Epic Games Store Hits 78M MAU as Former Staff Say Freebies Send Players Back to Steam

Epic Games Store reported 78 million monthly active users and $400 million in revenue from non-Epic games in 2025, but the linked report says former Epic employees still see a basic retention problem: players claim free games, then go back to Steam. The Reddit post landed in r/pcgaming on Apr 14 and reached 4,384 points with 920 comments at crawl time, making it one of the strongest PC storefront discussions in the seven-day window.

Store metrics and the gap

The numbers matter because they show Epic is no longer just a launcher experiment. According to the report, Epic described the store as profitable and said it had tens of millions of monthly active users last year. The same piece also cites Epic global communications director Liz Markman saying those metrics were lower than the company's launch-growth expectations.

Reported monthly active users in 2025: 78 million

Reported 2025 revenue from non-Epic games: $400 million

Core complaint from former staff: free claims do not reliably become paid store habits

Primary comparison point in the thread: Steam remains the default PC library for many players

The source report, citing the Los Angeles Times, frames the free-game strategy as useful for traffic but weaker as a long-term habit builder. That distinction is important for developers and publishers because a large launcher audience is less valuable if users only open it once a week to redeem a giveaway and then buy, mod, review, and play elsewhere.

Epic's next plan is not simply more free games. The article says the company is trying to tie its PC storefront and mobile app into a wider cross-device platform. It also points to pressure around rushed initiatives, including a 2024 mobile store app pushed out in seven months with contractor spending, and to the broader $1.5 billion Disney partnership around Epic's ecosystem.

The r/pcgaming response was not just about disliking a launcher. The large comment count shows readers treated this as a platform economics story: how much a giveaway user is worth, whether exclusives and free games can change a library habit, and why Steam's installed community features remain hard to dislodge. For now, the concrete takeaway is that Epic has scale, revenue, and profitability, but the store still has to prove that free traffic can become durable PC purchasing behavior.