Fortnite is still one of the biggest gravity wells in modern gaming, but new annual platform data suggests the broader ecosystem around it is not immune to year to year fluctuations in how much people actually play.
In a newly published year in review snapshot for 2025, Epic says the Epic Games Store logged 6.65 billion total gameplay hours across PC in 2025, a 14% decline compared to the prior year. At the same time, the company reported an all time record of 78 million monthly active users on PC in December 2025, alongside more than 317 million total PC players in its ecosystem and 972 million cross platform accounts overall. Those numbers underline the scale Epic is operating at, even as total playtime moved in the opposite direction.
Fortnite sits right at the center of that picture. In Epic’s own rundown of top PC titles for 2025, Fortnite appears in the highest tier of games on the storefront, grouped among the platform’s biggest performers. Epic also highlighted expanded social features that connect back into Fortnite, including messaging that syncs across its ecosystem and ties directly into Fortnite text chat. From Epic’s perspective, Fortnite remains a foundational pillar for engagement, identity, and platform connectivity, even when overall hours soften.
What makes the playtime dip especially notable is that it happened during a year when several other engagement and spending signals moved up. Epic says PC players spent $1.16 billion on the Epic Games Store in 2025, a 6% increase year over year. It also reported that player spending on third party PC games rose 57% to $400 million, and that players spent 2.78 billion hours in third party games, up 4% year over year. In other words, players did not vanish, they increasingly spread their time and money across a wider set of releases and live service catalogs, even as the total hours number declined.
Epic’s own breakdown offers a clue about how engagement is shifting inside its PC platform. The company says 35% of third party gameplay hours came from games that use their own in game payment solutions. That detail matters because some of the most popular live service games do not route all transactions through a storefront checkout flow. The result can be a platform that sees massive playtime and strong player counts, while the relationship between playtime, storefront revenue, and in game spending becomes more complex than it looks from the outside.
Epic is also leaning harder into Fortnite as a marketing engine for its store, which is a signal of how strategically important the game remains. The company says it is rolling out a program designed to help sell more games on the Epic Games Store by offering Fortnite cosmetics as a bonus when players purchase participating titles. The first wave of partners Epic named includes Capcom, miHoYo, Pearl Abyss, S-Game, MintRocket, and Kakao Games, with more planned. The pitch is straightforward, Fortnite’s reach is so large that tying store purchases to in game items can make a meaningful difference in discovery and conversion for other games.
That approach also fits a wider industry reality, the biggest titles today function less like standalone games and more like platforms that can funnel attention across genres and catalogs. Fortnite does that through rotating seasons and events, but also through the expanding set of experiences and collaborations that keep different audiences checking back in. When a game reaches that scale, the question is not only how many people play, but where those players spend their time, and how that time translates into revenue for partners who want access to the same audience.
On consoles, Fortnite’s staying power has looked similarly entrenched. US player engagement tracking for 2025 indicates Fortnite was the most played game of the year on both PlayStation and Xbox, with Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto V, Roblox, and Minecraft also sitting near the top. The broader takeaway from that dataset is that the top of the engagement charts stayed remarkably stable year over year, reinforcing how difficult it is for new releases to displace the biggest live service and evergreen hits once they become habits.
So what does a year over year playtime drop actually mean in practice. It does not automatically point to a single cause, and Epic’s year end snapshot does not break the decline down by title. Still, it is a useful reminder that engagement at scale is not a straight line. Even when a platform sets new user records and keeps a megahit like Fortnite in its top tier, total hours can ebb as player schedules shift, competing games pull attention, and usage patterns diversify across a broader library.
Epic says it is responding on the platform side with a slate of upgrades aimed at reducing friction and improving retention. The company says it is rebuilding underlying architecture for its PC launcher and plans to ship improvements in 2026, while also pushing new social and community features, plus continued expansion of its mobile footprint. Whether those changes translate into higher playtime over the next year will be a key signal for how much headroom remains in a mature live service ecosystem, even one anchored by a game as dominant as Fortnite.
News report written by Mike.
