PC market stress signs
- What happened: Commentary points to underperformance in the PC market and higher piracy of ROMs. - The key specific: Analysts note piracy and weak hardware sales leave PC as a thin cushion for Epic's broader plans. - Context/reaction: That underperformance is being used to explain why new storefront strategies struggle to gain traction (x.com).
Epic’s push to build a bigger games storefront is still leaning on a fragile PC base, even after a rebound in 2025 sales. (store.epicgames.com) Epic said players spent $400 million on third-party PC games in its store in 2025, up 57% from 2024, after that same metric fell 18% in 2024 to $255 million. Total PC player spending on the store reached $1.16 billion in 2025, up 6% year over year. (store.epicgames.com 1) (store.epicgames.com 2) The user picture was mixed. Epic reported a record 78 million monthly active users on PC in December 2025, but its average monthly active users for the year slipped 1% to 67 million and average daily active users fell 2% to 31 million, according to Epic figures cited by IGN. (store.epicgames.com) (ign.com) That matters because Epic has spent years trying to turn its store into a second major stop for PC game buying, after launching the Epic Games Store in December 2018 to challenge Valve’s Steam. Six years later, IGN reported that Steam still holds the stronger position with PC players, while Epic is rebuilding its launcher and store interface again. (techcrunch.com) (ign.com) Epic’s own numbers show why the strategy has been hard to scale. The company said free-game promotions drove discovery in 2025, with 662 million titles claimed, and said more than 77% of featured games hit a store record for concurrent users during their giveaway week. (store.epicgames.com) But Epic also said those same giveaways produced a roughly 40% lift in Steam concurrent users for the promoted game, a sign that attention generated on Epic can still spill back to the rival storefront. Epic executive Steve Allison told IGN the company is trying to answer that by making the PC launcher faster and less memory-hungry, with a rebuilt version targeted for June 2026. (store.epicgames.com) (ign.com) Piracy is part of the pressure around the broader PC and game-software market, though the public evidence is uneven and often platform-specific. In July 2025, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said it had seized several game-piracy sites and estimated 3.2 million downloads from one service between February 28 and May 28, 2025, with claimed losses of $170 million. (fbi.gov) Epic has tried to widen the funnel beyond desktop. Its mobile store is now available worldwide on Android and on iPhone and iPad only in the European Union, and Epic says it plans broader iPhone expansion as app-store rules change. (store.epicgames.com) The problem is that the biggest competitor is still getting bigger. Valve’s Steam stats page was updated on April 18, 2026, and third-party trackers have recorded Steam concurrency above 42 million users in early 2026, underscoring how much scale Epic still has to overcome on PC. (store.steampowered.com) (steamdb.info) So the current picture is not a collapse in Epic’s PC store business. It is a business that returned to growth in 2025, but still shows soft engagement, depends heavily on incentives, and operates in a PC market where piracy and Steam’s size keep narrowing the room for a new storefront to break out. (store.epicgames.com) (ign.com)
