AdvertisementĪmount Epic spent acquiring free game giveaways in the EGS's first 10 months.

Add it up, and you get about $10.6 million in EGS revenue that is pretty directly attributable to 'free' games. But about 291,000 of them (5.34 percent) became paying customers, and those who did spent an average of $36.30 each on the Epic Games Store in that time. In the EGS's first 10 months, the vast majority of users coming to the store for free games were complete freeloaders who didn't spend a dime on the store. Games like those in the Batman: Arkham series and Subnautica were unsurprisingly big attractors for new EGS users, but titles like Slime Rancher, Overcooked, Hyper Light Drifter, and World of Goo brought in surprisingly high numbers of new EGS users as well.

Epic linked 5 million new accounts to its free-game program through September 2019, meaning it spent about $2.37 per new account. Two of the free games in the bunch were worth at least $1 million to Epic- Mutant Year Zero ($1M) and Subnautica ($1.4M)-while offering free copies of the three collected Batman: Arkham games cost Epic $1.5M total.Įpic measures how many individual downloads each free game attracted, but the company's real measure of success for a free-game giveaway seems to be how many new Epic accounts came to the service for that game. The 'buyout price' paid from Epic to the publisher for each individual title varied, but the middle half of titles (25th to 75th percentile) cost $80,000 to $350,000 each. In the first 10 months of the EGS's existence (through September 2019), Epic spent roughly $11.6 million to distribute just over 104 million free copies of 42 different titles, the filing shows.

Epic hopes its investment will help to eventually make the EGS a self-sustaining, profitable storefront with a significant share of the PC gaming market. While this version of Epic's Review of Performance and Strategy is a bit dated now, it still gives the clearest public indication yet of how Epic sees huge upfront spending on free and exclusive games as key to attracting new users to the EGS. Now, a new filing in the case gives a detailed breakdown of how that money was spent over the first 11 months of the Epic Games Store's existence (through October 2019). Apple court case showed the public just how much money Epic has been throwing around to secure exclusive 'guarantees' and offer free games in an effort to establish a market foothold for the Epic Games Store (EGS). Further Reading How long can Epic afford to throw money at the Epic Games Store?Last month, a filing in the Epic v.

Slime rancher keeps crashing