this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2024
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personally speaking, I think they were short-sighted not requiring an account to have made a purchase to use the free game program. Not like a dedicated subscription but like as a "you must have bought a game through is" type of deal like how steam manages the community system. A huge part of their misinvestment are people who are only there /for/ the free games. It wouldn't be a tall barrier if they had put it behind a "must make a 5 or 10$ purchase a year off the store" type of restriction, and it would save tremendously on how many free copies that get redeemed
I know people that like flipping keys and games off gray markets, and they've told me themselves they have three or four epic accounts and whenever a game goes live they just run a script on their computer that Auto redeems the game on all four of the accounts, that would more or less stop that from happening because they're not going to get much advertisement wise out of that type of crowd anyway.
That being said I'm guilty as charged as well, I think satisfactory was the last game I actually bought off of the Epic store and that was strictly because that was the only platform I could get it on
They're doing the equivalent of buying twitter followers. The goal is simply to make more people make accounts so they can mislead developers into thinking their market has customers who will buy their game there.
They intentionally did not do it that way. Their thesis here is that people won't leave Steam because that's where their game library is already, so they want you to accumulate enough of a library that you'll get over that hurdle. I think this premise is fundamentally flawed, because while some subset of the market does think that way, why would I ever buy a game on Epic if I could buy it on Steam instead? I've never spent a dollar on Epic's store, but I have a library of 270 games on it. Epic paid for all of those. In one case, I tried a game out that Epic gave away before buying it on Steam later.
Exactly. It's especially nice because I can use Heroic launcher on my Steam Deck or Linux Desktop and never have to actually use EGS, I just claim on the web and play through another launcher.
Considering Sweeney says they made a lot of money on the free games program, what you are suggesting is a bad idea. Your proposal only reduces the number of users which devs are explicitly trying to get.
I don't believe he did say that they made a lot of money on the program. If memory serves, they lose hundreds of millions of dollars on this store endeavor every year. What he's saying has worked for them is user acquisition, but I doubt those users are as valuable as he says they are.
Because the user acquisition is how they'll end up making money. The more people in their ecosystem the more people they have who are willing to spend in their ecosystem.
The free games is probably a good avenue for them to get some potential buyers.
I believe that they believe that, but while that results in a number of people with Epic accounts and libraries, I think that's a very different number than people who will spend money in their store. From my perspective, they do nothing to offer me a better product or experience than Steam or GOG, and that's before we even get to the part where they don't support my operating system.
I still wouldn't have spent any money there. Biggest reason I never would is how I hated Metro Exodus becoming an Epic exclusive after being announced on Steam. Was a good way to make people who are upset by that to refuse to spend money there.
Not like I haven't spent money on other launchers so wasn't like I only bought steam games. They just went about in a way that immediately made me perceive them as an antagonist.