Re: FREE GAMES: "River City Girls", "Arcadegeddon" and "Idle Champions"

On Thu, 10 Apr 2025 18:20:03 -0000 (UTC), in
comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action, candycanearter07 wrote:

Wait, they're offering free games for free?? How bad has Epic gotten?

The goal of the freebies is twofold:

    a) get people to sign-up to Epic GameStore. Onboarding new
       users (that is, getting them to go through the bother
       of setting up an account) is the hardest step (even
       more difficult then getting them to come visit in the
       first place), so companies often use bribers^h^h^h^h^h^h
       incentives to encourage customers to take that step

    b) encouraging people to visit the website, in hopes that
       --whilst scrolling down to the freebies-- something else
       will catch their eye and they'll buy that at the same
       time.

But (a) is pretty much done; they've gotten as many new accounts as
they probably can from the program. And (b) doesn't seem to be very
effective, since people just aren't that interested in buying (or more
to the point, using the EGS client to play) games from Epic.

So Epic has been visibly scaling down the scope of the give-aways for
the past two or three years, relying more on free-games, small Indies,
and repeats. They'd take a significant hit in PR (and active user
count) if they killed the program entirely, so it continues on
life-support (and every now and again they throw in a 'big game' to
keep people interested) but it's mostly on life-support now. It's
served its purpose.

Anyway, for many games -- especially older titles or F2P-- these
free-offers are actually beneficially to the developer. They're
unlikely to make a lot of money from sales of the base game anyway,
but those new players may purchase DLC/MTX. So they sacrifice the
retail cost of the game (which they weren't going to get anyway,
'cause nobody was buying) to bolster MTX sales. I'm sure for a lot of
games --especially cruft like "Idle Champions of the Forgotten
Realms"-- it's not EPIC offering it for free so much as the publisher
themselves. It's mutual parasitism; Epic gets the benefit of offering
another free game on Thursday, whilst the game developer gets new
players to buy the MTX.

TL;DR: expect to see a lot more of this sort of Thursday-freebies from
Epic.