite to increase sales of third party releases, with a new official program of Fortnite cosmetics and Epic Store avatars for people who buy games from participating developers. They’re going to do upwards of 100 hats (or equivalent) a year, apparently. 100 hats! Where did I leave that trusty Smithers gif. Ah, here you go.

Epic’s latest year-in-review brandishes some bountiful numbers - a record 78 million monthly active users in 2025, and a 6% year-on-year rise in expenditure on the Store to $1.16 billion. The review emphasises gains for third-party developers - player spending on third-party games grew 57% to $400 million, while hours spent in third-party games is up 4%. Epic also say that their regular free game rollouts are having "a measurable halo effect across the broader PC ecosystem", claiming that games given away under the program have seen a 40% lift in Steam concurrent users during the offer period.

Epic continue to fight an uphill battle persuading third-parties to favour their store, given Steam’s dominance, with executives often touting Epic’s more generous developer revenue share on social media. "Though Epic processes only around 7% as many third-party payments as Steam, that vastly underreports economic activity as devs on Epic Games Games store are free to process their own payments and keep 100%, and many major games like GTA do so," wrote company head Tim Sweeney last month.

Sweeney got some flak for that comment, with Larian’s Michael Douse arguing that certain Epic exclusivity deals have backfired for developers. "I understand Epic entirely funded Alan Wake 2 but this altruistic pro-developer talk doesn’t sit well when Remedy seemingly went into financial crisis because they couldn’t tap Steam for AW2 sales suffering potentially hundreds of millions in lost revenue," he wrote. (Remedy subsequently pushed back against Douse, arguing that "the publishing deal with Epic was very fair to Remedy", without addressing the point about missing out on Steam revenue.)

In the same Xitter thread, Douse added that "[u]ltimately the viability of the store sits on their ability to convert hundreds of millions of Fortnite players into mid-hardcore premium gamers, and i don’t see the Fortnite brand attempting to do that." Which brings us back to Epic’s latest effort to "leverage the marketing power of Fortnite".

According to the Epic’s 2025 review post, the first of the new Fortnite cosmetic tie-ins "will be available in the first half of the year", with confirmed partners including Capcom, miHoYo, Pearl Abyss, S-Game, MintRocket, and Kakao Games. You can expect a Resident Evil Requiem cosmetic, to start with.

Epic Store boss Steve Allison went into a little more detail about the program in a new chat with The Game Business, following the latest round of EGS figures. "We’ve had this very powerful anchor [in Fortnite], and we’ve not tapped into the marketing power that it provides," Allison told newsletter owner Chris Dring. "Maybe four times in seven years. When I was at Telltale, we did this with Valve and Team Fortress hats, and that would have this profound impact. This year we will probably do 40 of them starting with Resident Evil. Our plan is to scale that up to 100 a year in the next 18 to 24 months."

Once more with feeling: 100 hats (or hat equivalents) a year! Yeah, that ought to do it. I’m not being entirely scornful. I have no idea how you make a PC gaming store more successful than Steam. I guess they could also try sinking Gabe Newell’s yacht while he’s having his diamond teeth put in?

"We have ambitions to get to at least 25% to 35% market share on PC where third-party stores are involved," Allison explained elsewhere in the newsletter. "Depending on the data, we are somewhere between 9% and 12%, although in some cases if you think Steam is bigger than it is, you might even say we’re 6% or 5%. The focus is continued growth. We need to MAU over 100 million on average. The next four or five years is about making progress on that."

He suggests that some of Epic’s growth won’t be directly at Steam’s expense, partly because the console business is in the doldrums, but also because "PC gaming has got much larger, I believe, because of this competitive thing we’ve got going on here." I can’t really speak to the numbers, there, but the last observation does make me think of a cornered drifter anxiously assuring Clint Eastwood that actually, this town is big enough for the two of us.

In general, I’m sort of interested in how Epic might convert Fortnite players into people who play games beside Fortnite, given that Fortnite has been pitched for many years as a platform for all other games, intellectual properties, and labours of the human imagination, from Disney to Eminem. Probably the surest way for third parties to make money from EGS is still to make things directly for Fortnite.