Epic has been distributing games on the Epic Games Store since its launch in late 2018, encouraging Steam users to install the launcher with as much panache as “Grand Theft Auto 5” and “Civilization 6”. Last year alone, more than 580 million free games were claimed.

Distributing 500 million copies of a game a year is not cheap, even if you pay a fraction of the list price of each copy; thanks to documents released during the court battle between Epic and Apple, we know that the company spent $11.6 million in the first nine months of the free games program alone Epic has been offering the games for six years.

However, in a conference call with the press earlier this week, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney responded to questions about Epic's free games strategy by saying that it is a “very economical” user acquisition program and that it is not Facebook or Google advertising, but game developers (a He stated that there is a bonus in that the budget is passed on to the groups that benefit from the game store.

“Offering free games seems counterintuitive as a strategy, but companies spend money to acquire users for their games. For about a quarter of what it costs to acquire users through Facebook ads or Google search ads, you can pay a game developer a lot of money for the rights to distribute its game to users and attract new users to the Epic Games store at a very economical rate.” [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]