Free Games and EPIC's Cost

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@simoncarless
·
4h
Want to know how much $ the devs of those 'free' Epic Games Store games got, & how many copies were grabbed? Here's the first 9 months to September 2019.

https://twitter.com/simoncarless/status/1389297530341519362

A little teaser of the documents that will be presented in the Epic vs Apple lawsuit. This one shows first 9 months of Epic's free games, how much each game did cost them, how many users it acquired etc.

It cost Epic less than 12 million to acquire nearly five million new accounts. Compared to an advertising campaign generating a similar growth in user accounts this is peanuts. While some indie developers got a mere pittance big companies get big payouts.

Question is how many of these new accounts will become buying customers once Epic's spending spree is over.
 

"The numbers themselves give a rare look into the cost of "free" games. For example, according to the document, Epic paid Warner Bros. $1.5 million to offer the Batman Arkham series as a temporarily free game on the Epic Games Store. Most of the fees are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, including hit indie games like Subnautica and Celeste, though Metro: 2033 Redux was apparently given for $0.

The document also shows the number of Epic accounts and the percentage of accounts that were new to Epic, as well as a column that calculates the amount of money Epic spent on each new user. That metric is abbreviated UA, for "User Acquisition." The whole purpose of these free games was to drive new users to EGS so they can establish a foothold against Steam. While these UA numbers are quite high, the colossal amount of money that Fortnite has made over the past few years has allowed Epic to finance this expensive strategy."

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/leaked-epic-games-store-documents-reveal-money-and-downloads-numbers-for-free-games/1100-6490963/

Sorry for the bad quality better images are not available yet.

Replies • 99

I don't get Fortnite. But I understand why they wanted all of the users to compete against Steam.






Planetary

i think the moment epic enables reviews, achievements, cloud saves, I think it becomes a very similar to steam and a very compelling reason to use that store for cheaper games, otherwise steam is still better. its a shame it still doesn't have those after 2 years :/

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Planetary
ABD360G said:

i think the moment epic enables reviews, achievements, cloud saves, I think it becomes a very similar to steam and a very compelling reason to use that store for cheaper games, otherwise steam is still better. its a shame it still doesn't have those after 2 years :/

edited 1d

i believe their strategy would be trying to amass usesr first than the platform using the giveaways. When Epic reached their User milestone, I bet they will discontinue the weekly giveaways as that would be highly unprofitable 


Galactic

this is a bit misleading, its not the games they're paying for, the product they are paying for is the freeloaders, which they hope will eventually spend money with epic.

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