Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney has summarized the strategy for the Epic Games Store, which launched at the end of 2018, and the overall picture is not entirely positive.

One of the positive moves of the Epic Games Store is that it offers free games on a weekly basis, and in some periods (such as the end of the year) on a daily basis (although there are some recurring games), so Grand Theft Auto V and Civilization VI, among others, were added to your account on the platform, where 580 million games were added to accounts this way last year alone. But it doesn’t come cheap, even if Epic only has to pay a fraction of what publishers and developers do. (The Epic vs. Apple lawsuit revealed that Epic spent $11.6 million in the first nine months of the free program, but the platform has been offering free titles for six years…)

Tim Sweeney’s comments on exclusives are the first to be quoted: “We spent a lot of money on exclusives. Some of them worked extremely well. A lot of them were not good investments, but the free games program was just magical”. Ubisoft, for example, was able to attract Ubisoft, but in 2021 we heard that they’ve spent more than $300 million on those alone so far. From Remedy Entertainment, Alan Wake 2 was the first Epic-published game that they also funded development on (the publishing division was launched by Sweeney in 2020). But what about free-to-play games?

“Giving away free games seems counterintuitive as a strategy, but companies spend money to acquire users for games. For about a quarter of what it costs to acquire users through Facebook ads or Google search ads, we can pay a game developer a lot of money for the right to distribute their game to our users, and we can drive new users to the Epic Games Store at a very economical rate. And you might think that this would hurt the sales prospects of games on the Epic Game Store, but developers who give away free games actually see a spike in sales of their paid games on the store, just because of the exposure their free game gets. And it’s so much so that when developers are about to launch a new game, they often come to us and want to work closely on a timed release of a free game just to build user awareness for their next game. It’s been a great thing. And it’s been by far the most cost-effective aspect of the Epic Games Store,” Sweeney said.

But do people play free games? Some people just add them to their account.

Source: PCGamer