The Epic Games Store entered the PC market in 2018 with the promise of going head-to-head with the giant Steam. To win over players, the platform adopted the aggressive strategy of giving away free games every week.
Who doesn’t remember the absolute chaos and servers crashing when Epic simply gave GTA V away for free to everyone, right?
However, what seemed like the perfect plan to dethrone the all-powerful Valve ended up becoming a real headache.
Epic Games Store struggles to retain players
Yes, you read that right. According to former employees in an interview with the website Polygon, the store still struggles immensely to keep its users.
Even Steve Allison, one of the company’s top executives, confirmed that the platform has not yet reached the expected level of success.
The reason for all of this is quite clear: users enter the store, claim the free title of the week, and simply close the app immediately. In other words, the strategy of giving away free games was not enough to actually change player behavior.
After grabbing the freebies, users go back to Steam. It’s worth remembering that Epic has always proudly stated that it charges developers only a 12% fee, compared to the staggering 30% charged by Valve.
But the truth is that this math matters little to the end consumer. The biggest complaint from users remains the lack of basic social features on the platform, such as robust profiles and community forums.
Additionally, recent documents revealed in court have proven that the Epic Games Store is still not profitable. All of this is only sustained by the mountain of money generated by the massive success of Fortnite.
