Epic Games' free games have been working out great, but a lot of the store's exclusives "were not good investments" says CEO Tim Sweeney

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.

"Giving away free games seems counterintuitive as a strategy, but companies spend money to acquire users into games," Sweeney said. "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.

"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."

Of course, Epic has also tried to bring more players to the storefront by hosting certain PC games there exclusively (normally just for a limited time), with notable titles such as the first Hades, Ooblets, and for a while the Kingdom Hearts series. This hasn't gone as well though, with Sweeney 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." I guess you can't win over everyone!