Epic’s plans for its game store include launching on the next Xbox

Plus: Horses' Epic Games Store roadblock, revisited. And how EGS did in 2025.

Epic Games has plans. Sometimes they just take a while to happen.

That’s what Steve Allison, longtime head of the Fortnite-maker’s digital marketplace, the Epic Games Store, told me when we spoke earlier this week.

“If you look at our announcement in 2018, we said we plan to come to mobile as soon as we can,” he said. (Pretty much. Technically, they predicted a 2019 mobile launch.)

“It just took a long time,” Allison told me.

After a couple of well-publicized legal battles with mobile giants Apple and Google Epic launched the Epic Games Store on mobile (in many markets, not all) in 2024.

This week, Allison was telling me some key Epic Games Store 2025 stats:

• 67 million average monthly users for the Epic Games Store in 2025. He wagers that’s a little under half of Steam’s count (but, he calculates, Epic generates only 10% of the player spending that Steam does; “so we’ve got to work on conversion.”)

• a 16% conversion rate, on average, of people who grab games from EGS’ popular free game giveaways and then at some point pay for something in the store

• a record $400 million in revenue in 2025 from third-party game sales on EGS

And he was talking plans:

• …to bring the store to more markets (EGS mobile on iOS in Japan, EGS on mobile in Brazil, etc)

• …to add more social features (forums!)

• …to make it easy to switch from EGS for PC to EGS for mobile

• …to improve the store’s game launcher, in May or June:

“We’re ripping out the guts. We’re replacing the guts with modern guts. That are faster, it won’t have like a two second lag on your refresh, it won’t take as much system resources in your tray, all that stuff’s underway.”

All good, but I was curious about some other plans, like the ones Epic boss Tim Sweeney alluded to when he told me last year that he’d like to bring Epic Games Store to consoles (just as he’d wanted to bring them to mobile), but wasn’t going to sue anyone over it.

How was that going, I wondered, noting that Epic Games Store isn’t even in the store launcher for last year’s ROG Xbox Ally X?

That Xbox-branded Windows-based portable offers quick access to the Xbox marketplace, the Ubisoft store and Steam. It unifies their game libraries for the user, and it offers a glimpse of Microsoft’s vision of multiple storefronts on one gaming device.

Regarding the Ally X, Allison said, they plan to get EGS on there, just were busy. “We haven’t built the apps for those that we need to build,” he said. Epic’s next priority is to improve overall player experience for the store and launcher. And then “I would love to see us on the handhelds.”

As for that next home console from Microsoft, which Xbox leadership has said would be more open, here’s Allison:

“We definitely plan to be on the new hardware for Xbox, because, unless their policy or stance on it changes, they are telling us they’re going to welcome that. And we’re going be there, like, on day one. That will probably require us to build in whatever their requirements are, some sort of software to support that.”

And the other two consoles? Well, that led to this amusing exchange: