Epic Games has been giving away free games every week for years now, which has apparently been going well – but the store’s exclusives haven’t done so well.
Valve doesn’t exactly run a monopoly when it comes to buying digital games, but for the most part everyone knows that Steam is the defacto place to buy your PC games. Storefronts like GOG and Itch.io have their own niches, but Steam is still the place to be for most PC games, even if it is quite flawed. Then, in 2018, Epic Games decided it wanted a piece of the pie and opened up its own store, and it didn’t do so without controversy, as many PC gamers were not a fan of it right off the bat. Six years on, the store is still around, but even still many don’t like it.
Of course, Epic has tried a couple of tactics to encourage players to use its platform, like weekly free games, which it has given out every week since 2018, with certain seasons even offering daily free games. But in a recent press call (via PC Gamer), despite how costly that might be, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney shared that it’s been a “very economical” user acquisition program.
