Two years and four months after its inception on December 4, 2018, the Epic Games Store hasn’t done much for its parent company aside from being one of its biggest money losers. This is according to court documents shared by a ResetEra user, which reveal that the fledgling Steam competitor had cost Epic Games approximately $181 million and $273 million in losses in 2019 and 2020, respectively. The implication here is that Epic’s decision to throw truckloads of cash to secure exclusives for its game store isn’t going as well as the company might have hoped—Epic doesn’t expect to make any profit from its digital storefront until 2023 at the earliest.
• Currently EGS has more than 160 million registered users and more than 56 million monthly active users
• EGS has 400 games published by more than 200 developers
• EGS currently supports 29 different currencies and has pricing in more than 190 countries and 30 regions
• EPIC expects EGS to become profitable in 2023
• At present, EGS has not yet achieved profitability because it has increased a lot of costs in order to gain market share
• The 12% distribution amount charged by EGS is sufficient to cover the operating costs of EGS
• EPIC lost approximately US$181 million on EGS in 2019, approximately US$273 million in 2020, and estimated losses of approximately US$139 million in 2021
• Apple uses the application review process to give priority to its own applications to pass the review, and use this to compete against competitors
• Apple does not use all its own rules for its own apps