Analyst Says Epic Games Store Can’t Recover Against Steam — “I Don’t See How They Can Turn That Around”

Epic has been pouring money and effort into the Epic Games Store for years — free game giveaways, a better revenue split for developers, legal battles against Apple and Google, exclusive titles, and now a ground-up launcher rebuild. Despite all of that, one industry analyst is calling it: the Epic Games Store is not catching Steam, and at this point, it probably never will.

Emmanuel Rosier, director of market intelligence at Newzoo, gave what might be the most honest public assessment of Epic’s storefront situation in recent memory. Speaking to PC Gamer, he said plainly, “I don’t see how they can recover at this point.” That’s a pretty brutal take for a platform that’s spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to crack a market Steam has held for over two decades — and it’s hard to look at the numbers and argue with him.

The Numbers Tell the Story Epic Doesn’t Want to Tell

The market share gap between Steam and the Epic Games Store in 2026 is not close. Steam controls roughly 74% of the global PC digital distribution market by revenue, a figure that has barely moved since EGS launched in 2018 with its developer-friendly 88/12 revenue split designed specifically to pull publishers away from Valve. Epic’s store, by comparison, sits somewhere between 3% and 8% depending on who’s measuring and how.

Steam peaked at over 42 million concurrent users in early 2026 — an all-time platform record hit without any single blockbuster launch driving it. The platform’s monthly active user count sits around 132 million. Epic has reported 78 million monthly active users at its December 2025 peak, which sounds substantial until you look at how those users actually behave on the platform. The engagement patterns are telling: a huge portion of EGS users log in to grab a free game and leave. Many don’t even install what they claim.

Epic’s catalog gap is another structural problem that doesn’t get talked about enough. Steam hosts over 135,000 titles. The Epic Games Store carries roughly 6,000. That’s not a gap you close with a faster launcher — it reflects years of a different acquisition and curation strategy, and it means that when someone wants to find and buy a specific game, Steam is almost always where they end up.

Epic Games Store

Free Games: A Clever Strategy That Mostly Sends Players to Steam

The free game giveaway program has been Epic’s most visible consumer-facing move since the store launched, and it’s genuinely impressive in scope. Epic has given away hundreds of titles, including some significant releases, at no cost to the player. The program drives user acquisition — that’s real. But Rosier’s point is that it doesn’t drive the kind of engagement that actually builds a competing platform.

“The Epic Games Store, they get players by giving free games, but people just go, they log in, they get the free games, they don’t even play them,” Rosier said. “It’s almost like collecting games rather than actually playing them.”

That’s an observation a lot of gamers would recognize from their own behavior. The EGS free game library functions more like a digital hoard than an active gaming community. And here’s the part that really stings for Epic: Rosier pointed out that a free game giveaway on EGS can sometimes end up boosting that game’s sales on Steam, because the exposure reminds people they want to play it — and they’d rather have it in their Steam library than their EGS one. Epic’s generosity ends up advertising for its competitor.

Fighting Too Many Battles at Once

Rosier’s other major point is about strategic overreach. Epic hasn’t just been fighting Steam — it’s been simultaneously battling Apple in the App Store dispute, fighting Google over the Play Store, and trying to establish its launcher as a platform on PC, console, and mobile all at once. That’s a lot of fronts for any company, even one backed by Fortnite’s revenue.

“The challenge I think Epic is facing is that they try to win everywhere in the past few years,” Rosier said. “They try to win against Steam, they try to win against Apple, against Google Play, and probably they run out of steam on where they cannot fight all these battles at the same time.”

The Apple and Google legal battles in particular have consumed significant attention, money, and public goodwill. Those fights have produced mixed outcomes, and while Epic scored some meaningful legal points — particularly in Europe around App Store access — the distraction from building the actual storefront experience has been real.

What the Launcher Overhaul Actually Includes

To be fair to Epic, they’re not standing still. The company unveiled a significant 12-month roadmap at Unreal Fest Chicago in June 2026, and the scope of what they’re building is genuinely substantial for a platform that’s been criticized for feeling years behind Steam on basic features.

The headline improvement is Launcher V2 — a complete architectural rebuild that Epic says will load up to five times faster on a cold start and around 6.5 times faster when returning from the system tray. For anyone who’s endured the current EGS launcher’s glacial load times, that would be a real quality-of-life upgrade. The storefront is also being redesigned with a more personalized homepage, clearer categories, and stronger recommendations.

Beyond performance, Epic is finally adding features that Steam has had for years:

• User-written reviews — One of the most consistently requested features since EGS launched in 2018, finally making it in.
• Player profiles and avatars — Adding identity and social presence to accounts that currently feel largely anonymous.
• Cross-platform text and voice chat — Building social infrastructure that goes beyond just launching games.
• Improved library management tools — Giving players better ways to organize what they own.
• Publisher-funded coupons — Expanding the promotional tools available to developers on the platform.
• Cross-platform library — Linking PC and mobile game collections under a single account, planned for autumn 2026.

Epic is also leaning on its biggest asset in a new way — tying Fortnite cosmetics to game purchases on the EGS, giving buyers a reward that no other storefront can offer because no other storefront has Fortnite. Confirmed launch partners for that program include Capcom, miHoYo, Pearl Abyss, and several others.

The Problem: Most of This Should Have Existed in 2020

Here’s the uncomfortable truth underneath all of this: the Epic Games Store launched in December 2018, and user reviews, robust player profiles, and a fast launcher are features that Steam had before most of today’s EGS users started gaming. The overhaul is real, and some of the improvements sound genuinely good. But playing catch-up on features that Steam users have taken for granted for a decade isn’t the same thing as building a platform that gives people a reason to switch.

Rosier’s point isn’t that Epic is building badly — it’s that Steam’s advantages compound over time. The sheer size of its library, the depth of its community features like Workshop and Trading Cards, the trust users have built up over years, and the inertia of having everything in one place create switching costs that a faster launcher and free games simply don’t overcome. “Steam has become so inevitable,” as Rosier put it — and that’s the wall Epic is still trying to figure out how to climb.

Fortnite Remains Epic’s Real Bright Spot

Rosier was noticeably more optimistic when the conversation shifted from Epic as a storefront operator to Epic as a game developer. Specifically, he highlighted Fortnite as a genuine success story in a way that the EGS is not.

The current Fortnite season has leaned hard into crossover cosmetics — Sonic the Hedgehog and Pac-Man alongside Kingdom Hearts’ Sora and Persona 5’s Joker sharing the same battle royale island. It sounds chaotic on paper and somehow works in practice. “You can see they put a lot of thought in Fortnite right now,” Rosier said. “They are doing everything they can, and I think it’s working better when you look at the state of Fortnite today compared to six months or one year ago.”

Fortnite reportedly has around 110 million monthly active users across platforms, and its cultural reach is genuinely unmatched in the live-service space. If Epic’s future is less about winning the PC storefront war and more about maximizing what Fortnite can be as a platform unto itself — a content hub, a crossover canvas, a social space — that might actually be the smarter play than continuing to pour resources into catching Steam.

The Xbox Partnership Gives EGS a New Angle

One piece of the picture that could shift the calculus at least slightly is Epic’s planned presence on the next Xbox console. Epic Games Store GM Steve Allison confirmed earlier this year that Xbox had welcomed the idea of including EGS on its hardware, with Epic planning to be there “on day one.” Getting the storefront onto a major console — especially as Microsoft continues blurring the line between PC and Xbox — gives Epic a foothold that’s genuinely different from the PC-only battle it’s been fighting against Steam.

Whether that changes the overall trajectory of the EGS as a PC storefront is a separate question. Consoles and PC have different user habits, different expectations, and different competitive dynamics. But it’s the most interesting new development in Epic’s platform strategy in a while, and it’s worth watching how that integration actually plays out when the next Xbox hardware arrives.

The Verdict: Good Features, Wrong Timeline

The Epic Games Store in 2026 is meaningfully better than it was in 2021. The launcher overhaul is real, the features being added are ones players actually want, and the Fortnite cosmetic tie-in is a clever lever that nobody else has access to. None of that is nothing.

But Rosier’s assessment holds up when you look at the trajectory. Steam hasn’t stood still either — it continues adding features, its library keeps growing, and its user engagement numbers keep climbing to new records. The gap in market share hasn’t meaningfully closed in eight years of Epic trying. At some point, the question stops being “can Epic catch Steam?” and starts being “what does a successful EGS actually look like if it’s not in first place?” Epic may need to answer that question before it can figure out where to go next.

For more gaming industry news, check out our piece on the class action lawsuit against Twitch and Amazon over AI training, or see what’s happening with Arc Raiders pausing Expeditions until 2027.