JANUARY 2020 PCWorld 111than others. Epic gave
away some truly incredible
games though, many of
which appeared on our
past Game of the Year
lists—like Soma, Observer,
Mutant Year Zero, Stories
Untold, and more. The list
even includes two of our
Game of the Year winners,
What Remains of Edith
Finch? and Celeste.
Now that we’ve reached the one-year
mark, I’m not sure whether these giveaways
will continue. It’s been a hell of a run
though, and significantly offset Valve’s
15-year head start.
Epic did the most damage by locking
down 2019’s release calendar though. As I
said, Steam was the de facto PC storefront for
years. If a game came to the PC then it came
to Steam, with few exceptions.
In 2019, that couldn’t be further from the
truth. Epic shelled out a ton of money for
timed exclusives (go.pcworld.com/tmex).
Good ones, too! Many of
my favorite games this year,
big and small alike,
debuted on Epic’s
storefront—Metro Exodus
(go.pcworld.com/metx),
Outer Wilds (go.pcworld.
com/otwl) and Obsidian’s
similarly named RPG The
Outer Worlds (go.pcworld.com/towl),
Control (go.pcworld.com/cntr), and Tetris
Effect (go.pcworld.com/trse).
The list goes on, more than 50 titles total,
and includes heavy hitters like The Division 2
(go.pcworld.com/dvn2) and Borderlands 3
(go.pcworld.com/brd3), plus pseudo-
exclusives like Red Dead Redemption II (go.
pcworld.com/rded).
Did it work? Probably. It’s hard to know
without concrete sales figures, and the only
numbers we have are almost a year old. At
GDC, Epic said more than 85 million
accounts were using the Epic Games Store