Epic Games has been giving away free games every week for years and seems to be doing well with it – but the store’s exclusive titles haven’t done so well.

Valve doesn’t exactly have a monopoly when it comes to buying digital games, but by and large everyone knows that Steam is the de facto store for PC games. Storefronts like GOG and Itch.io have their own niches, but Steam is still the go-to place for most PC games, even if it has its fair share of flaws. Then, in 2018, Epic Games decided it wanted a piece of the pie and opened its own store. This wasn’t without controversy, as many PC gamers weren’t fans of it to begin with. Six years later, the store is still around, but even so, many still don’t like it.

Of course, Epic has tried a few tactics to encourage players to use its platform, such as weekly free games, which it has offered every week since 2018, with even daily free games during certain seasons. But in a recent press conference (via PC Gamer), Epic CEO Tim Sweeney shared that despite the potential costs, it is a “very economical” user acquisition program.

“Giving away free games seems like a counterintuitive strategy, but companies spend money to acquire users for games,” Sweeney said. “For about a quarter of the price 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 new users to the Epic Games Store at a very reasonable price.”

“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 increase in sales of their paid games on the store, simply because their free game increases awareness. And it gets to the point that when developers are close to releasing a new game, they often want to partner with us to release a timely free game just to get users’ attention for their next game. That’s a great thing. And it’s by far the most cost-effective aspect of the Epic Games Store.”

Of course, Epic has also tried to attract more players to the store by offering certain PC games exclusively (usually for a limited time), including notable titles like the first Hades, Ooblets, and for a while the Kingdom Hearts series. This didn’t go so well, however, with Sweeney saying, “We spent a lot of money on exclusives. Some of them worked out very well. A lot of them were not good investments, but the free games program was just magic.” I guess you can’t convince everyone!