The results that the Epic Games Store has shared, and that they collect all the keys to your adventure in 2021, leave us some very interesting data that, of course, is worth analyzing carefully. The first thing that caught my attention was the total number of games he gave away last year, and their total value.
A user who claimed all the free games offered by the Epic Games Store in 2021 took, in total, 89 shares valued at $2,120. Impressed, right? Let’s put that fact in perspective. We continue to look at the data that the Epic Games Store has given, and we see that during 2021 more than 765 million copies of those free games.
If we divide $2,120 by those 89 titles, we can get the average value of claiming a game free, and then by multiplying this by those 765 million copies claimed, we would obtain an approximate value of the cost that the Epic Games Store could have had to assume to give away all those copies. I’m not going to make you pull out your calculator, the average cost per game would be $23.82, and the total would be over 18,222 million dollars.
Before you put your head in your hands, I want to remind you that this operation has been carried out based on the final price that the consumer must assume. Obviously the Epic Games Store will have reached agreements specific with publishers and developers so that giving away that huge number of games does not cost you billions dollars, but I wanted to give you the data so that you can see the magnitude, in consumption, of those gifts that the Epic store makes.
In any case, it is not a secret that the Epic Games Store has invested a large amount of money in free games, and that this it doesn’t end up being profitable, a statement that we will understand in more detail when we see the total money spent by users of said platform in 2021, a data that comes from the Epic Games Store itself.
Epic Games Store users spent $840 million in 2021
Well, and is this a lot or is it a little? I am not going to enter into comparisons with what Steam enters in a year because I do not have reliable official data to make such a comparison, so I am going to limit myself to the data that the Epic Games Store gave in 2020 to establish, with them, a year-over-year comparison.
In 2020, the Epic Games Store closed with a revenue of $700 million, a figure that represented a very small improvement (just 20 million dollars more) compared to the results of 2019. During 2021, those revenues rose to $840 million, a figure that represents a much higher year-on-year increase and that confirms, without a doubt, that its strategy has given it better results.
They also increased the number of registered PC users, going from 160 million to more than 194 million, and more free games were claimed, more than 765 million copies compared to almost 750 million in 2020. Interestingly, in 2020 more games were given away, a total of 103 valued at $2,407, as we told you at the time in this article .
If we put everything that we have said together and value it sensibly, we can conclude that the strategy that the Epic Games Store has been following has worked better in 2021, and therefore I am not surprised that the platform has decided to maintain its commitment to keep giving away games to users. However, the most important thing is that improvements have been confirmed that will gradually reach the platform, and that little by little will make it more competitive against Steam.
