Epic Games Store Customers Spent on Average Just $4 in 2021 - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 02 March 2022 / 6,935 Views
Epic Games has released its 2021 year in review for the Epic Games Store.
There are over 194 million Epic Games Store users on PC, which is 34 million than in 2020. Daily active users peaked at 31.1 million, while peak concurrent users hit 13.2 million. Monthly active users reached a peak of 62 million in December.
There was $840 million spent on games in the Epic Games Store in 2021, which is up 20 percent compared to 2020. Third-party games accounted for 36 percent of sales with over $300 million.
When you take the amount of money spent on games in 2021 and divide it by the number of users you can figure out the average amount spent per users.
The $840 million spent on games divided by the 194 million users means that each user on the Epic Games Store spent just $4.33 in 2021.
View the infographic below:
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Here's one 'customer' happily contributing to lowering the average!
So most people didn't buy anything.
Wait so isn’t $540 million on Epic’s own games (I assume mostly Fortnite)
It would be more interesting to know how much money was spent by the average person that spent any money. We know that a ton of people are going there just for the free games, so that makes this statistic basically useless.
Oof size, Everest!
How does it compare to other platforms?
I only go on Epic Game Stores just to claim the free games and that's it.
I don't think I need the numbers to guess Steam users spend more than $4 on average a year.
While they still made a ton of revenue, that's really low. I don't have an Epic Games Store account. If I did, I would do what most do and use it almost exclusively for the monthly games.
Their number of active users is quite good and although revenue is increasing it still looks very low.
$4 for a whole year? That is incredibly low. Even with just one impulse buy in a sale you are in that area. Did EGS strongly grow in 2021? Because if many of these users were only participating for a few months, that seems more understandable.
If we round last year’s and 2020’s data, we can see an increase of 34 million “PC customers” (+21.25%) for the Epic Games Store. But the average expenditure/accounts has fallen a bit:
Average money spent per user in 2020: ~4,375
Average money spent per user in 2021: ~4,33
If my calculations and data provided are correct, by analyzing the other data we can see that while average money spent/first-party products (in this case Fortnite and Rocket League mtx and full games like Alan Wake Remastered etc.) has risen by ~2.38%, average money spent/third-party stuff dropped by ~6.63%. This is just the average numbers. Total number of users, money spent etc are all up. Whether EGS grew significantly is up to you.
Thanks for your insightful data analysis. Yes, this provides some context and while the user-number increased significantly (17%), that is not by far enough to explain the low per user value. So probably a lot of users only use the free games and nothing else. Still overall Epic makes money and establishes itself in the market, so the interpretation if that is a success can be seen from different angles.
I can’t say I fully understand the hate for EGS’ business model, even though I don’t use it myself.
By that I mean, I get how having timed storefront exclusives is annoying particularly given EGS is generally not as good as Steam, but in terms of the sales-cut income guarantees I can see why it is favoured by devs.
Again, I can see why when 2K, Activision and Ubisoft use it for that reason it doesn’t really fly but for indie devs who can easily go bust if a game underperforms I can’t really hold it against them.
It's annoying because some of us just want to buy the game on our storefront of choice on the same day and not a year later.
The majority of my games are on Steam, so are the features and my friends. I've got some titles on GoG, but that's mostly for old games being DRM Free, but if given the choice out of the all the stores, I'd rather have my games on Steam/GoG, and Epic isn't giving me that option until a year later, and by then I've lost interest and faith in the devs, and instead buy into other games, thus losing me as a customer.
I doubt Acti keeping CoD exclusive to Battlenet has increased their sales/users on PC tenfold or anything, mostly because they've hardly once ever talked about how moving to Battlenet was some net positive for them (Funny enough, just like how Blizz magically stopped talking about total WoW user count, since WoD tanked their sales back in 2014).
Epic is posing as the saviour of the people, when all it does it reduce the number of choice people have while its actions mainly benefit publishers. The only thing Epic is doing to earn the goodwill of people are freebies and ridiculous discount coupons.
If Epic was competing in a manner that respected my ability to choose and/or otherwise acted respectably, I might consider shopping there, but with what Epic is doing now, I'd have to be desperate to buy anything on their service.
