Epic Games has released a series of new figures today as part of a “year in review” lookback on Steam storefront rival, Apple lawsuit bane, and Fortnite forever-maker the Epic Games Store – and there are some interesting stats in the mix.
The headline figure, of a few, is that the Epic Games Store hit a total of 6.65bn gameplay hours in games launched via the store – a number that is down noticeably year-on-year, by 14 percent. But third-party gameplay hours – that is, time spent playing games that aren’t Fortnite or any other published by Epic – were up by 4 percent to 2.78bn. Between the lines then, that suggests a fairly notable drop in first-party games’ playtime, specifically that of Fortnite, with the wildly popular battle royale-cum-crossover platform still the top game on the store overall.
“That’s the logical conclusion on hours [played],” Epic Games Store’s vice president and general manager, Steve Allison, confirmed to Eurogamer during a brief interview on the figures. “But you’ve got to remember Fortnite’s coming off one of its best years ever on PC,” he added, noting that “relative to the state of the industry,” it was still “outpacing” a lot of other games. Fortnite “still remains the biggest game in the world on many fronts,” he added, while conceding that “the conclusion is fair and accurate” that it had seen a noticeable drop compared to 2024, enough to offset the rest of the store’s growth.
Another key stat from the review details player spending – a tad businessy, maybe, but something that makes for interesting reading amongst the ongoing debate on live service games and, frankly, the future sustainability of the industry as a whole. There, third-party games saw a huge increase in spending, up by 57 percent to $400m. For context, Epic had what Allison called a “down year” in 2024, where the equivalent spending was $255 million, 18 percent down on 2023’s figure of $310m, which also makes last year’s increase especially large.
The reasonable guess as to what drove that would be the rising popularity of ‘gacha’ games, such as Kuro Games’ Wuthering Waves and MiHoYo’s Honkai Star Rail, on the store. Epic puts Wuthering Waves, Honkai, and Genshin Impact in its top five, ‘mythic’-rated top games rankings, alongside staples Fortnite and Rocket League, and their relatively aggressive monetisation, centred on gachapon vending machine-style loot boxes, would suggest that’s where the big spending growth is coming from.
“Obviously MiHoYo does really well here, and has chosen to be exclusive here” Allison said, “but they are not the lion’s share of the spending on the store.” Instead, Allison claimed the spending was “pretty dispersed across third-party games.” Notably, other high-ranking games on the store continue to be live services with significant microtransactions, such as EA Sports FC 26, Grand Theft Auto 5, and Infinity Nikki.
There was also another record set, in total monthly active users playing Epic Game Store games in December 2025, with 78m logged-on, presumably tying in with the usual flurry of holiday freebies and sales – but again that’s offset, this time over the wider year’s average. Monthly active users were down 1 percent to 67m on average, and daily active users down 2 percent to 31m.
Those free games meanwhile have now ticked over the 100 mark, with 662m free games claimed, Epic putting the total value of those – presumably at full retail price – at $2,316 per player.
Finally, Epic also announced some relatively big plans for the Epic Game Store in terms of new features this year, including social functionality that “maybe is better than anyone’s doing,” Allison said. Expect much more on those, and the wider player opinion of the Epic Games Store, from us here very soon.
