Among the statistics in the Epic Games Store 2022 Year in Review blog post (opens in new tab) published today was the expected but welcome news: Epic is not ending its free games offerings.

"Our weekly free games program will continue into 2023.

It's been a few months into 2023 and Epic has not stopped giving away free games (open in new tab) every week.

Epic also stated that 70 of the participating games broke the record for concurrent players, which is not too surprising: give people free games, and they will play free games.

Epic began distributing the games in 2019 as a way to attract new users to the Epic Games store, and along with exclusive content and Fortnite's continued appeal, the strategy seems to be working.

"The Epic Games Store now has over 230 million PC users, up 36 million from 2021. Epic's cross-platform accounts total 723 million, with daily active users peaking at 34.3 million in 2022 and monthly active users reaching 68 million, up from 62 million last year."

Steam remains considerably larger: the Epic Games Store peaked (in 2022) at 34.4 million daily active users, while Steam can exceed 30 million at the same moment, according to SteamDB (open in new tab) and Steam currently has 33,159,010 concurrent users.

According to Epic, performance improvements are a priority for Epic Games Store development this year, but they are also working on new features, including support for subscription services like EA Play. But the biggest announcement from Epic today is the launch of a self-publishing tool (opens in new tab), allowing anyone with $100 to submit a game to the Epic Games Store.