Epic's Sweeney says game giveaways "magical" for user acquisition
The CEO of Fortnite giant Epic, Tim Sweeney, has said that the company's strategy of giving away free games to users on its storefront has been good for bringing in users.
Speaking to the press recently – as reported by PC Gamer – the exec said that the company was spending around a quarter on user acquisition by giving money to developers to give away their games than it would have cost on ads for Facebook or Google.
"Giving away free games seems counterintuitive as a strategy, but companies spend money to acquire users into games," Sweeney said.
"For about a quarter of the price that it costs to acquire users through Facebook ads or Google Search Ads, we can pay a game developer a lot of money for the right to distribute their game to our users, and we can bring in new users to the Epic Games Store at a very economical rate.
"And you might think that this would hurt the sales prospects of games on the Epic Game Store, but developers who give away free games actually see an upsurge in the sale of their paid games on the store, just because their free game raises awareness. And it's so much that often developers, when they're about to launch a new game, come with us wanting to work closely on a timed release of a free game, just to drive user awareness of their next game. That's been an awesome thing. And it's been by far the most cost effective aspect of the Epic Games Store."
It hasn't all been positive, however. Sweeney went on to say that spending money on exclusives was not worthwhile much of the time,
"We spent a lot of money on exclusives," he continued.
"A few of them worked extremely well. A lot of them were not good investments, but the free games program has been just magical."
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