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Comment by Hamuko | Hacker News Reader

I do wonder about the economics of throwing this many free games at consumers. I think I have around 160-170 titles on my Epic Games Store account and I have never spent money on the service.

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Yeah I have a couple hundred and have bought... like... two.

That's just something you can do when you have a money-printer (Fortnight) and want to buy market share, I guess. Worked in my case—sorta—since I'd only ever have bought a couple exclusives and wouldn't have it set to start-on-boot if not for the frequent free games.

But, if I'm looking to buy a game, I still check GoG and Steam first, and if it's not there give a hard think to whether I really want the game, though. Which is why I've only bought two games. I'll even pay more, or defer until a sale, if Epic has it for cheap and it's more expensive on the other two services. The only price they're winning my "business" with is free (except a couple exclusives).

If they don't fix the Linux issue, like steam does, no money from me.

Is it just market share? What do they do with your data?

They're trying to buy being the other store that all gamers have and leave open and look at pretty often. They're trying to go head-to-head with Steam—others have tried with exclusives (e.g. EA's Origin) but it's never been enough, so they're trying with exclusives and giving away like a hundred games a year, hoping that'll do it.

I dunno how everyone else is treating them, but for me, they've gotten me to leave it open and look at it pretty often, but haven't managed to get me to ever buy non-exclusives, so... partial victory?

They don't pay retail price. You probably weren't going to buy those games if Epic wasn't giving them away, so you don't represent a lost sale. The developers could easily come out ahead getting payed penny's on the dollar for sales that wouldn't have otherwise happened.

There is a risk that a game or studio gets a reputation for giveaways/discounts which could canabalize future sales. Or the entire industry gets such a reputation. However, at least in this case, KSP is so old at this point, I don't think it is a major issue. If anything, the publicity probably will do more to boost sales of KSP2, then the notion that KSP2 may be free in 7 years.

Given the timing, I suspect Private Division views this as a marketing deal in advance of the February release of KSP2. Any monetary compensation they get is just a bonus.

In the Apple VS Epic suit some of the numbers for this were actually released. Its surprising how low some of the numbers where. I think for some weeks Epic was only paying $50k/week for this (which, for the scale of Epic, is peanuts). Obviosuly for bigger games (e.g. when they gave out GTA V) it was way bigger, but the YoY cost is actually not as high as you might think.

Also remember this is suppose to be a loss leader. If they can get you hooked on a few games to draw you from Steam then you start buying your games on Epic and then they make real money

>If they can get you hooked on a few games to draw you from Steam then you start buying your games on Epic and then they make real money

Hasn't happened yet and I've had an account for >2 years.

The thing is that even if they keep giving out free games, I still consider my Steam library to have the superior collection of games than what Epic has thus far given out. And since I like using the Steam client and the Steam store more, I don't see Epic Games closing the quality gap anytime soon.

Same. Only reason why I have an Epic account is for the free games. I refuse to buy anything from them on principle; especially after they did my baby Unreal Tournament dirty.

Game company advertising budgets can be in the hundreds of thousands per day, giving away free games like this (most likely with a bulk discount negotiated with the game creator) is peanuts compared to the traffic they bring.

The more free games you have, the less time you have to spend on games you bought on Steam, slowly decoupling you from the Steam ecosystem.

Maybe this isn't a money play, but an attention economy play, in the short run?

In the new economy, attention is the real currency.

I'm not sure they're losing much. You would have to pay me money if you wanted me to play 90% of what's free on the epic games store.

10% of that is still almost 20 games to play, which is a lot.

Think of it less like “free games” and more like “buying market share”.

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