Skip to main content

Epic Games Store hasn’t made Steam any less popular with players

Half-Life: Alyx Announcement Trailer

Even the Epic Games Store’s collection of exclusives couldn’t diminish the popularity of the gaming store juggernaut Steam. In fact, Valve set a record for its largest concurrent player count ever with hundreds of thousands of players active in Steam-exclusive games over the weekend.

Recommended Videos

Steam hit more than 18.8 million players on February 2, according to the third-party tracking service SteamDB, just a few hours before the Super Bowl began in the United States. The new record is about 300,000 more players than the previous one set in 2018. Just under 6 million of those active players were in the middle of a game when the record was set.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

By the end of the day, the figure had dipped to just over 11.5 million concurrent users. Despite it being Super Bowl Sunday, this drop was not much greater than the day before when it had dipped to 12.3 million users.

The two most-played games were Valve titles themselves. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive peaked at over 784,000 concurrent players over the last 24 hours, while Dota 2 peaked at just under 575,000. Both games are several years old but have loyal player-bases and competitive followings.

how to add games to steam add product to steam
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Steam could attract even more attention from a new first-party release when Half-Life: Alyx arrives in March. Valve’s VR headset, the Index, has seen a surge in popularity, even ahead of Alyx’s release. After the game’s announcement, the headset’s sales doubled, and Valve is struggling to keep it in stock ahead of launch. Despite its $1000 price point, it was the best-selling PC VR headset of Q4 2019

None of this is to say that Epic Games Store hasn’t managed to carve out a slice of the market. The store topped 8.3 million players in November, up almost threefold since February 2019.

PC games exclusive to Epic Games Store include The Division 2, Control, and the upcoming Watch Dogs: Legion. However, many of these are timed exclusives that will come to other platforms after a certain period has elapsed. Metro Exodus, for instance, caused controversy when it launched in early 2019 as an Epic Games Store exclusive despite a previous listing on Steam. It will return to Steam on February 14. Red Dead Redemption II initially released on PC without a Steam version, too, before joining the platform a month later.

Gabe Gurwin
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Gabe Gurwin has been playing games since 1997, beginning with the N64 and the Super Nintendo. He began his journalism career…
Valve has made sharing games on Steam easier than ever
A Steam library filled with custom artwork.

Steam Families is now available to all users, making it easier than ever to share your games library and monitor your child's activity.

The PC gaming platform has had family features for a while, going back to Steam Family Sharing and parental controls like Family View. But Steam Families -- announced in beta in May --  puts them in one hub. It officially went live on Wednesday, and since it's now the weekend, this is a great time to start sharing games.

Read more
A game that’s just about clicking a banana is going viral on Steam
An illustration of a regular banana against an olive green b ackground.

A new game is rising on the Steam most-played charts, and it's not a new battle royale or Call of Duty game. It's a free-to-play clicker game where all you do is click an illustration of a banana.

At the time of this writing, Banana has around 434,000 concurrent players, but it peaked in the past 24 hours at around 480,000. Over the course of the day, it's risen in the charts above Apex Legends, PUBG: Battlegrounds, and Elden Ring, which are all regularly at the top of the Steam player charts. All of this information comes from SteamDB, a third-party site that tracks Steam data.

Read more
How did multiple unannounced games leak through the Epic Games Store?
Final Fantasy 16's cover showcasing its protagonist infront of two demon summons.

In an event not seen since numerous video games leaked through Nvidia GeForce Now, a third-party tool accidentally exposed a bunch of listings on the Epic Games Store. A website called EpicDB featured public pages for a bunch of unannounced titles from Square Enix, Sony, Sega, Saber Interactive, and many other publishers.

While a lot of what people found were codenames Tuesday night, going through the metadata and looking at related files revealed a lot about what they could actually be. The story is a bit confusing, so let's break down exactly what went down, what games leaked, and what steps Epic is already taking to prevent it from happening again.
So, what happened?
EpicDB is an Epic Games Store equivalent of SteamDB, an unofficial database of everything on the digital games platform. Valve doesn't publicly release sales data, but you can glean a lot from SteamDB's charts and lists, which provide a more detailed view of how games are doing on Steam. It's a great way to see if player count is spiking, what has been wishlisted the most, and how games do over multiple years.

Read more