Contents
- The short answer
- The analyst's case: "I don't see how they can recover"
- Epic's rebuttal: the numbers Epic is pointing to
- The money problem: what exclusives actually cost Epic
- Why exclusives didn't crack Steam's lock-in
- What happens to your library if the store scales back
- Scale, for context
- What's still unconfirmed
- FAQ
Epic Games Store isn’t shutting down — Epic hasn’t said it’s scaling back, either. What did happen: on August 23, 2026, Newzoo’s Emmanuel Rosier told PC Gamer he doesn’t see a path back for Epic against Steam. Epic pushed back within days, publishing its own numbers, and neither side has backed down since.
The short answer
The store is losing the argument on Steam’s home turf, according to one analyst. By the measures Epic prefers to cite, it isn’t losing at all.
Emmanuel Rosier, Newzoo’s Director of Market Intelligence, said it on the record: “I don’t really see how they can turn that around, because Steam has become so inevitable.” Named analyst, named firm, direct quote — not an anonymous source.
Epic disagreed publicly. Then Newzoo, Rosier’s own employer, distanced itself from his comments too. Three positions, one story: an analyst who says the store can’t be saved, an Epic executive who says the data says otherwise, and a research firm walking back its own director’s remarks.
The analyst’s case: “I don’t see how they can recover”
Rosier’s argument has two parts. First, a spending-pattern claim: users grab free games on Epic Games Store, then go back to Steam when they’re ready to actually pay for something. Multiple outlets repeated this pattern independently.
Second, an overextension claim. Rosier put it this way: “Epic is facing is that they try to win everywhere… they try to win against Steam, they try to win against Apple, against Google Play, and probably they run out of steam where they cannot fight all these battles at the same time.” That quote is corroborated across multiple outlets, not a single directly-fetched article.
Epic has publicly signaled a store overhaul: new features, UI changes, better game discovery, and Linux support. Rosier’s read on that plan: it may be “too little, too late.”
One example stands out. Lords of the Fallen 2 was set up as an Epic exclusive, ran into strong pushback from players, and the developer moved it to launch on Steam instead — a named, concrete case, not a vague trend.
Epic’s rebuttal: the numbers Epic is pointing to
Epic Games Store VP and GM Martin Keely responded directly: “The data tells a very different story.”
Here’s what Keely cited:
- Third-party game playtime on Epic Games Store hit 2.78 billion hours in 2025 — a record for the store.
- Third-party PC game user spending rose 57% year over year in 2025, reaching a record $400 million.
Those numbers come from Epic itself, via an Epic executive — not an independent audit. They contradict the “store is dying” framing at face value, but they’re a company’s own account of its own performance, not a neutral one.
Newzoo, the firm Rosier works for, added its own disclaimer: his comments “were not supported by Newzoo data or analysis and did not take into account relevant public evidence,” and “should not be treated as Newzoo’s market assessment.”
A company publicly correcting its own director, over a story about a rival, doesn’t happen often.
The money problem: what exclusives actually cost Epic
Set the 2026 argument aside for a moment. The financial history here is not in dispute — it comes from court documents filed during the Apple v. Epic litigation, not analyst commentary.
| Year | EGS loss (est.) | Total / PC revenue | Third-party revenue | Users |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | ~$181 million | ~$680 million | $251 million | 108 million |
| 2020 | ~$273 million | $700 million+ | $265 million | 160 million (31 million daily active) |
| 2021 | ~$139 million | not disclosed | not disclosed | not disclosed |
| 2023 | not disclosed | $950 million | not disclosed | 270 million |
Two more figures from that same court filing: Epic spent at least $444 million on minimum guarantees in 2020 alone — payments made to secure exclusive games, regardless of how those games sold. Wikipedia’s own summary puts combined 2019-2020 losses at “about $400 million,” which doesn’t line up exactly with the individual-year figures above — likely a difference in how each figure was aggregated, not a real contradiction.
None of these numbers are current. They’re the clearest publicly available financial picture, and the newest of them is three years old, the oldest seven. Epic doesn’t publish current profit-and-loss figures for the store, as far as any source here shows.
Why exclusives didn’t crack Steam’s lock-in
Rosier’s own assessment: many of Epic’s exclusive-game deals “weren’t a good investment.”
The mechanism keeping users on Steam gets named specifically, not just gestured at:
- Reviews
- Wishlists
- Friends lists
- Playtime tracking
- Workshop mod support
- Community hubs
Those are switching costs, not brand loyalty, and a free game doesn’t erase any of them. It’s the pattern PC Gamer’s and TechPowerUp’s sourcing both point to: people take the free game, then buy what they actually want on Steam.
Fortnite is named as the revenue engine still propping up the store. There’s also a vaguer claim in this coverage that Epic is planning some shift in its relationship with Unreal Engine — the sourcing doesn’t make clear what that means, so treat it as unconfirmed.
What happens to your library if the store scales back
Here’s the question none of the coverage above actually answers: if Epic Games Store shrinks, what happens to the games you already own there?
No source in this story addresses it — not Rosier, not Epic, not Newzoo. That’s the real gap: not whether the analyst is right, but whether your library is safe.
The same goes for Epic exclusives already locked to the platform. Nobody’s addressed it.
For context, digital storefronts don’t typically vanish overnight. Steam’s own market position has looked close to unshakeable since well before this dispute, with a widely cited “about 75%” digital distribution share. That figure is from a 2013 estimate, not current — but it shows how entrenched Steam already was, years before Epic Games Store even launched.
Scale, for context
A few more numbers to size up where the store actually sits, none of them tied to the 2026 dispute directly:
- 2026 monthly peak users: about 78 million, per one source — though how that peak figure was calculated isn’t explained in the original reporting.
- 2023 total user base: 270 million (cumulative, not monthly active).
- 2023 PC game revenue: $950 million.
- Steam’s cited digital distribution share: “about 75%” — again, a 2013 estimate, not current data.
What’s still unconfirmed
A few things this story leans on that aren’t nailed down:
- The exact annual operating cost of Epic’s free-games program. No source gives a number.
- Current monthly active users and current market share versus Steam. What’s circulating in some outlets wasn’t independently verifiable and isn’t included here.
- What Epic’s plan actually means when it comes to Unreal Engine — the sourcing is vague on this point.
- How and where Newzoo issued its disclaimer distancing itself from Rosier — the exact channel and date weren’t found.
FAQ
Is the Epic Games Store shutting down? No. Nothing in this story says Epic Games Store is closing. An analyst said he doesn’t see how it recovers competitively against Steam. Epic disputed that reading and published its own 2025 usage numbers.
Did Newzoo say Epic Games Store is dying? Not as an official company position. Rosier, a Newzoo director, said it in an interview. Newzoo then stated publicly that his remarks weren’t backed by Newzoo data or analysis and shouldn’t be treated as the company’s market assessment.
Will I lose my Epic Games Store library if the store struggles? Unknown. None of the reporting around this dispute addresses what happens to existing purchases or exclusive titles if Epic scales the store back. There’s no confirmation either way.
How much has Epic lost running the Epic Games Store? Historical court-filed figures show roughly $181 million in 2019, an estimated $273 million in 2020, and an estimated $139 million in 2021, plus at least $444 million spent on exclusivity minimum guarantees in 2020. There’s no confirmed figure for 2022 through 2026.