The Epic Games Store ended 2025 with a year of growth, more overall spending, and a bigger presence in the PC gaming market. Epic’s 2025 Year in Review showed that the platform kept growing its user base, and third-party game expenditure reached all-time highs, even if there were still arguments over how to keep users engaged and make profits.
Epic Games Store 2025: A New Spending Milestone
Epic stated that in 2025, players spent a total of $1.16 billion on the Epic Games Store. This was a steady 6 percent growth from 2024. This number includes all PC purchases, both first-party and third-party games.
The most interesting number was the big rise in spending on third-party games, which was more than the total. Epic said that players spent a record $400 million on third-party PC games, which is a 57 percent increase from the previous year. This is the most money that has ever been spent on these games on the platform.
Player Growth and Engagement Trends
An encouraging amount of interest from PC gamers was reflected in the store’s user activity. The number of people using personal computers increased to almost 317 million, according to figures collected by Epic, from over 295 million a year before. Another record for the site was reached in December 2025 with 78 million monthly active users.
Players logged 6.65 billion hours of gaming in 2025, which is a huge total across the store. Within that, third-party titles accounted for almost 2.78 billion hours, suggesting that these games managed to attract substantial engagement despite a decrease in total hours compared to the previous year.
The Impact of the Free Games Program
Epic’s long-running free games program was still a key part of the platform’s strategy. In 2025, the store gave away 100 free games that users claimed 662 million times. Many of these freebies had the highest levels of engagement ever, which increased user activity and drew attention to partner games. In other situations, games that were free on the Epic Games Store also got more traffic on other platforms like Steam.
Fortnite, Grand Theft Auto V, and Hogwarts Legacy were some of the top sellers on the Epic storefront. This shows that people still love recognised franchises, even when new and exciting games come out.
Developer-Friendly Policies Driving Momentum
Epic has continued to highlight developer freedom by offering various arrangements for revenue sharing. For instance, in 2025, the shop included choices that let developers keep a bigger share of their profits as long as they stayed below specific levels. These programs are meant to bring in more developers and help create a more stable environment for games of all sizes.
Some people have said that these regulations will lead to less daily engagement and lower profits, but they are part of Epic’s plan to make its platform stronger as both a competitive marketplace and a partner to creators.
The 2025 performance shows that Epic’s digital store has been growing and doing well. The platform looks like it will be able to keep up its momentum because third-party expenditure is at an all-time high, and user engagement is growing. As Epic keeps adding new features and changing its community offers, PC gamers may find and play new games in new ways in the coming year.
