Epic says there are now more than 500 million Epic Games accounts

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Epic Games announced Wednesday that there are now more than 500 million Epic Games accounts. It’s a notable milestone as Epic continues to build the Epic Games Store as a competitor to Steam and bring in new players for titles like Fortnite and Rocket League. Epic didn’t share further details about that 500 million, however, so it’s unclear how many of those accounts represent segments like people that only play Epic’s own games (such as Fortnite) or those who have only used Epic’s store.

The company has put a huge amount of resources behind growing its PC games store — and therefore, getting more people to sign up for accounts — since it launched in December 2018. One document from the Epic v. Apple trial, for example, showed that Epic had $330 million in unrecouped costs in 2020 alone from paying developers to give away their games on its store. Another document showed that more than 7 million people tried the Epic Games Store because of its Grand Theft Auto V giveaway — despite the 8-hour outage that happened because of the freebie. Epic has committed to giving away free games again in 2022, so it seems that the company continues to think the cost is worth it to bring in users.

Epic is also seeing a lot of use of its Unreal Engine developer tools; the company announced that 48 percent of “announced next-gen games” are being built on the platform.