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[Thick Thighs Save Lives]

It's that time again! With 2024 already in high gear for both Epic Games and the Epic Games Store, we're going to take a quick look back at 2023, and share more on what's to come this year with our most anticipated new features and releases.

This community of developers, publishers, players, and creators continues to grow, and we're proud to be a part of it. There are now over 270 million Epic Games Store PC users, an increase of 40M from 2022. This makes a total of 804M Epic cross-platform accounts. In 2023 Daily Active Users peaked at 36.1M, and Monthly Active Users reached 75M users – up from last year's 68M.

Our catalog expanded significantly in 2023, with publishers and developers bringing over 1,300 new PC titles to the store. The Epic Games Store now offers over 2900 titles, increasing the games available to our audience by 88% since 2022. Players spent $310M on 3rd Party applications, down 13% year over year. Including Epic's own games, players spent over $950M in 2023, up 16% from 2022.

The Epic Games Store Free Games program continues to thrive, as we continued to partner with a variety of talented developers and publishers to bring our users 86 free games last year, worth over $2,000 USD total. More than 580 million free games in total were claimed this year, bringing those titles to new and expanded audiences.

Epic Games Store Features Shipped in 2023​

Last year, our dev team was hard at work, improving quality of life for both our players and our development partners. Here's a look back at some of our top priority releases:

• We significantly improved launcher performance, reducing loading time to a third of the prior load time according to benchmarks from Q1 2023 for 95% of users.
• Self Publishing Tools launched, making it easier than ever to release your game on the Epic Games Store.
• Epic Rewards became available, offering 5% rewards earned on all purchases made, redeemable against everything currently available on the store. Throughout the year, we boosted those Rewards up to 10% during our key Epic Games Store sales, which we plan to continue in 2024. Our goal is to make Epic Rewards one of the best loyalty programs in the industry.
• We introduced Epic First Run, a program that empowers developers to keep 100% of their net revenue in their first six months of exclusivity on the Epic Games Store.
• Discount Price Management Tools have given publishers direct access to the pricing of their catalog, allowing them to create more value for players outside of our own hosted sales.
• Experience Detail Pages have allowed us to create dedicated pages for experiences within games (LEGO Fortnite, for example), and have built a foundation for library organization, allowing users to launch directly into their preferred experience, and better manage their library

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What's planned for the Epic Games Store in 2024?​

In 2023, we focused heavily on the back-end developments for the Epic Games Store in order to deliver our partners some highly requested features. While we still have many developer-focused features to ship, in 2024 we are shifting the majority of our attention to improving game discovery, and the player experience overall. Here are some of our top priorities for the 2024 roadmap:

• A wholly new Download Manager is coming in early 2024. As expected, you will be able to control timing with updates, schedule downloads, reorder your queue, and more.
• We are making significant improvements to Offline Mode, including the ability to deliberately switch to an offline state, a smoother launcher experience with clear error information, and improved authentication flows for users with limited connectivity.
• Social Improvements: Let's make your friends list more meaningful, and give you more options for communicating with your friends.
• Pre-loading for pre-purchases.
• Subscription Support: This will let developers and publishers with their own subscription service bring them to the Epic Games Store. Crucially, you will also be able to earn Rewards with subscriptions purchased on the Epic Games Store.
• Dynamic Bundles: Want to take advantage of a great bundle of content, but already own some of the items? You'll be able to do so without losing out on the cost savings.
• …and launch on iOS in Europe!

Update on Epic's return to iOS in Europe: Developer account secured!​

We've received our Apple Developer Account and will start developing the Epic Games Store on iOS soon thanks to the new Digital Markets Act. We plan to launch in 2024. Epic Games Sweden AB will operate the mobile Epic Games Store and Fortnite in Europe, with the Store team leading development.

Epic Games Sweden has 3 studios and 60+ employees.

Games Coming to the Epic Games Store in 2024​

2023 was an incredible year for games, and 2024 is set to be another great year with exciting new titles coming to the Epic Games Store. You can already add some of these to your Wishlist! Here are a few to look forward to:

https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/news/epic-games-store-2023-year-in-review

 

[SolarFry]

I feel like they should've caught up a bit with steam by now. It still looks so barebones. I've bought some stuff though during their sales, because of the coupons they add to the discounts.

 

[Magic Carpet]

The UI has gotten much faster. The library used to crawl.

I recently finished the free Guardians of the Galaxy and have qued up several more of the free games that have enlarged the back log.
I ALMOST bought Avatar Pandora at the end of the year but I think it's too expensive.

They need to put in features beyond just selling games.

Steam lets me play the free Tomb Raider games using a wireless PS5 controller When I launch the Epic Games through Steam.
Come on Epic, you need to get these type of features native to your store.

 

[T-Cake]

Pretty much gone from logging in once a week to claim the free games to every day now as I play Fall Guys. Not really using it other than that, the weekly freebies are just sitting there...

 

[NoLootBoxDev]

I only purchased 2 games last year, due to discounts and coupons. It is good to have multiple stores and such. I go for the best price, not due to feelings that "one store is more popular than the other"