"Lower than our growth expectations at launch." That's how Epic global comms director Liz Markman described the Epic Games Store's performance metrics to the Los Angeles Times, and it's a remarkably candid admission from a company that has spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars trying to chip away at Steam's dominance.
The Los Angeles Times report, published April 13, is the clearest picture yet of what many players have suspected for a while: the Epic Games Store functions, for a large chunk of its user base, as a free game dispenser. Claim the weekly freebie, close the launcher, open Steam.
What former employees actually said
Two former Epic employees told the Los Angeles Times that this pattern is real and documented internally. Players show up for the free games, claim them, and then immediately return to Valve's platform. The result is a library full of games nobody asked for sitting in accounts that rarely get opened again.
Here's the thing: that's not a new observation from outside critics. It's coming from people who worked there.
Epic reported 78 million monthly active users in 2025, alongside $400 million earned from non-Epic titles that same year. Those numbers sound significant until you frame them against what the company originally projected when it launched the store and started throwing money at exclusives and free game giveaways.
The rushed rollout problem
The Los Angeles Times report also points to a recurring issue at Epic: a tendency to ship fast and figure out the rest later. The company reportedly spent millions on contractors to get its 2024 mobile game store app out the door in just seven months.
Seven months is not a lot of runway for a platform product. The people quoted in the report suggest this kind of velocity is less a feature of Epic's culture and more a symptom of pressure to keep pace with ambitions that keep expanding before the previous ones are finished.
danger
Epic is now working to merge its PC gaming storefront and mobile gaming app into a single unified platform across devices. Whether that consolidation fixes the retention problem or just adds more surface area to manage is the open question.
The Fortnite dependency and what comes next
None of this exists in isolation from Fortnite. Bloomberg reported recently that Epic is developing a new extraction shooter alongside Disney as part of a $1.5 billion partnership. The project is clearly meant to recapture the cultural momentum that Fortnite generated, but Epic's track record with side ventures is mixed at best.
The company has bought and sold Bandcamp. It acquired ArtStation. These moves looked like diversification at the time and ended up as distractions. The question hanging over the Disney extraction shooter is whether it becomes the next Fortnite or the next item on a long list of ambitious projects that didn't quite land.
What makes the stakes higher now is the workforce situation. Epic laid off over 1,000 employees last year following an unexpected drop in Fortnite engagement, a round of cuts that included workers dealing with serious personal circumstances. The company's ability to execute on its unified platform vision and the Disney collaboration is being tested at a moment when its internal capacity is smaller than it was.
Steam's advantage is not just features
The key here is that Steam's hold on PC gaming isn't purely about features or library size. It's about habit. Players have years of friends lists, achievement histories, wishlists, and purchase records on Valve's platform. Competing with that requires more than free games and a better revenue split for developers.
Epic has tried exclusives, tried aggressive giveaways, tried developer-friendly terms. The 78 million monthly active user figure suggests the platform has real reach. But reach and retention are different things, and the former employees quoted this week are pointing directly at the gap between them.
For the latest gaming news and analysis, check out gaming news on our site as the Epic Games Store's next moves take shape over the coming months.
