Since its launch, the Epic Games Store has attracted attention with free games. Among them were top titles like GTA V. The CEO now explains how this model of giving away games pays off when competing with Steam.
What is the deal with free games? Every week, there are new free titles that are given away to users in the Epic Games Store. Sometimes there are even several per week.
These often include indie games, but sometimes also bigger names like GTA 5 or Civilization 6. Since these offers started, the question arises of how this model is financially viable for Epic Games. After all, there are costs involved. In the first nine months since its launch in December 2018, the company spent about 11.6 billion US dollars on free games.
And this has been going on for six years now. The CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, has now explained how the model works.
Free games are cheap advertising
What does the CEO say? In a conversation with the press, the CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, provided insights into how the business with free games works. According to him, it is a “very economical” program that primarily aims to attract new customers.
Normally, a lot of money would be invested in advertising that runs on Facebook or through Google ads. Instead of investing the budget this way, Epic prefers to give it directly to the game developers – in exchange for free copies of their titles.
Tim Sweeney further elaborates:
For about a quarter of the cost of acquiring users through Facebook ads or Google search ads, we can pay a game developer a significant amount 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 low price.
This approach appears to be cheaper than traditional advertising methods. And even the developers themselves benefit in the long run:
Developers who give away free games actually see an increase in sales of their paid games in the store, simply because their free game increases visibility. This goes so far that many developers, who are about to release a new game, collaborate with us to enable a limited-time release of a free game just to draw attention to their next title.
Thus, the model seems to work well for all parties involved – including the players who receive free games this way.
Is there only positive feedback? No, because Tim Sweeney also notes that not all investments have paid off. In particular, games that have been released exclusively in the Epic Games Store did not always perform well, but cost a lot of money at the same time. By the end of 2023, Epic Games also had to lay off a good portion of their employees, 830 people.
In the fight against strong competition like Steam, the free games program is a strong argument. Nevertheless, it seems that Valve’s platform is hardly to be displaced from the top. On MeinMMO, we have an overview of the best platforms for gamers – and clarify which is the best.
