Epic Games Store 2022 Year in Review

3.9.2023

By Epic Games

2023 is off to a strong start for both Epic Games and the Epic Games Store, and we’re glad to have you with us. As we’ve done in the past, we’re looking back at 2022 and taking a look ahead at some of our most anticipated features and games coming this year.

We're proud to be part of this growing community of developers, publishers, players, and creators who made last year another special year for us. There are now over 230 million Epic Games Store PC users, an increase of 36M from 2021. This makes a total of 723M Epic cross-platform accounts. In 2022 Daily Active Users peaked at 34.3M and Monthly Active Users reached 68M users, up from last year’s 62M.

Publishers and developers brought 626 new PC titles to the store in 2022, bringing our total count up to 1,548. That’s more than any previous year and represents a significant increase over games we had available to players in 2021. Players spent $355M on 3rd Party applications, up 18% year over year. Including Epic’s own games, players spent $820M in 2022, down 2% from 2021.

The Epic Games Store Free Games program had another strong year in 2022. Many developers and publishers partnered with us to bring our users 99 free games worth $2,240 USD. Of those, 70 of the games offered in our free games program broke their peak concurrent user records on PC, with an average increase of 25 times their all-time records! This year nearly 700 million free games in total were claimed by players, bringing those titles to new and expanded audiences. Epic Games Store 2022 Year In Review Data Infographic

Self Service Publishing Tools and IARC Age Ratings release!

We are excited to announce the 1.0 launch of our Self-service Publishing Tools coming out of closed beta. These new tools are housed in Epic’s Developer Portal and will allow for exponential growth in our catalog of games and apps. The tools make it easy to bring eligible PC products directly to the Epic Games Store and its huge global audience. Partners who use Self Service Publishing will continue to benefit from our favorable 88%/12% revenue split or can use their own IAP payment solution in their products.

The Epic Games Store is the best place to publish your game and ensure parental controls are in place that take into account your region’s age rating, thanks to our new IARC integration. This global solution gives publishers simple, no-cost access to ESRB, PEGI, GRAC, USK and ASK age ratings, all from our Developer Portal.

In addition to the release of these great new developer features, we are offering no-cost localization services for Epic Games Store product pages (available upon request). For more information, including distribution requirements and toolset features, head over to our announcement blog.

Shipped Epic Games Store Features in 2022

In 2022 our development team was hard at work improving the quality of life for our players and development partners. Here’s a look back at some of our top priority releases:

Player Ratings and Polls allow players to provide direct feedback to the Epic Games Store community for the games they’re playing
Improved Search to find games faster in the Store and your Library
Improved Browse in the Store and your Library with more and better filter options
Library Favorites and Folders to help organize collections and get players to their favorite games faster
Direct Game Page to Library Linking to click from product page to the game in your library, ready to download or play
Improved Storefront Lists
- Top Sellers, Top Rated, Most Played, Top Upcoming Wishlisted
Crossplay Tools for PC released as part of Epic Online Services and are an option for our partners to ensure players across all PC versions can play together, regardless of what store they are purchased from.
Best in class Parental Controls and Cabined Accounts providing a tailored store experience for younger players and their parents focused on managing safety, content access, privacy and purchasing permissions.

What’s planned for Epic Games Store users in 2023?

This year our highest priority is launcher performance, though we also intend to evolve the Epic Games Store in several other meaningful ways. 2023’s priority roadmap includes (but isn’t limited to):

Launcher Performance Improvements focused on substantially faster load times and attention to the end-to-end user experience across the entirety of the launcher.
Support for Subscription Services from third party publishers and live service products.
Content Hubs, in addition to product pages, these hubs will provide a new destination for publishers to share information with users in a robust editorial format about their upcoming and ongoing live-service products, developer news and application updates.
Last, but not least, we’re also excited to confirm that our weekly Free Games Program will continue in 2023!

Games Coming to Epic Games Store

This is set to be a great year for gaming, with huge new titles coming to the Epic Games Store, some of which can be wishlisted right now! Here are a few to look forward to:
EN Most Anticipated Games
If you’ve come by to purchase or download a game or application since we launched the Store back in 2018 – thank you! We’re humbled by the continued support of our users, and we can’t wait to introduce you to a whole slate of exciting games and experiences from many talented development and publishing partners in 2023.