There is some good news for those who love PC gaming freebies going into 2021. The Epic Game Store just published its 2020 Year in Review and as well as a few paragraphs boasting of its penetration, engagement, and platform feature development last year it confirmed that "weekly free games are going to continue on the Epic Games Store in 2021".
On the growth of customer engagement, Epic says that there are now 160 million registered users of its online PC store. Many of these will have signed up for the generous freebies that have been doled out throughout the year. However, a better test of a platform's success must be the average daily users that are active. Providing transparency for this metric, Epic says that daily active users are up 192 per cent to 31.3 million daily active players, with a peak concurrent user count of 13 million players in 2020 (up from 7 million in 2019). Furthermore, monthly active users in December rose from 32 million in 2019 to 56 million.
Going by those numbers the EGS doesn't just have lots of vultures descending upon it to grab the free games for a rainy day before disappearing. The active users tally is sizable, and the concurrent users peak of 13 million is nothing to be ashamed about when Steam's record for this metric only entered the 20 million+ region in 2020, though is now touching 25 million quite frequently.
As a newer digital store, Epic is trying hard to bolster not just its stock but platform niceties which make using it convenient and comfortable. In 2020, it says it has added the following features for improved quality of experience: wish-listing, mod support, storefront visual improvements (discover, browse, carousel), open critic reviews, self-service refunds, new currencies, direct carrier billing in some countries, offline sign-in, launcher improvements and others.
Moving into 2021, Epic promises more store feature improvements, and the biggest changes will come to wishlist Improvements, a social overhaul, achievements, and player profiles.
No big name freebies are teased for 2021, but they often fall around the sales and holiday periods and if anything major gets scheduled I will either write about it in the news or add a post to the freebies forum.
