Epic Games boss: Free games a winner, exclusive deals a ‘bad investment’

The Epic Games Store’s six-year-old campaign of offering free games to anyone who creates a free store account has been “very economical” at building a user base, Epic founder and boss Tim Sweeney told games journalists last week.

The exclusive (and much-reviled) releases that Epic has negotiated over the same span? Not so much, Sweeney admitted.

The candor came during a conference call roundtable with journalists, who asked questions based on some of the dollar figures that have shaken out of Epic’s legal battles with Apple and Google going back to 2024.

For example, the 2020 suit against Apple revealed that Epic spent $11.6 million to distribute free games in the first nine months of the program, which began in December 2018 when the Epic Games Store itself opened to challenge Valve’s Steam and its dominance of online PC video game sales.

Sweeney said this was a very good investment to quickly grow an installation base — to which Epic can then market new and upcoming games at scale. “For about a quarter of the price that it costs to acquire users through Facebook ads or Google Search ads,” Sweeney reasoned, according to PC Gamer, “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 economical rate.”

The Epic Games Store launched in large part because of the breakout success — especially the commercial success — of Fortnite Battle Royale, which launched in 2017 and exploded in popularity in early 2018.

Fans who signed up for an account and free games at the beginning of the Epic Games Store may recall that Epic did not make a long term promise that the free-games campaign would continue, tacitly acknowledging this was an effort to quickly spin up an audience. But six years later, the free games giveaway continues, with most assuming it’s a permanent part of the plan akin to free games from Amazon Prime Gaming or PlayStation Plus Essential.

Sweeney said that developers who make a deal with Epic to offer a game for free “actually see an upsurge in the sale of their paid games on the store, just because their free game raises awareness.”

The word-of-mouth coming from this experience, Sweeney added, translates to an increased willingness among developers to offer a free back-catalog game around the time they’re ready to launch an all new game, just to drive attention to their offerings.

As for PC-exclusive distribution arrangements, which have ticked off the ever restive PC gaming fanbase over the years, Sweeney says that hasn’t gone so well. Again, early on in the Epic Games Store’s life, it cut exclusive deals with third-party publishers ensuring that new titles for PC  would launch there and not Steam.

While there were some successes — a $146 million deal making Borderlands 3 exclusive to the Epic Games Store was mostly recovered in the first week of sales — Sweeney said that “a lot of [exclusive launch agreements] were not good investments.”

Epic Games drew white-hot outrage when a deal it cut with 4A Games to make 2019’s Metro Exodus exclusive to the Epic Games Store ran afoul of its presence already on Steam, where fans had already preordered it, too.

That kicked up an online backlash which included accusations that Epic was a front for Chinese propaganda and personal data-gathering, in light of Tencent’s 40%, noncontrolling stake in the company at the time.

PC Gamer reported later that the exclusive arrangements from 2019 to 2021 hit Epic with a $300 million loss by themselves. Epic has since backed it down as far as grabbing third-party exclusive deals, but of course its own publishing division, for PC titles anyway, is sold through the Epic Games Store and nowhere else.

Featured image via Ideogram.

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