The PC Storefront War Is Over and the Loser Refuses to Admit It

Patch Notes – Issue 006

Epic Games Store – Status: Profitable on paper. Strategically inconclusive.

The Epic Games Store launched on December 6, 2018 with a clear theory: offer developers a better revenue split (88/12 versus Steam’s 70/30), pay for exclusivity deals to drive players onto the platform, and give away free games to build an install base. By 2023, Epic declared the store profitable for the first time.

What that profitability required was scaling back the very things that had defined the strategy. The free games programme became less aggressive. Exclusivity deals, which had included Metro Exodus, Borderlands 3, and Control among others, were winding down. The store that had been loud about disrupting Steam was quietly settling into a secondary position.

Steam’s monthly active user count sat at approximately 132 million in 2024. Epic has not published an equivalent figure. Third-party estimates put EGS monthly active users somewhere between 35 and 68 million, with substantial uncertainty because a significant proportion of those accounts were created solely to claim free games and have never purchased anything. Engagement metrics – time spent, games launched, social interactions – are not released, which tells you something.

The exclusivity strategy had a clear theory of behaviour: force players onto the platform for the games they want, and they will stay. They did not stay. Players installed the launcher, ran the exclusive, finished it, and went back to Steam. The friction of using a second launcher was lower than Epic assumed. The stickiness of Steam’s social layer, library management, community features, and Workshop integration was higher. Tim Sweeney has since argued publicly that the real goal was industry-wide revenue share reform, and that Valve lowering its cut for high-earning titles to 25% constitutes a win. That is a reasonable reframe. It is also a reframe.

Steam – Status: Dominant. Has not materially changed its behaviour in six years.

Valve’s response to two billion dollars of competitive pressure was essentially nothing. They lowered the revenue cut for games earning more than $10 million, they launched Remote Play Together, and they kept doing Steam sales on the same schedule they always had. The platform in 2024 is recognisably the same as in 2018, with more games and more users.

Steam hit a peak of 33.68 million concurrent users in January 2024, a new record at the time. Approximately 14,000 new games were released on the platform in 2023 alone. Discovery on a platform of that scale is a genuine and largely unsolved problem, but it has not produced any structural threat to Steam’s overall position.

The one area of genuine competitive pressure is not EGS at all. It is Xbox Game Pass on PC. A subscription model that includes day-one releases from a major publisher represents a different value proposition to anything Steam offers. Valve has no equivalent product. So far this has not produced visible damage to Steam’s numbers, but it is the only angle that looks structurally interesting over a ten-year horizon. Epic never found that angle. They competed on price and catalogue and lost on both.

GOG – Status: Niche. Honest about it.

GOG has roughly 100 staff and a clearly defined position: DRM-free games, a preservation focus, and a catalogue that includes a large number of titles that cannot be found legally anywhere else. It does not compete with Steam for mass-market dominance and has not tried to for years. The GOG Galaxy client is genuinely useful as a library aggregator. The store is where you go for Planescape: Torment and Baldur’s Gate and System Shock 2 in working condition. That is a real and specific service.

GOG’s challenge is that the DRM-free argument has weakened as more developers have released DRM-free versions on Steam, and as the cultural urgency around game ownership has not translated into purchasing behaviour at the scale required to significantly grow market share. The audience that cares most about DRM-free distribution is also the audience most likely to be technically capable of removing DRM themselves. This is not a solvable problem from inside the business.

Known Issues

The storefront war produced one genuine outcome: the standard revenue split across the PC games market is slightly more favourable to developers than it was in 2018. That is worth having. Everything else was expensive noise.

The actual systemic issue is that platform competition in digital distribution is structurally difficult because the switching cost for users is low but the network effects are enormous. Steam’s value is not the software. It is 132 million users, their libraries, their friends lists, their review histories, their hours logged. You cannot buy that with exclusivity deals because the thing you are trying to replicate is not the launcher, it is the accumulated social infrastructure of fifteen years. Epic spent two billion dollars learning this. The lesson was always available for free.