Epic Games Still Doesn’t Make Any Profit, But is Catching Up to Steam Fast

Epic Games founder and CEO, Tim Sweeney, was recently interviewed by The Verge shortly after the company’s notable triumph against Google in court. The executive revealed that the Epic Games Store is catching up fast with Steam, the biggest PC gaming client.

One of the topics of the interview was Epic’s court battle against Google, which ended in Epic’s favor. The popular Fortnite creator successfully proved that Google does indeed have a monopoly in the Android app market and charges too much of a Google tax for it.

The Epic Games Store also launched five years ago on PC to challenge Steam’s near monopoly situation in the market. It also allowed developers to keep a much higher share of their earnings compared to Steam. Steam, on the other hand, takes a 30% cut from all game earnings by default while Epic only takes 12%.

But since then, the Epic Games Store has evolved to include more than just games including web browsers as well as its renowned Unreal Engine. Not only that but the PC store is also known for giving away free games throughout the year, including AAA titles.

The CEO said:

The Epic Games Store isn’t a games store, right? It’s the store operated by Epic Games. So we have a lot of non-games there already. We have the Brave web browser, we have a number of software creation tools including Unreal Engine, and there’s more coming, including some other awesome creation tools and productivity tools. We’ll host any app anybody wants of any sort.

Although the Epic Games Store, despite being more than 5 years old, is still not profitable, it is quickly catching up to Steam in terms of users with 80 million monthly active players, according to Sweeney. Steam is currently hovering around 120 million.

In response to a question about maintaining an assertive strategy for securing Epic Games Store exclusives, Sweeney indicated that they are adopting an even more ‘ridiculously aggressive’ approach, suggesting that more exclusives are likely forthcoming.

No, we’re in a different model, which is called the “Ridiculously aggressive pursuit model.” If it’s a 10-slide deck, that’s on slide 11.