Many of Epic's exclusivity deals were 'not good investments,' says Tim Sweeney, but the free games program 'has been just magical'
Many of Epic's exclusivity deals were 'not good investments,' says Tim Sweeney, but the free games program 'has been just magical'
The most cost-effective way to get new users on the Epic Games Store has been the free games, not the exclusives.
Wow, almost like if you give gamers things they want, you might compete with steam. Instead of being a pissbaby and starting shit with everyone. Who fucking knew?
"Giving away free games seems counterintuitive as a strategy, but companies spend money to acquire users into games," said Sweeney. "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.
Good for Epic.
"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."
Good for developers, that have decent enough games.
"We spent a lot of money on exclusives," said Sweeney. "A few of them worked extremely well. A lot of them were not good investments, but the free games program has been just magical."
Exclusives, of course this is the expected result, because that how game publishing/marketing works. People in this thread talking like publishers make a lot of money on 80% of their released games. (<-- it's not, in case you did not get it. ) I think it's just Tim Sweeney's way of saying, we will adjust our approach in the future, like what any publicly traded CEO would do.
I think it’s just Tim Sweeney’s way of saying, we will adjust our approach in the future, like what any publicly traded CEO would do.
Epic Games is a private company.
If it were public, they would not let Sweeney throw (large amounts of) money into the shredder like he tends to do.
Sorry, I stand corrected. I thought they went public but after checking again Epic is not.
personally speaking, I think they were short-sighted not requiring an account to have made a purchase to use the free game program. Not like a dedicated subscription but like as a "you must have bought a game through is" type of deal like how steam manages the community system. A huge part of their misinvestment are people who are only there /for/ the free games. It wouldn't be a tall barrier if they had put it behind a "must make a 5 or 10$ purchase a year off the store" type of restriction, and it would save tremendously on how many free copies that get redeemed
I know people that like flipping keys and games off gray markets, and they've told me themselves they have three or four epic accounts and whenever a game goes live they just run a script on their computer that Auto redeems the game on all four of the accounts, that would more or less stop that from happening because they're not going to get much advertisement wise out of that type of crowd anyway.
That being said I'm guilty as charged as well, I think satisfactory was the last game I actually bought off of the Epic store and that was strictly because that was the only platform I could get it on
They're doing the equivalent of buying twitter followers. The goal is simply to make more people make accounts so they can mislead developers into thinking their market has customers who will buy their game there.
They intentionally did not do it that way. Their thesis here is that people won't leave Steam because that's where their game library is already, so they want you to accumulate enough of a library that you'll get over that hurdle. I think this premise is fundamentally flawed, because while some subset of the market does think that way, why would I ever buy a game on Epic if I could buy it on Steam instead? I've never spent a dollar on Epic's store, but I have a library of 270 games on it. Epic paid for all of those. In one case, I tried a game out that Epic gave away before buying it on Steam later.
Exactly. It's especially nice because I can use Heroic launcher on my Steam Deck or Linux Desktop and never have to actually use EGS, I just claim on the web and play through another launcher.
I still wouldn't have spent any money there. Biggest reason I never would is how I hated Metro Exodus becoming an Epic exclusive after being announced on Steam. Was a good way to make people who are upset by that to refuse to spend money there.
Not like I haven't spent money on other launchers so wasn't like I only bought steam games. They just went about in a way that immediately made me perceive them as an antagonist.
Considering Sweeney says they made a lot of money on the free games program, what you are suggesting is a bad idea. Your proposal only reduces the number of users which devs are explicitly trying to get.
Resurrect UT4 and I will deliver you 1 more user.