Though much of the controversy that surrounded the launch of the Epic Games Store in 2018 has since died down, many gamers still feel resentful about the company’s aggressive approach to growing the storefront. Some people believe that the exclusivity deals signed by Epic remove player autonomy by forcing them to purchase from the Epic Games Store if they want to enjoy certain titles on PC. However, that hasn’t kept some of these same people from stopping by the site every week to grab the free games offered by Epic.
Giving away weekly free titles has been another Epic strategy to pull in new customers. Those who have visited the site regularly since the program launched could potentially have received thousands of dollars of free games from the Epic Games Store. And despite paying millions of dollars to developers for the games, the strategy seems to be paying off. Epic had originally intended for the program to only run until the end of 2019 but decided to prolong it through 2021.
The Epic Games Store has given away a number of highly popular games over the years, including Grand Theft Auto 5, which was the free title offered in May 2020. According to information that has come out during the Epic v. Apple trial, that single giveaway brought more than 7 million new users to the storefront. Some may remember that when the offer went live, so many people flocked to the Epic Games Store that the site went down for more than eight hours and Fortnite’s login servers crashed.
The court documents also revealed some other game titles whose giveaways on the Epic Games Store brought in a substantial number of new users. Subnautica, the 2018 underwater survival game by Unknown Worlds Entertainment, resulted in just under 1 million new accounts on the site. And Civilization 6, which was given away right after Grand Theft Auto 5, attracted almost 2.5 million new users.
These numbers come from an internal Epic chart that was provided to the court for the trial. One notable thing is the tiny blip on the graph for Gearbox Software’s Borderlands 3, which launched for PC exclusively on the Epic Games Store. Court documents in May revealed that Epic paid $115 million for the six-month Borderlands 3 exclusivity deal, and yet the chart shows that the game brought in fewer than 250,000 new users when it launched in September 2019. Many gamers were unhappy about the exclusivity deal, review bombing previous Gearbox titles on Steam and vowing to boycott the game on release.
Source: The Verge