GTA V giveaway saw the Epic Games Store's concurrent user numbers almost reach Steam's

[midian182]

In a nutshell: At under two years old, the Epic Games Store still lives in the shadow of Steam in terms of user numbers. But thanks to the recent GTA V giveaway, the (relatively) new kid on the block is closing the gap.

Back in May, the Epic Games Store’s weekly giveaway was the best-selling game of the last decade and the most profitable media product of all time—GTA V. It might appear that most people already own Rockstar’s title, but the offer proved so popular that the store was overwhelmed with traffic, causing crashes and errors for those that could gain access.

GTA V was the first free game in Epic’s “user acquisition campaign” called The Vault. It was followed by three more huge titles: Civilization 6, Borderlands: The Handsome Collection, and Ark: Survival Evolved, each hidden behind the image of a vault door until the giveaways began.

Epic threw a lot of money into The Vault’s advertising budget, and it appears to have paid off. The Epic Games Store reached an average concurrent user count of 13 million, while its monthly active users topped 61 million.

"Since launching the Epic Games Store, we've always wanted to create a huge event around our very successful Free Games weekly program to give something awesome to players worldwide, and we decided to go big," said Steve Allison, Epic Games Store’s GM. "We invested in acquiring the rights to give four of the biggest games in the world away free.”

With the lockdowns leading to more people gaming, Steam saw its concurrent user record broken more than once during March. It now stands at 24.5 million, with monthly active users reaching almost 95 million last year. Epic might have some catching up to do, but after launching in December 2018, it has almost reached Steam’s off-peak concurrent user count (above).

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https://www.techspot.com/news/85748-gta-v-giveaway-saw-epic-concurrent-user-numbers.html

 

[winjer]

Most people just login to get the free game.
The number of people that are actually playing on the Epic launcher must be significantly lower.
If one does not consider Fortnite players, that count must be much lower.
And the number of people that actually buy games on the Epic store must be even lower.

 

[m4a4]

I mean, that sounds ok and all, but I doubt retention and actual paying customers are as nice of numbers.
Gotta be able to convert us free users to paid for it to mean something...

 

[Shadowboxer]

Great news. I’m fed up with steams dominance and their platform has stagnated. Epic seem pretty determined to shake things up and are giving away free games and often undercutting steam on prices too, which is great for us.

They also allow the dev to keep more than 70% and I think that’s great. I don’t think that for a PC game there is room for a launcher to take 1/3 of the revenue as it’s an open platform - Steam doesn’t hold the keys to windows gaming.

 

[Mister_K]

Great news. I’m fed up with steams dominance and their platform has stagnated.

Dominance is unhealthy (well depends on the situation) and competition is required for this to get better. However as the other posters have already mentioned, the retention of these users will most likely be very small and actual use of EPIC is probably **** all when compared to Steam.

Steam is great but Steam is letting Steam "kill itself".

 

[Shadowboxer]

Dominance is unhealthy (well depends on the situation) and competition is required for this to get better. However as the other posters have already mentioned, the retention of these users will most likely be very small and actual use of EPIC is probably **** all when compared to Steam.

Steam is great but Steam is letting Steam "kill itself".

I don’t think steam is great. I think that if Epic keep adding more features and giving out better deals it will overtake steam. That’s steams problem though, not mine. I’m happy that there is someone out there who seems to be trying.

If they don’t do anything it will become nothing more than an old games archive.

It’s odd because there used to be a lot more going on, steam used to have aggressive sales, more exclusives and even things like steam OS, steam machines on the way. What do they do now? The valve index? That looks great but it shouldn’t be categorised under the same category as normal PC gaming imo. What does VR do for the average user who just wants to play some normal PC games?

 

[Mister_K]

I’m happy that there is someone out there who seems to be trying.

That is the key there. However we are looking at years of improvements over Steam before I and 99.9% of my friends are not relying, buying, interacting with Steam over EPIC.

At least EPIC smashes the **** out of Origin.

 

[Shadowboxer]

That is the key there. However we are looking at years of improvements over Steam before I and 99.9% of my friends are not relying, buying, interacting with Steam over EPIC.

At least EPIC smashes the **** out of Origin.

Well, within my sphere of friends who play games most of us are on Xbox game pass more than anything else. But a lot of us are on epic and using it. It’s funny at first most of my mates are like “I haven’t ever paid for anything on epic” but now most of them have done, usually during a sale. In the last sale you could get control, AC odyssey and some other games cheaper than anywhere else.

Of course what our friends are doing isn’t a very good way to measure what’s going on industry wide. The user base is there for epic and the exclusives and concurrent players are growing.

Nothing for us to be concerned about though, in fact all this is good. And yes I do agree Origin is a pos. I still use it though, I use many game launchers. I dont understand why others have a problem with using more than one! Currently the only launchers giving me any **** is steam and origin. Origin is just pants and sometimes hides your games, it’s also got some wierd scaling issue on 4K monitors. And steam sometimes just shows up a black screen or takes forever to load store pages. But neither of those things stops me playing games!

 

[Evernessince]

Well, within my sphere of friends who play games most of us are on Xbox game pass more than anything else. But a lot of us are on epic and using it. It’s funny at first most of my mates are like “I haven’t ever paid for anything on epic” but now most of them have done, usually during a sale. In the last sale you could get control, AC odyssey and some other games cheaper than anywhere else.

Of course what our friends are doing isn’t a very good way to measure what’s going on industry wide. The user base is there for epic and the exclusives and concurrent players are growing.

Nothing for us to be concerned about though, in fact all this is good. And yes I do agree Origin is a pos. I still use it though, I use many game launchers. I dont understand why others have a problem with using more than one! Currently the only launchers giving me any **** is steam and origin. Origin is just pants and sometimes hides your games, it’s also got some wierd scaling issue on 4K monitors. And steam sometimes just shows up a black screen or takes forever to load store pages. But neither of those things stops me playing games!

I'm getting the opposite reaction from the people I play games with. They are more pissed at EPIC for making games exclusive and not allowing them to just play the games they want where they want without hassle. Actually just played through BL3 a few months back due to the exclusivity BS. On the upside only paid $30.

 

[m4a4]

I'm getting the opposite reaction from the people I play games with. They are more pissed at EPIC for making games exclusive and not allowing them to just play the games they want where they want without hassle. Actually just played through BL3 a few months back due to the exclusivity BS. On the upside only paid $30.

Yup. There are many of us that won't reward the BS of paid timed exclusivity by Epic. But free games? Sure. Money out of Epic's pocket, not mine lol

 

[Mptoyer]

Nothing for us to be concerned about though, in fact all this is good. And yes I do agree Origin is a pos. I still use it though, I use many game launchers. I dont understand why others have a problem with using more than one! Currently the only launchers giving me any **** is steam and origin. Origin is just pants and sometimes hides your games, it’s also got some wierd scaling issue on 4K monitors. And steam sometimes just shows up a black screen or takes forever to load store pages. But neither of those things stops me playing games!

I quite like origin, it does download fast.
I use gog galaxy and the only launcher I have issues when using that is steam. I constantly have to disconnect and reconnect it to get it to work.
I’ve never understood the hatred towards epic, they have a lot less cack on there than steam does.