[Brockenstein]

Way more people use Steam than Epic Launcher. The oldest Steam accounts are 15 years old now, people have been using it for a long time when it was largely the only game in town. People may use another company's platform because they have to to play a certain game. But a lot of times it's just that other platform trying to be Steam, but not in the same league.

[tapoxi]

Are we sure that's true? Fortnite is the most popular game in the world right now.

[kbenson]

Steam[1] still has more peak concurrent users than Fortnite at 14 million if you add the games up, while Fortnite is over 8 million[2]. Fortnite does have a huge install base, but I imagine most of them that need a store (i.e. not consoles, so basically PCs) already have Steam, and at least one game in it.

For new users that don't have steam, there might be an inventive to use the Epic games launcher, especially if there's a discount, but having games split across two systems is really annoying (but it's not too bad for one game), so I imagine without an incentive most existing Steam users will opt out, thus preserving Steam's dominance.

1: https://store.steampowered.com/stats/

2: https://thenextweb.com/gaming/2018/11/08/fortnites-concurren...

[ArchTypical]

> I imagine most of them that need a store (i.e. not consoles, so basically PCs) already have Steam, and at least one game in it

125 million fortnite installs - https://www.businessinsider.com/fortnite-size-statistics-pla...

70+ million steam installs - https://galyonk.in/steam-in-2017-129c0e6be260

Not saying what's right and what's wrong but I heard these kind of numbers reported after the announcement. I see a lot of different numbers being thrown around and I'm not sure what to believe anymore.

Steamcharts consistently surprises me at how few people play the popular games I like, so I'm beginning to think Steam isn't as big.

[kbenson]

Here's a more recent source[1] (unfortunately poorly sourced, but it does have a timestamp for each item). It shows 200 million installs (11/11), but 74.2 million iOS installs (11/7), 11.5 million downloads on the switch (10/30).

Android usage is complex, because it's still only available officially to Samsung Galaxy devices, but the amount of players looks like it might be similar to iOS (there are usage numbers from the link, but for different times).

So, just from the total installs number and the somewhat recent iOS and Nintendo Switch numbers, we can put the maximum number of PC installs at around 114 million, before we account for Xbox (released mid 2017), PS4 (released mid-2017) and Android (Samsung Galaxy only but I think it may well be in the tens of millions anyway, especially since there are tutorials on how to get it on other devices).

I think that will leave us well within the territory where Steam and Fortnite have a largely overlapping PC user base.

> Steamcharts consistently surprises me at how few people play the popular games I like, so I'm beginning to think Steam isn't as big.

I think most people just don't game on PC as much anymore. Most PC games are available for consoles now too, and it's much cheaper to buy a new console every few years than to keep a gaming PC updated. My brother bought a keyboard and mouse for his PS4, and played Overwatch with that. Probably just as good an experience as the PC version for much cheaper total platform cost over time.

1: https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/fortnite-facts-and-s...