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NeoGAFs Kent Brockman
Epic Games Store 2021 Year in Review
Read the Epic Games Store Year in Review for 2021! Numerical stats about customers, creators, publishers, revenue and more. Also a list of released features!
www.epicgames.com
With 2022 underway, we can look back on the last year of the Epic Games Store and share what happened along the way. Just as we did last year, we’ve looked at all of the data and gathered it together for a retrospective. The Epic Games Store continued to grow in 2021 and we’re excited about what we have in store for 2022.
We’re proud to be part of a growing community of developers, publishers, players, and creators who made 2021 another humbling year for us. There are now over 194 million Epic Games Store PC users, an increase of 34M from 2020. Daily active users peaked at 31.1M, and peak concurrent users reached 13.2M. December’s monthly active users peak reached 62M users, an increase of 11% from last year’s peak of 56M.
Players bought more games and played them for longer in 2021. We now have 917 titles for sale on the Epic Games Store, nearly doubling what we had available to customers in 2020. About $840M was spent through the store in 2021, up 20% from 2020. Third-party games represented 36% of all sales with more than $300M in player spending, a 12% increase from 2020.
We continued to give away free games each week. Many developers and publishers collaborated with us over the year to give away 89 free games worth $2,120. Over 765 million free games were claimed by players, bringing those titles to a new audience. 76 free games broke their peak concurrent user records on PC, with an average of 13 times their all-time records! That’s incredible engagement.
This year's holiday sale was bigger than ever. Over 31M people participated in the event, snagging over 159 million items during the event, a 14% increase over Holiday Sale 2020.
If you played a game from the Epic Games Store in 2021, you were part of a community that spent 6.2 billion hours in-game. We hope you had fun.
Shipped Store Features in 2021
By far the most anticipated feature for the store was the Shopping Cart, which we released in December. Players can now have up to 50 items in their cart at any moment. We also shipped Epic Achievements and added an Achievements Profile Page for players to track their progress. So far, 25 titles have added achievement support.In addition, we also made the following updates:
- Updated navigation to easily find everything the Epic Games Store has to offer as well as a new way to quickly launch into your most recently played games.
- Social Panel improvements with improved Presence to see what your friends are playing.
- New views for discovery of New Releases, Top Sellers and Coming Soon as well as Categories/Genres for products on the store.
- Improved Wishlist support with optional email notifications to never miss when your next favorite game is available.
- Added Epic Games wallet for US & Canadian customers, letting players load money directly into their Epic Games account, allowing for quick and easy payments.
- Improved product pages that allow more information and media to be reviewed prior to adding to wishlist or adding to cart.
- New Epic Games Store Newsletter Email (sign up in your profile settings).
- Support for 43 currencies, with 13 new currencies added in 2021.
Developer and Publisher Improvements Coming in 2022
Last year, we talked about improving the Epic Games Store’s publishing tools, with the desire to eventually provide complete self-publishing tools to developers and publishers using the platform. We took a huge step in that direction in August when we launched our Publishing Tools in a successful closed Beta.We welcomed hundreds of new titles to the Epic Games Store in our Closed Alpha and Closed Beta Programs for these new Self Publishing tools. Epic Games Store partners can expect a full release in 2022, which will make the process of launching a game on the store more efficient and seamless. Players on Epic Games Store will benefit by having more great games to choose from as we continue to grow the catalog of games available on the store.
What’s planned for Epic Games Store players in 2022?
First up, we’re excited to confirm that weekly Free Games will continue in 2022.Epic Achievements were the first step to bringing fleshed-out player profiles to the store. Profiles will give players a place to see all of their achievements in one place, track their playtime across their library, and more.
We’ve heard a lot of feedback from players regarding Library and Download management, and we’re going to be actively addressing those in the coming year. That includes the ability to prioritize and queue selected games for downloads, more options to help you filter and organize your library, letting you see more of your games in the library view, and the functionality to view your library outside the launcher.
Plus so much more:
- Continued iteration on social features including voice on platform with game agnostic parties
- Community features starting with user driven Ratings and Polls
- Game Hubs to stay up to date on game updates and news from publishers on the games you own or follow
- Expanding Epic Wallet to the rest of the world
- Continued improvements to launcher speed and performance
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