“We’re not going to topple Steam” – Epic Games Store head Steve Allison heralds the path of co-existence

Steve Allison, GM of the Epic Games Store, is adamant that the vision was never to unseat Steam as the dominant player. “Steam is a huge part of the PC ecosystem,” he says. “It’s not going away. We’re not going to topple Steam.”

But he’s certain, nonetheless, that the Epic Games Store has made an impact in its eight years of operation. “PC gaming, by virtue of the competition and by virtue of us existing, has grown,” he says. “That growth per se may or may not be attributed to all of us competing, but players are shifting a lot of their hobby from consoles to PC.”

Naturally, Allison would love to make up some ground on Valve’s runaway lead. “Of course, we’d be thrilled to be 50% or more market share of PC,” he says. That might be a tall order, however. Right now, the Epic Games Store has a roughly 35–40% share of monthly active users (MAU) on PC, he says, but it accounts for only around 5–8% of spending.

Allison is certain, however, that there’s room to grow. He thinks that potentially, the Epic Games Store could grab 30%, 35%, or even 40% of PC market share over the next five years. “I don’t think the battle has been lost at all.”

The question is how to turn the tide of battle in Epic’s favour. And one area that is in dire need of reinforcements is the infrastructure of the Epic Games Store itself.

Allison is acutely aware that players aren’t happy with the relative lack of features on Epic’s store when compared with Steam. “We get so much criticism. I hate reading it, but I also appreciate it. It’s not untrue.” He knows that a big overhaul is needed. “We were building incredibly rapidly on top of a foundation that was originally designed just to support Fortnite and Paragon,” he says, “and we’ve continued to build on a house of cards.”

Now, it’s time to get those foundations in order, starting with the sluggish Epic Games Store launcher. “It’s really slow,” admits Allison. “It’s built on this old framework… and we’ve poked at it and optimized it, and I think we’ve done the best that we could with that. So we decided in October last year to rip the whole foundation down and rebuild it.” The hope is that the rebuild will be finished by around May or June, at which point the store library will load “fairly instantly”, providing a much improved user experience.

Epic also launched text chat in January that works across the entire Epic ecosystem – the store, Fortnite, and apps. Plus, in around May or June, the plan is to add voice chat and game-independent parties, meaning players can stay in a chat with friends as they navigate between games. “It’s not just a framework for the store, it’s a framework that goes bigger, and these kind of network effects are really big goals of Tim [Sweeney]’s.”

Regional storefronts are coming, too. “It’ll be really good for our partners, because they can do regionalized messages and be as sophisticated with us as they are with some other platforms,” says Allison. “We get asked for that a lot.”

And then there are plans to boost sales of third-party games by leveraging the commercial power of Fortnite. Allison says they will be lining up around a hundred partnerships, where players who purchase a participating game on the Epic Games Store will receive a free Fornite cosmetic.

Free games

The ongoing narrative around the Epic Games Store is that players come for the regular game giveaways, but then quickly head elsewhere without opening their wallet. It’s a narrative Allison is tired of. “When we see things like that Dataisbeautiful Reddit post where they have all these users and nobody spends money, it’s kind of bullshit. It’s a challenge for sure, but we’re definitely on our way of making tons of progress.”

He is quick to highlight the leap in spending on third-party games in 2025 – up 57% to $400 million. But at the same time, Epic’s own games still account for the lion’s share of revenue on the store, which totalled $1.16 billion last year.

There is no doubt that the free game programme has been successful in attracting players. Allison notes that 70% of the hundred or so games given away last year hit their peak concurrent user record on PC as a result. The Epic Games Store hit an all-time high of 78 million MAUs in December thanks to the giveaway of Hogwarts Legacy. “We added almost 6 million new users that we’d never seen before in that month,” says Allison.

So is it safe to say that the free games programme will stick around? “Yeah,” says Allison, before quickly qualifying himself. “I mean, well, anything can change. We’ve had some years where I would say we’ve ‘gone big’, for sure, but our average investment there I consider our marketing budget. The effect on new users and retention is so profound that I think it would be a difficult conversation to say we shouldn’t do this anymore. And we keep the budget right around somewhere between $20 and $30 million. We don’t do a lot of other marketing.”

Generous deal

Attracting players is one thing, but attracting developers is quite another. “Getting content here is really hard,” admits Allison, who says the free games programme was all about scaling the audience in order to make the store more attractive to game makers. Yet the Epic Games Store still lags far behind Steam in terms of third-party titles, with around 6,000 compared with the 120,000 or so on Steam’s platform.

“Getting content here is really hard”

Epic offers generous terms for developers, with an 88/12 revenue split rather than the 70/30 split that’s standard in many other areas of the industry. Plus, in June last year, Epic announced a new deal whereby developers would keep 100% of the revenue share until the first $1 million – a target that resets each year, meaning smaller titles might never have to pay Epic a penny. Allison notes that this kind of thing could make a crucial difference for many smaller studios. “There’s lots of developers that put out lots of content every year that don’t see a lot of money. So every dollar really counts for those studios.”

It’s difficult to see what else Epic could do at this point to attract more developers when it comes to payment terms. But the elephant in the room is Steam’s vast market share, making it an obvious first port of call for developers that want to reach as many players as possible. The strategy now, it seems, is to not make developers choose between the two stores, and instead encourage them to embrace both.

“Our growth is not about the exclusives,” says Allison. “Our growth is going to come from shifting the share of sales on games shipping in both places. So we have to give players really good reasons to do that.”

Slowly, gradually, the developers are coming. “One of the things we track is the top PC releases every year, and how many of those actually came to both places,” says Allison. “In previous years, if we didn’t have a partnership, an exclusive – which we don’t really do anymore, haven’t for years – we’d be in the 40% zone.” If some of those top performers don’t come to the Epic store, it’s “pretty profound”, he says, like with Helldivers 2. But this year, he says, “we have about 70% of those important PC games, and we’ve missed less of the profound ones. And so this has been the best year we’ve ever had on that front.”

Steam Machine

But there’s a cloud on the horizon in the form of Valve’s upcoming Steam Machine. Although the console/PC hybrid will technically be able to provide access to any PC storefront, it will be up to users to reconfigure it to do so, and hence it’s likely that most will stick with Steam.

“I mean, I’m buying one, I think it’s pretty cool”

But Allison isn’t fazed by the possibility of millions of new consoles hooked up to Steam. “I mean, I’m buying one, I think it’s pretty cool,” he says. Yet he’s sceptical about how large of a market the Steam Machines will find. “They’ve got to hit a volume of unit scale that they haven’t really had.” He compares it to the PC handheld market. “I love my Steam Deck, I also have an Asus to play on other platforms like ours, but right now, the volume seems to be really complementary hardware for hardcore Steam users versus high volume. So we’ll see what happens. But that’s either going to be a threat to our goal of getting to 30% spend share, or it’s just going to help PC gaming more and more. I hope it’s the second.”

One area that could potentially see plenty of growth for the Epic Games Store in the near future is mobile, thanks to the various rulings and deals that are opening up storefronts on iOS and Android. Allison says there are moves behind the scenes to connect up the various versions of the Epic Games Store on PC, Mac, iOS and Android.

“Mobile will be a big vector of growth,” he acknowledges. “But like I said, I think we have room to get to a hundred million MAU on PC over the next four years, and I think we have a lot of room to get to 20– 30% spend share. So you’ll see us being pretty aggressive on our spend share on PC.”