Since its launch, the Epic Games Store has attracted attention with free games. Some of these have included top titles such as GTA V. The CEO now explains how this model of giving away games pays off if you want to compete with Steam.
What’s the deal with the free games? Every week there are new, free titles given away to users in the Epic Games Store. Sometimes there are several per week.
These often include indie games, but sometimes also bigger names like GTA 5 or Civilization 6. Since these offers have been available, the question has been raised as to how the model is profitable for Epic Games. Of course, this incurs costs. In the first nine months since its launch in December 2018 alone, the company spent around 11.6 billion US dollars on free games.
And it’s been like this for six years now. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has now explained how the model works.
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Free games are cheap advertising
What does the CEO say? In a press interview, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney explained how the free games business works. According to him, it is a “very economical” program that is primarily designed to attract new customers.
Normally, a lot of money would be invested in advertising that would then run on Facebook or through Google Ads. Instead of investing the budget this way, Epic prefers to give it to the game developers themselves – in exchange for free copies of their titles.
Tim Sweeney continues:
For about a quarter of the price 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 bring new users to the Epic Games Store at a very reasonable price.
This approach seems to be more cost-effective than traditional advertising. And the developers themselves also benefit from it in the long term:
Developers who give away free games actually see an increase in sales of their paid games on the store just because their free game increases awareness. To the point that many developers who are about to release a new game will partner with us to give a limited-time free game release just to increase user awareness for their next game.
So the model seems to work well for everyone involved – including the players who get free games this way.
Are there only positive things? No, because Tim Sweeney also notes that not all investments were worth it. Games that were released exclusively on the Epic Games Store in particular did not always work well, but at the same time cost a lot of money. At the end of 2023, Epic Games also had to lay off a good portion of its employees, 830 people.
In the fight against strong competition like Steam, the free games program is a strong argument. Nevertheless, Valve’s platform seems unlikely to be pushed from the top spot. On MeinMMO we have an overview of the best platforms for gamers – and clarify which is the best.