Since its launch in 2018, the Epic Games Store has been giving a title or two away for free every single week – sometimes even more than weekly. According to Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, this program “has been just magical.”

During a recent press call (as transcribed by PCGamer), Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney discussed the relative success of its various EGS programs, including their exclusive games as well as the free game program.

According to Sweeney, while the exclusivity deals “were not good investments” in some cases, the company’s free game program has been much more fruitful, saying:

“Giving away free games seems counterintuitive as a strategy, but companies spend money to acquire users into games. For about a quarter of the price that 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 in new users to the Epic Games Store at a very economical rate.”

Sweeney continued, “And you might think that this would hurt the sales prospects of games on the Epic Game Store, but developers who give away free games actually see an upsurge in the sale of their paid games on the store, just because their free game raises awareness. And it's so much that often developers, when they're about to launch a new game, come with us wanting to work closely on a timed release of a free game, just to drive user awareness of their next game. That's been an awesome thing. And it's been by far the most cost effective aspect of the Epic Games Store.”

Based on all this, it seems as though Epic is moving away from timed-exclusives while continuing to offer free games on a weekly basis, with Tim saying “We spent a lot of money on exclusives. A few of them worked extremely well. A lot of them were not good investments, but the free games program has been just magical.”

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KitGuru says: What do you think of Epic’s free game program? How many titles have you gotten for free? Let us know down below.

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