The most cost-effective way to get new users on the Epic Games Store has been the free games, not the exclusives.
Epic has been giving away games on the Epic Games Store since it launched at the end of 2018, enticing Steam users to install its launcher with freebies as big as Grand Theft Auto 5 and Civilization 6. More than 580 million free games were claimed just last year.
Giving away half-a-billion game copies a year is not a cheap thing to do. Epic only pays a fraction of each game’s list price per copy given away, but it adds up. Thanks to documents that came out during Epic’s legal fight with Apple, we learned that the company spent $11.6 million on free games in just the first nine months of the program. Epic has been giving away games for six years now.
However, responding to a question about Epic’s free game strategy on a call with press earlier this week, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said that it’s been a “very economical” user acquisition program, with the bonus that the budget goes to game developers—a group that it’s in a game store’s interest to see thrive—rather than toward Facebook or Google ads.
