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Among the statistics in today’s blog post “Results of 2022 for the Epic Games Store“There is also expected, but good news: Epic does not stop giving away free games.
“Our weekly free games program will continue into 2023,” the company wrote.
It’s been 2023 for a few months now and Epic hasn’t stopped giving away free games every week, so everyone has already guessed it, but it’s nice to get confirmation that the offering train will be running until at least the end of this year.
The blog post also contains some statistics on last year’s draws. If you were to claim all 99 games that were given away last year, you would have $2,240 worth of games, according to Epic. In total, “nearly 700 million” free games were awarded in 2022.
Epic also noted that 70 of the participating games broke records for the most concurrent players, which isn’t too surprising: Give people free games and they’ll play free games.
Epic started giving away games in 2019 as a way to bring new users to the Epic Games Store, and along with exclusive games and Fortnite’s continued appeal, this strategy seems to be working.
There are now over 230 million PC users on the Epic Games Store, up 36 million from 2021. This brings the total number of cross-platform Epic accounts to 723 million.” In 2022, daily active users peaked at 34.3 million, and monthly active users reached 68 million users, up from last year’s 62 million.
However, Steam remains quite large: While the Epic Games Store peaked at 34.4 million users in a single day in 2022, Steam sometimes has over 30 million users at any one time. According to SteamDB, the record of concurrent user activity on Steam currently stands at 33,159,010.
Epic says performance is a priority for the Epic Games Store this year, but the company is also working on new features, including support for subscription services like EA Play. However, the biggest announcement of the day from Epic was the launch of self-publishing tools, allowing anyone with $100 to submit a game to the Epic Games Store.