Since its launch in 2018, the Epic Games Store has been giving away one or two titles every week—sometimes more often than weekly. According to Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, this program was “just magical.”

During a recent press conference (transcribed by PCGamer), Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney discussed the relative success of EGS’s various programs, including its exclusive games and free-to-play program.

According to Sweeney, the exclusive deals were in some cases “not good investments,” but the company’s free games program was much more profitable. Saying:

“Giving away free games seems like a counterintuitive strategy, but companies spend money to acquire users for games. 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.”

Sweeney continued“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.”

Based on all of this, it seems like Epic is moving away from time-limited exclusives, but will continue to offer free games on a weekly basis. in Tim’s words “We spent a lot of money on exclusives. Some of them worked very well. A lot of them were not good investments, but the free games program was just magic.”

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

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