None of Epic Game Stores’ top 5 games were released in 2024

Genshin Impact, Rocket League, Honkai: Star Rail, Grand Theft Auto 5, and Fortnite were the top five games — “by player spend and engagement,” per Epic Games — on the Epic Game Store in 2024. None of those five games were released in 2024. Epic Games released its Year in Review blog on Friday, where it announced the platform had 32 million daily active users (from a total of 295 million Windows PC players) across all its games.

The top games in 2024 are broken into three categories: five games listed as Mythic, five as Legendary, and 10 as Epic. It may not surprise you that the top five games are all free-to-play, except Grand Theft Auto 5, which has sold more than 210 million copies. (It’s not clear whether these games are listed in order or randomly. Polygon has reached out to Epic Games for clarification.) EA Sports FC 24, Destiny 2, Alan Wake 2, Fall Guys, and Wuthering Waves are the five listed as Legendary. EA Sports FC 25, Cyberpunk 2077, The Sims 4, Black Myth: Wukong, Satisfactory, Warframe, Farming Simulator 2022, Dead by Daylight, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Dead Island 2 are the 10 games listed as Epic.

Of these 20 games, just four games were released in 2024. While it might be surprising to see laid out so clearly, the “black hole” of older games overriding new ones has been ongoing for several years. In 2023, games six years old or more took up 61% of people’s gaming time, according to Newzoo. As Ryan Rigney put it in his Push to Talk newsletter, “in 2023 just five games, most of them released over a decade ago, together accounted for more playtime than every game released in 2022 and 2023 combined.”

That left 23% of game time for new games — but of those new games, the majority of that playing time is going toward annualized releases like Call of Duty or sports games. Eight percent of playing time in 2023 went toward new games untethered from big, annual IP. Analyst and The Metaverse author Matthew Ball wrote in his State of Video Gaming in 2025 presentation that the same five franchises — Call of Duty, Counter-Strike, Fortnite, League of Legends, and Minecraft — has averaged 30% of playtime for four years running on Windows PC; on console, the top five franchises — Call of Duty, FIFA/EA FC, Fortnite, Grand Theft Auto, and NBA 2K — have averaged 43% of all playtime for four years straight.

People are playing new games, but not nearly as much as they’re playing older, long running ones.