Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney acknowledged that while the company’s free game giveaways were good for business, many of the exclusive deals were “not good investments.”

During a recent press conference, Sweeney spoke candidly about the Epic Games Store’s approach to user acquisition.

He acknowledged that while “some (of the EGS exclusives) worked extremely well,” many of them “were not good investments.”

Meanwhile, he described the free games program as “simply magical” and “very economical,” even if the initial impression was that giving away games might seem “counterintuitive.”

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

“For about a quarter of the price of acquiring users through Facebook 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 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,” Sweeney added.

“It’s that when developers are close to releasing a new game, they often want to come to us and work closely with us to release a timed 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.”