In their 2020 Year in Review post, Epic Games teased that a shopping cart was one of the many additions customers should see added to their PC storefront in 2021. This will be news to users and detractors of the Epic Games Store, as the lack of such a basic online retail feature has been the subject of memes aimed at Epic Games since the storefront's reveal and debut in December 2018. Many who still prefer Steam cite missing features such as this as a reason why they prefer to wait out Epic's regular yearlong exclusivity deals and purchase games when they arrive on Valve's Steam or other PC storefronts.
Whiles this is seemingly a large contingent in the world of enthusiasts, that hasn't stopped Epic Games from acquiring a large customer base. In its new blog post summarizing the Epic Games Store in 2020, the company revealed that the active userbase is up 192%, with a peak concurrent user count of 13 million individual users. Monthly active users went from 32 million in 2019 to 56 million in 2020. It's still a long way away from Steam's 120 million monthly active users and record-setting sales figures, and some of this growth can be attributed to gaming trending upward thanks to COVID-19, but it's still an impressive figure for a store going into its third full year of operation.
In the same blog post, Epic goes through what it hopes to bring to the Epic Games Store in the new year. The company starts off by confirming that customers will continue to get free games on the store throughout 2021. On the new features front, they will continue to improve the client's wishlist and social features while also adding widespread support for achievements and individual player profiles. Finally, and most importantly, it hints via emoji that it'll be adding a shopping cart, proving that the feature has even become a meme within Epic Games.
Outside of memes, Epic also states that 2021 will open up the Epic Games Store to more games than ever thanks to a self-publishing option. In its first two years of operation, the store has only added games curated by Epic, with older titles usually coming through the weekly free game selection. A self-publishing model will bring the store more in line with Steam and provide publishers big and small options on where they want their game to end up. It will also ensure that there are more games on the store than any one person can keep up with, which could pose curation problems all its own down the line.
Jokes about shopping carts aside, it does look like the Epic Games store will continue to provide good competition to Steam this year on the PC gaming front. Whether a player is dedicated to GabeN or diving into Fortnite on the regular, it's hard to argue against having more than one place for games to land on PC. When two or more big corporations fight, the end-user generally gets a good deal, and that's come in the form of a renewed Valve pushing new features in Steam and a string of free games on the Epic side of things. One hopes that both of those trends continue for a long time to come.
Source: Epic Games