this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2024
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personally speaking, I think they were short-sighted not requiring an account to have made a purchase to use the free game program. Not like a dedicated subscription but like as a "you must have bought a game through is" type of deal like how steam manages the community system. A huge part of their misinvestment are people who are only there /for/ the free games. It wouldn't be a tall barrier if they had put it behind a "must make a 5 or 10$ purchase a year off the store" type of restriction, and it would save tremendously on how many free copies that get redeemed
I know people that like flipping keys and games off gray markets, and they've told me themselves they have three or four epic accounts and whenever a game goes live they just run a script on their computer that Auto redeems the game on all four of the accounts, that would more or less stop that from happening because they're not going to get much advertisement wise out of that type of crowd anyway.
That being said I'm guilty as charged as well, I think satisfactory was the last game I actually bought off of the Epic store and that was strictly because that was the only platform I could get it on
Considering Sweeney says they made a lot of money on the free games program, what you are suggesting is a bad idea. Your proposal only reduces the number of users which devs are explicitly trying to get.
I don't believe he did say that they made a lot of money on the program. If memory serves, they lose hundreds of millions of dollars on this store endeavor every year. What he's saying has worked for them is user acquisition, but I doubt those users are as valuable as he says they are.
Because the user acquisition is how they'll end up making money. The more people in their ecosystem the more people they have who are willing to spend in their ecosystem.
The free games is probably a good avenue for them to get some potential buyers.
I believe that they believe that, but while that results in a number of people with Epic accounts and libraries, I think that's a very different number than people who will spend money in their store. From my perspective, they do nothing to offer me a better product or experience than Steam or GOG, and that's before we even get to the part where they don't support my operating system.