Epic Games Store’s New Boss Faces Steam’s 74% Lead [2026]

Epic Games Store has a new person in charge of fixing it. On July 27, 2026, Epic Games named Martin Keely, who spent the previous seven years running Blizzard’s Battle.net launcher as senior vice president, as the new VP and General Manager of Epic Games Store and Epic Online Services. He replaces Steve Allison, who left the company earlier that month for Saber Interactive after roughly eight years steering Epic’s fight against Steam.

The timing says a lot. Epic Games Store closed out 2025 with $1.16 billion in store revenue and a record $400 million in third-party player spending, yet it still controls only around 3% of global PC digital game distribution against Steam’s roughly 74%, according to figures reported by PC Gamer. Seven years and, by Epic’s own 2023 court disclosures, more than $700 million in losses after launch, the storefront Tim Sweeney built to break Valve’s grip on PC gaming still hasn’t cracked double-digit market share. This news analysis looks at what changed on July 27, why Epic keeps losing this fight on paper while claiming a strategic win in practice, and what Keely’s background suggests about where the store goes next.

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Epic Games Store Gets a New Boss as Steam’s Grip Holds Firm

The leadership change was announced with little fanfare – a corporate title swap that would normally pass unnoticed outside trade press. But for a storefront that has spent billions of dollars trying to dent Steam’s dominance, any change at the top gets read as a signal. Keely’s appointment, first reported by GamesRadar and confirmed by outlets including Tech Times and PocketGamer.biz, puts a launcher veteran in charge at a moment when Epic Games Store’s growth curve has flattened even as its spending has not.

Epic Games Store’s core problem has never really been about product quality in isolation – it’s about switching costs. PC gamers accumulate libraries, friends lists, achievements, and cloud saves on Steam and rarely have a reason to leave, even when a game is cheaper or exclusive elsewhere. Keely inherits that structural problem along with a storefront that, by multiple accounts, still lacks some of the community features PC gamers now expect as standard. His job, in plain terms, is to make Epic Games Store sticky enough that a $400 million-a-year giveaway budget stops being the main reason anyone opens it.

Who Is Martin Keely? From Battle.net’s Top Job to Epic Games Store

Keely spent seven years as the senior executive overseeing Battle.net, Blizzard’s PC launcher and the home of Diablo, Overwatch, World of Warcraft, and Call of Duty’s PC storefront presence for large stretches of that period. Battle.net is a useful comparison point precisely because it solved the problem Epic Games Store has struggled with: player retention through community tools, low-friction matchmaking, and a launcher that gamers tolerate rather than resent. Epic is betting that experience transfers.

Announcing the move, Keely wrote on LinkedIn that he was “excited to get started with the team delivering new capabilities that elevate player, creator and developer experiences,” language first surfaced in reporting from PC Gamer. It’s the kind of statement every incoming platform executive makes, but the “creator” reference matters – Epic Games Store has increasingly tied its pitch to developers around its 12% commission rate rather than consumer-facing polish, and Keely’s remarks suggest that balance may shift toward the player experience side of the ledger.

Keely’s Battle.net Track Record

Coverage of the appointment, including reporting from Niche Gamer, credits Keely with overseeing what Epic described as growth and record results during his Battle.net tenure, though exact subscriber or revenue figures for that period were not disclosed publicly. What is notable is the contrast in reputations: Battle.net is routinely cited by PC gamers as a launcher people accept without complaint, while Epic Games Store has spent years fielding the opposite reaction, even from its own former leadership.

Why Steve Allison Left — and Where He Landed

Allison departed Epic earlier in July 2026 to join Saber Interactive, the studio behind titles like World War Z and the Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine series. He had run Epic Games Store since shortly after its December 2018 launch, making him the executive most associated with the storefront’s entire public history – the free-games program, the exclusivity deals, the antitrust fights with Apple and Google, and the slow climb from a bare-bones launcher to a 6,000-plus game catalog.

Allison was also the executive who, in January 2026, said Epic intended to bring its storefront to Microsoft’s next Xbox console on day one, a comment reported by Video Games Chronicle and echoed in follow-up coverage from Game Rant: “We definitely plan to be on the new hardware for Xbox, because, unless their policy or stance on it changes, they are telling us they’re going to welcome that. And we’re going be there, like, on day one.” Whether that commitment survives the leadership transition intact is one of the more consequential open questions hanging over Keely’s early tenure – more on that below.

Epic Games Store by the Numbers: Revenue, Users, and Losses in 2025

Whoever runs Epic Games Store inherits a business with a genuinely strange balance sheet: growing revenue, a record year for player spending, and a market share number that has barely moved in years. Store revenue hit $1.16 billion in 2025, up from $1.09 billion in 2024 and $950 million in 2023 – a 6% year-over-year gain, according to figures cited by PC Gamer. Third-party developer game spending – money spent on games Epic doesn’t publish itself – reached $400 million in 2025, up 57% from $250 million in 2024 and the highest figure the storefront has posted.

User numbers tell a similar growth-without-share story. Epic Games Store logged an average of 67 million monthly active users across 2025, peaking at 78 million in December, and its registered PC account base sits at roughly 295 million, a figure reported by multiple outlets tracking Epic’s own disclosures. Those are not small numbers in absolute terms. The problem is the denominator: Steam’s monthly active user base and revenue dwarf Epic’s by a wide enough margin that Epic’s growth, however real, hasn’t moved its share of the market.

Steam’s 74% Share: The Wall Epic Still Can’t Break

Steam’s dominance of PC digital distribution has been remarkably stable through Epic’s entire existence. Estimates put Steam at roughly 74% to 75% of global PC digital game distribution by revenue, a figure that has barely shifted since Epic Games Store launched in December 2018 promising to break it. Our own Steam vs Epic Games Store market share breakdown found the same pattern: Steam’s share moves in single-digit increments year to year, largely unaffected by Epic’s exclusivity deals or free-game giveaways. Steam itself just posted a record $11.1 billion in first-half 2026 revenue, up 14.5% year over year, according to our coverage of Steam’s H1 2026 results – a reminder that Valve isn’t standing still while Epic tries to catch up.

That stability is the real story here. Epic’s strategy since 2018 – timed exclusives, a lower commission rate, and free games nearly every week – was designed to force a wedge into Steam’s user base. Seven years and well over a billion combined dollars in exclusivity payments and giveaways later, the wedge hasn’t moved the number in any meaningful way. That’s the environment Keely is stepping into, and it’s why simply matching Steam feature-for-feature, rather than trying to out-discount it, appears to be the emerging strategic bet.

Epic vs Steam vs GOG vs Xbox PC: Commission Rates and Market Share Compared

Commission structure is the clearest lens for understanding why Epic keeps competing on price rather than winning on habit. Here’s how the major PC storefronts compare heading into the second half of 2026:

Platform	Launch Year	Standard Commission	Est. PC Market Share (2026)	Key Differentiator
Steam (Valve)	2003	30% (tiered down to 20% above $50M/year)	~74%	Largest library, social graph, Workshop mod support
Epic Games Store	2018	12% flat	~3%	Lowest standard commission, free weekly games
GOG (CD Projekt)	2008	~30% standard	Under 2%	DRM-free downloads, no launcher requirement
Microsoft Store (PC)	2012	12% (matched Epic in 2021)	Under 2%	Xbox Play Anywhere cross-buy with console

The pattern is stark: commission rate alone has never been the deciding factor for where PC gamers buy games. Epic and Microsoft both undercut Steam by roughly 18 percentage points and neither has meaningfully dented Valve’s share. That’s the strategic puzzle Keely has to solve differently than his predecessor did – not by cutting further, but by closing the feature and habit gap that keeps players on Steam regardless of price.

Epic Games Store’s Financial Timeline: 2018 Launch to 2026

Epic has never hidden that the store was built to lose money early in exchange for market position – that was always the explicit pitch to investors and to Epic’s own Unreal Engine licensees. What’s changed is how long “early” has turned out to be. Litigation from Epic’s antitrust fight with Apple forced disclosure of some of the sharpest numbers: court filings revealed the store had lost more than $590 million between 2019 and 2021, with Epic’s own internal projections at the time showing cumulative losses continuing without a specific total disclosed, only Apple’s own claim in court filings that the store would not turn a profit until 2027, according to reporting from Game Developer.

Year	Store Revenue	Third-Party Player Spending	Notable Development
2018	Launch (Dec.)	N/A	Epic Games Store launches without cart or reviews
2023	$950 million	Not separately disclosed	Court filings show over $700M in cumulative losses
2024	$1.09 billion	$250 million	Steve Allison-era growth continues, share flat
2025	$1.16 billion	$400 million (record, +57%)	Record year; Allison departs in July 2026
2026	Not yet reported	Not yet reported	Martin Keely named VP/GM, July 27, 2026

Read across the table, the trend line is genuinely positive – revenue and third-party spending are both climbing at a healthy clip. The unresolved question is whether that growth ever outpaces the giveaway spending fast enough to close a loss gap that was already projected to approach $1 billion by 2027 before Keely ever took the job.

The Free-Games Gambit: Did Billions in Giveaways Pay Off?

Epic’s weekly free-game program is the most visible piece of its customer acquisition strategy, and it has arguably worked as an acquisition tool even if it hasn’t worked as a retention one. Millions of accounts have been created specifically to claim free titles, padding Epic’s headline registered-user figures. The harder question is how many of those accounts ever come back to pay for something else. Epic doesn’t break out that conversion rate publicly, and outside estimates vary widely, but the gap between 295 million registered accounts and a still-tiny single-digit market share suggests a large share of that user base logs in rarely, if ever, outside of grabbing that week’s freebie.

This is precisely the kind of vanity-metric trap a launcher veteran like Keely should recognize immediately. Battle.net never needed a weekly giveaway to keep players logging in – it had Overwatch, Diablo, and World of Warcraft doing that work organically. Epic Games Store has never had that kind of built-in gravity outside of Fortnite, which notably lives partly outside the storefront’s own PC client on many platforms. Whether Keely reallocates giveaway budget toward product features, exclusivity deals, or something else entirely will be one of the clearest early signals of his strategy.

The Next Xbox Wildcard: Epic’s Day-One Console Plan

The most consequential open commitment Keely inherits isn’t a feature roadmap – it’s Allison’s pledge to put Epic Games Store on Microsoft’s next Xbox console the day it launches. Microsoft’s next-generation console, discussed under the working characterization of a hybrid PC-console device in our coverage of the next Xbox platform strategy, is widely expected to open the door to multiple PC storefronts running natively on Xbox hardware for the first time in the platform’s history – a sharp break from the closed, single-storefront model consoles have used for decades.

If that hybrid approach holds and Microsoft follows through on welcoming outside storefronts, it would hand Epic Games Store something it has never had: a console footprint that doesn’t depend on winning PC gamers away from Steam one purchase at a time. It would also be a genuinely novel test case for whether Epic’s lower commission and community tools can win over console players who have never had to think about which storefront they’re buying from. Keely has said nothing publicly yet about whether he intends to honor Allison’s specific “day one” framing, and that silence is worth watching for as the next Xbox timeline firms up.

What Keely Needs to Fix First

Epic Games Store’s product gaps are well documented by this point in its history. The store launched in December 2018 without a shopping cart, forcing players to buy games one at a time, and didn’t add user reviews until years after competitors treated them as table stakes. Cloud save support, wishlist-to-purchase conversion tools, and community features like forums or activity feeds have all trailed Steam’s equivalents for most of the store’s existence. None of these are secret complaints – they’ve been the subject of PC gaming community criticism since roughly the storefront’s first year.

What a Battle.net veteran brings to that list is direct experience shipping the kind of social and retention infrastructure Epic Games Store has historically deprioritized in favor of business-development wins like exclusivity deals. The open question is resourcing: Epic Games’ broader business spans Fortnite, Unreal Engine licensing, and Epic Online Services, and the storefront has to compete for engineering investment against all of it.

Historical Context: Lessons From Apple v. Epic and Google v. Epic

It’s worth remembering that Epic Games Store wasn’t just a business decision – it was the opening move in a broader Epic campaign against platform commission structures that eventually produced two of the biggest antitrust fights in tech history. Epic sued Apple in 2020 over App Store fees and later won a jury verdict against Google in December 2023 over Play Store practices, cases that reshaped how regulators and courts think about mobile app store monopolies. Epic Games Store was, in a sense, the proof of concept Epic used to argue that lower commissions and open competition were both viable and good for the industry.

The irony Keely inherits is that Epic won the legal argument on mobile more decisively than it has won the market argument on PC. Steam faces its own version of that legal pressure now – Valve is currently defending a certified class-action antitrust case covering roughly 32,000 developers over its 30% commission and price-parity rules, a case we cover in detail in our breakdown of the Valve Steam antitrust lawsuit. If that case forces changes to Steam’s pricing rules, it could reshape the competitive landscape Keely is trying to navigate more than any product decision Epic makes on its own.

Market Impact: What This Means for Developers and Gamers

For developers, the leadership change is unlikely to alter Epic’s fundamental pitch in the near term: a 12% commission versus Steam’s tiered 30% / 25% / 20%, plus Unreal Engine royalty waivers for studios that publish on the Epic Games Store.[2][7][8][1] That math already makes Epic Games Store attractive for self-published and mid-size studios doing meaningful revenue, even without a large player base to draw from. What Keely could change is the qualitative pitch – whether Epic can credibly promise developers a storefront with modern discovery tools and community features to go with the lower cut.

For gamers, the practical impact of a single executive change is close to zero in the short term. The free games keep coming, exclusivity deals will likely continue at whatever pace Epic’s budget allows, and nothing about switching costs from Steam changes overnight. The more interesting long-term impact is competitive: a healthier, more feature-complete Epic Games Store gives Valve a reason to keep improving Steam rather than resting on a 74% share that has held for years. Platform competition, even from a distant second place, tends to produce better products for everyone using the market leader too.

5 Predictions for Epic Games Store’s Next Chapter

• Feature parity over further discounting. Expect Keely to prioritize community and retention features — reviews, cloud saves, social tools — over cutting the commission rate any further below 12%.
• Market share stays in the single digits through 2027. Structural switching costs and Steam’s library gravity make a jump past 5% unlikely within Keely’s first 18 months, barring a major console breakthrough.
• The next-Xbox day-one plan proceeds, cautiously. If Microsoft’s hybrid console strategy holds, expect Epic to confirm participation, though possibly with a narrower launch-day catalog than Allison’s original framing implied.
• Giveaway spending growth slows. With third-party spending already up 57% year over year, expect Epic to shift incremental budget toward product engineering rather than further free-game escalation.
• Losses narrow but don’t disappear. Revenue growth of 6-8% annually should continue, but full profitability remains unlikely before the end of the decade given the scale of Epic’s exclusivity and giveaway commitments.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Epic Games Store’s new boss?

Martin Keely, who previously spent seven years as senior vice president overseeing Blizzard’s Battle.net launcher, was named VP and General Manager of Epic Games Store and Epic Online Services on July 27, 2026.

What happened to former Epic Games Store head Steve Allison?

Steve Allison, who had led Epic Games Store since shortly after its December 2018 launch, left the company earlier in July 2026 to join Saber Interactive, the studio behind titles like World War Z.

What percentage of the PC gaming market does Epic Games Store have in 2026?

Epic Games Store holds roughly 3% of global PC digital distribution by revenue, compared to Steam’s approximately 74% share, a gap that has stayed largely stable since Epic Games Store launched in 2018.

How much money has Epic Games Store lost since launch?

Court filings disclosed during Epic’s antitrust litigation showed the store had lost more than $700 million since its December 2018 launch, with internal Epic projections at the time estimating cumulative losses could reach roughly $965 million by 2027.

What commission does Epic Games Store charge compared to Steam?

Epic Games Store charges a flat 12% commission on sales. Steam’s standard rate is 30%, tapering to 25% above $10 million in annual revenue for a title and 20% above $50 million.

Will Epic Games Store be on the next Xbox console?

Former Epic Games Store head Steve Allison said in early 2026 that Epic planned to launch on Microsoft’s next Xbox console on day one, contingent on Microsoft’s policies. Martin Keely has not yet publicly confirmed whether that commitment stands under his leadership.

Is Epic Games Store profitable in 2026?

No confirmed 2026 figures have been published. As of the most recent disclosures, Epic Games Store was still operating at a loss, though revenue and third-party player spending both grew in 2025.

How does Epic Games Store’s 2025 revenue compare to previous years?

Epic Games Store generated $1.16 billion in 2025, up from $1.09 billion in 2024 and $950 million in 2023 – roughly 6% year-over-year growth and 22% growth over two years.