Although it wasn’t the usual route, Tim Sweeney’s platform ended up generating excellent publicity for Blood West over the Christmas period.

Dave Oshry, co-founder and CEO of New Blood Interactive, has built a reputation not only as the head of a prominent indie publisher, but also on Twitter, where he regularly shares opinions and occasional industry insight. Oshry highlighted just how much people dislike the Epic Games Store and how strongly they gravitate toward Steam instead. Responding to a meme video joking that players would rather pay for a game on Steam than grab it for free on Epic, Oshry pointed to a real-world example that perfectly matched what the meme was mocking.

Blood West, an indie first-person shooter published by New Blood Interactive, was one of the titles Epic Games Store made free during the holiday giveaway period on December 20, and by the time the promotion ended it was among the 20 games that helped Epic “save” players $550 if they had bought all of them at full, non-discounted price. (We reported on this earlier.)

New Blood doesn’t get any royalties from EGS we let Hyperstrange take 100% of that – so they got the $$$ bag for the free giveaway, are putting that money into developing the new DLC and we got more Steam sales too 🙂 pic.twitter.com/X7AGx8tcRZ

— Dave NewBlood (@DaveOshry) January 16, 2026

But none of that really matters to a large chunk of players, because they simply don’t use the Epic Games Store – they use Steam. And if they can either buy a game on Steam or grab it for free on Epic, they’ll often still choose to purchase it on Steam. During the day Blood West was available for free, its Steam sales jumped by 200%. Oshry had previously assumed the Epic Games Store was basically a marketing black hole, but it turned out that making the game free on Epic worked as outstanding advertising for Steam sales. When a game goes free on the Epic Games Store, Epic pays a flat royalty fee to cover that giveaway window – and in this case, that royalty went entirely to Blood West developer Hyperstrange.

New Blood itself doesn’t receive royalties from Epic Games Store. The publisher lets Hyperstrange take 100% of the payout, meaning the studio got the full bag from the free giveaway, is now putting that money into developing new DLC, and New Blood still benefited thanks to increased Steam sales. Epic could theoretically offer developers 100% of store sales, but that doesn’t mean much if there are no sales at all – because 100% of zero is still zero.

Back in December, while Epic was in the middle of its end-of-year giveaways, The Astronauts founder Adrian Chmielarz summed it up bluntly – and arguably best of all: the Epic Games Store is a store, while Steam is a community…

Source: WCCFTech