Ancient-Red-Dragon: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/05/epic-thinks-egs-could-make-up-35-50-of-the-pc-gaming-market-by-2024/
Under the aggressive scenario, Epic thinks the EGS could be responsible for anywhere from 35 to 50 percent of the PC gaming market by 2024, depending on Steam's reaction. That would be a huge success, considering estimates currently place Steam at roughly 75 percent of that market.
Ancient-Red-Dragon: I think EGS is probably being very overly optimistic with those projections. I hope they come true though.
What do you think?
Does EGS actually have a chance to gain that much market share, that quickly?
Do they mean market share as in customers paying actual money to buy games on their store, or mindshare, which is more people getting so many free games from them and never spending money there that they end up inadvertently playing games on the Epic store because it becomes increasingly difficult to pick a game to play out of their library which isn't an Epic freebie? :)
Honestly though, I only installed the Epic client originally to try out Fortnite a couple of times to scientifically confirm that it wasn't for me, lining up with my hypotheses. After that I never used it at all until they started giving away free games in December 2019 or so, and I've only acquired free games ever since, including the weekly freebies, sporadic freebies, and the always-free ones.
I don't mind getting the free games or playing them there as long as they work, and I'm neither fond of nor have any disdain for the company overall, but I prefer to buy my games on GOG whenever possible along with some other considerations, and then on Steam second (as well as authorized Steam resellers). I almost never buy games on other storefront platforms with few notable exceptions (A few games from Shinyloot, Itch.io bundle, Starcraft Remastered on Battle.net).
Virtually every close friend as well as most Internet acquaintances use Epic just for the free games, and I don't know a single person who has ever bought a game there or who intends to do so. When we talk about it at all, nobody hates Epic but would simply rather own all of their games on Steam and/or GOG or elsewhere. I don't know how representative of the marketplace as a whole myself and my own friends and acquaintances are, but EGS owning a large percentage of the market sounds like crack to me. :)
For me, their game client is so featureless and it feels like they're either not developing new features for it at all, or if they are it isn't a very big development team as progress is snail paced. Then again, GOG Galaxy was light on features when it first came out and it took a few years for it to turn into the IMHO decent client it is today. I think if Epic wants a bigger piece of the market pie they're going to have to vastly improve their client and start having some value-add to their platform as right now the only value-add they have to offer is free games IMHO, the rest of their store and client are value-minus.
I know some people get super worked up about the exclusive titles that Epic swings, and while it has never upset me personally I do find it kind of annoying on any store, but then every single store in existence also has exclusive game titles on it and nobody ever seems to point that out either. :) Having said all of that though, while their hope with exclusivity is to get people to come to their store to buy games when they are new releases who don't want to wait... I'm more than happy to just straight up wait 3/6/9/12/24/4000 months until the given game shows up on GOG or Steam instead because I've got tonnes of games to play that I'm excited about in my library already while I wait. Also, it means Epic store exclusives customers are post-release beta testers for the rest of us who wait for the given game to be released on another storefront. :)