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Epic gave away nearly 600 million games in 2024, and it's 'not slowing down' for 2025 (www.pcgamer.com)

submitted 6 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago

The goal is very simple, it's to get you to use Epic. The reason people buy their games on Steam is because people effectively have Steam start on boot. It's the default because "all" your games are there. You use gog or EA app or Ubisoft connect only if there's something that's not on Steam and you boot them up specifically to that one game.

So if you're Epic and you want to compete with Steam how do you do that? You grow the user's library to make sure they start up Epic instead of Steam and you get them in the habit of logging in. Both are accomplished by giving our free games.

It's probably not effective on the old timers who have 100+ games on Steam, but people like me are not the target audience. It's aimed at younger people who don't have a huge steam library and can't really afford to buy a lot of games.

Tldr: Epic is giving away free games to become the default store for the next generation of gamers.