While Steam arguably holds a monopoly over the PC games market, Epic Games‘ 2025 Year in Review shows that the Epic Games Store managed a strong year in terms of third-party games spending, and a record 78 million monthly active users in December.
These were the top PC games on the platform, by player spending and engagement: Fortnite, Wuthering Waves, Honkai Star Rail, Rocket League, and Genshin Impact.
Yes, all of these are free games, but Epic shows that overall spending rose to $1.16 billion, while the amount spent on third-party games was $400 million. Across the whole year, the Epic Games Store saw an 8% Year-over-Year increase in cross-platform accounts, amounting to nearly 972 million.
How Does This Compare To Steam?
It’s important to note that among all these strong gains in player spending, total gameplay hours dropped by 14% compared to 2024. Now, it might be a bit unfair to compare to Steam, as we already know that Valve is the lead contender in PC games, and by a wide margin. However, it helps to know the numbers to put things into perspective.
According to Alinea Analytics, Valve’s revenue for Steam grew to a whopping $16.2 billion in 2025, up from nearly $15 billion in 2024. It’s important to note that for nearly every game sold on Steam, Valve takes a $30 cut for games that sell under $10 million. That’s the vast majority of games, by the way, and Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has some strong thoughts about these wide profit margins.
Regardless, it still looks like Epic’s main revenue is from in-game spending on free-to-play games. This is mainly because while gamers do buy third-party games on EGS (FC 26 and Alan Wake II sold well), the vast majority of gamers prefer to buy third-party games on Steam. For example, out of the 12 million Arc Raiders copies sold, reports suggest that nearly 7 million of those sales came from Steam. The dominance is in full effect, and while developers and competitors feel like Steam is controlling the market with aggressive practices, the player choice is still obvious.
