Epic Games has just released their 2020 Year in Review article, which touts some massive user growth, accompanied by revenue numbers that closely match last year’s.

Epic Games Store customers have shot up to 160 million (from 108 million in 2019), and daily active user numbers are also very impressive (31.3 million daily active players). Peak concurrent user numbers come in at 13 million CCU in 2020 vs 7 million in 2019, which is a massive increase, and the same can be said for the monthly active users in December 2020 (56 million) vs December 2019 (32 million).

However, these massive increases in user numbers don’t seem to have translated into more money going to Epic’s pockets, as the comparison with 2019’s numbers paints a pretty clear picture. In 2019, EGS users spent US$680 million on all products (including Fortnite), a number that’s remarkably close to 2020’s US$700 million. Removing Fortnite from the equation results in pretty much the same picture, with third party revenue amounting to US$251 million in 2019 and US$265 milion in 2020.

I am not an analyst, but these numbers seem to indicate that most Epic Games Store users visited and interacted with the store with the express purpose of claiming the free games that have been offered on a weekly basis. Epic’s own numbers support this theory, as more than 200 million free games were claimed in 2019, versus a staggering increase in 2020, which saw numbers rising to a massive 749+ million free game claims (EGS offered 73 free games in 2019, vs. 103 in 2020).

According to the store team, they are working on opening up the store so more developers can publish titles on EGS, so these numbers could see a big shakeup when the next Year in Review article hits. If that means less exclusives and more multi-store releases, then I’m all for it.