Can I Offer You a Free Game in These Troubling Times?Â
The Epic Games Store has been handing out free games lately like they were working for a charity. The latest game to be part of the giveaway was Civilization 6. Not exactly a game that is coming from a small indie developer. While this new approach by the Epic Games Store has been adored and loved by users of the platform, there has been its fair share of critics as well. However, the founder of Epic Games, Tim Sweeny has stated that this generous business model actually helps the gaming industry in the long.
Sweeny has defended his company’s actions by claiming that giving away free games to Epic Games Store users will inevitably lead to said titles being bought on other platforms. He also added that this was an attempt to try and win over hardcore PC gamers who were not too happy about the arrival of the new online market. Sweeny said, “We realized early on that we needed to take a really, really bold approach, and a disruptive approach, and so the free game program was launched, exclusives were launched. A lot of things we knew would be controversial in some ways, especially with the hardcore Steam gamers who bought hundreds of games on Steam and want to buy all of their games on Steam.”
Regardless of how you feel about the Epic Games Store, what they are doing is certainly working. Their control over the market has grown exponentially since they first debuted only a year and a half ago. Most experts have said that the chances of Epic Games dethroning Steam as the king of the PC market is unlikely but if these trends continue the rest of this decade it seems as though anything could happen.