Epic Games Store to get performance upgrades and copy more Steam features

In 2025, the Epic Games Store managed to break several of its own records, as the Steam alternative logged 78 million monthly active users last year, who spent more than $400 million on third-party games in total, not counting Fortnite. Overall, customers have spent 2.78 billion hours playing third-party games, with many of those likely attributable to the weekly free games.

The Epic Games Store still trails Steam, not only in terms of revenue and the number of active players, but also in terms of software quality. The Epic Games Store uses far more system resources than Steam, responds more slowly to mouse clicks and lacks many convenience features. That is expected to change soon, as Epic Games has now announced that it will rewrite most of the Epic Games Store’s code. Starting this summer, the app is expected to respond much faster, with shorter load times and improved stability.

In addition, Epic Games wants to copy many of Steam’s community features and give players the ability to create a more meaningful profile including an avatar, and to communicate with friends via voice chat. This chat is not tied to individual games and is therefore expected to work even if not all participants are playing the same title. For this purpose, Epic Games will also introduce so-called friend groups in the second quarter of 2026. Finally, games that are available on both smartphones and PCs will be purchasable once and then become playable on both platforms in the future.