Epic Games has been giving away free games every week for years, and it’s apparently working well – but the store’s exclusive titles haven’t been doing so well.
Valve doesn’t have a complete monopoly on buying digital games, but most people know Steam as the de facto platform for buying PC games. Stores like GOG and Itch.io have their own niches, but Steam is still the go-to for most PC gaming, even if it’s pretty flawed. Then, in 2018, Epic Games decided to take a piece of the pie and opened its own store, but this wasn’t without controversy, as many PC gamers didn’t like it at first. Six years later, the store is still around, but even so, many people still don’t like it.
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Sure, Epic has tried some tactics to encourage players to use its platform, like weekly free games, which have been given out every week since 2018, and even daily free games during certain seasons. But in a recent press conference (via PC Gamer), while it can be costly, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said it’s a “very economical” user acquisition program.
“Giving away games for free may seem like a counterintuitive strategy, but companies spend money to attract users to play games,” Sweeney said. “For a quarter of the cost of acquiring users through Facebook ads or Google search ads, we can pay game developers a lot of money for the right to distribute their games to our users, and we can bring new users to the Epic Games Store at a very affordable price.
“You would think that this would hurt the sales prospects of games on the Epic Games Store, but developers who give away games for free actually see a surge in sales of their paid games on the store, just because of the awareness generated by their free game. And it’s so common that developers will often work closely with us when they have new games coming out, to time their free releases just to drive awareness for their next game. It’s an amazing thing. And it’s by far the most cost-effective aspect of the Epic Games Store.”
Of course, Epic has also tried to attract more players by exclusively hosting certain PC games (usually only for a limited time), including well-known games such as the first Hades, Ooblets, and the Kingdom Hearts series. However, this plan has not been smooth sailing, Sweeney said: “We spent a lot of money on exclusive games. Some of them have performed very well. A lot of them were not good investments, but the free game program was amazing.” I guess you can’t win everyone’s heart!
