San Francisco, Feb 17 (IANS): Fortnite developer Epic Games has announced that there are now more than 500 million game accounts.

According to The Verge, it is a notable milestone as Epic continues to build the Epic Games Store as a competitor to Steam and bring in new players for titles like Fortnite and Rocket League.

The company did not share further details about that 500 million, however, so it is unclear how many of those accounts represent segments like people that only play Epic's own games (such as Fortnite) or those who have only used Epic's store.

The company has put a huge amount of resources behind growing its PC games store -- and therefore, getting more people to sign up for accounts -- since it launched in December 2018, the report said.

As per the report, one document from the Epic versus Apple trial, for example, showed that Epic had $330 million in unrecouped costs in 2020 alone from paying developers to give away their games on its store.

Another document showed that more than 7 million people tried the Epic Games Store because of its Grand Theft Auto V giveaway -- despite the 8-hour outage that happened because of the freebie.

Epic has committed to giving away free games again in 2022, so it seems that the company continues to think the cost is worth it to bring in users, the report said.

Epic is also seeing a lot of use of its Unreal Engine developer tools; the company announced that 48 per cent of "announced next-gen games" are being built on the platform, it added.