In its first nine months, the Epic Games Store spent nearly US$12 million giving games away. That figure, which surfaced years later in documents from the Epic v Apple legal case, covered 38 games handed out between the store's December 2018 launch and a September 2019 giveaway of Double Fine's *Everything*.
Twelve million dollars is a lot of money to spend on things you are not charging for. It is also, as it turned out, a fairly precise measure of what Epic thought a new customer was worth.
The free-game habit is now so normal on PC that it is easy to forget it was ever a strategy. For a lot of players, checking what Epic is giving away this week sits somewhere between checking the weather and checking the letterbox. But the programme started as a bet by a newcomer to PC storefronts, and the numbers behind it are more revealing than the giveaways themselves.
What a free game actually cost
The documents reported by Video Games Chronicle show that every deal was priced differently. Some were cheap: Super Meat Boy, World of Goo and RIME each cost Epic US$50,000 or less. Others were not. Subnautica cost US$1.4 million, Mutant Year Zero cost US$1 million, and the Batman Arkham Collection cost US$1.5 million.
The Arkham deal is where the logic shows. According to VGC's reading of the documents, the collection was downloaded nearly 6.5 million times, and around 10% of those downloads came from people who were new to the store. VGC worked that out to roughly US$2.44 per new user. By the same measure, some smaller games were far less efficient: VGC estimated Celeste at about US$12 per new user and Inside at about US$11.12.
That is the quiet heart of the whole programme. Epic was not really paying for downloads. It was paying for accounts, and some games recruited new ones much more cheaply than others. A blockbuster with a recognisable name, it seems, does a better job of getting someone to install a new launcher than a beloved indie that many of them already owned.
From experiment to weekly ritual
By the start of 2020, the experiment had become a fixture. Shacknews reported in January 2020 that Epic had offered 73 free games in 2019, with 200 million copies claimed, and that the weekly free-game programme had been extended through the end of 2020. Anyone visiting the store each week, it said, would find at least one game being offered free of charge.
The scale has not shrunk much since. In February 2025, Kotaku reported Epic's 2024 figures: 89 giveaways, worth more than US$2,000 in total by Epic's own count, and 595 million free games claimed across the year. Epic also said the programme was "not slowing down" and would continue in 2025 on both PC and mobile.
What changed along the way is less the cadence than the expectation. Before the programme, "free" on PC usually meant a demo, a free-to-play game with its business model elsewhere, or a weekend trial that disappeared on Monday. Epic's giveaways trained a large audience to expect complete, paid games at no cost, on a schedule, as a matter of routine. Whether that is good for the games being given away is a separate argument. Developers were paid up front, as the court documents show, but the long-term effect of a game being "the free one" on its later sales is not something these sources settle.
Why it is still running
Seven years on, the weekly giveaway is still there, and the numbers suggest why. Hundreds of millions of claims a year are not a side promotion. They look a lot like a store paying to stay part of players' weekly routine, which, judging by what Epic was willing to spend from the start, is the point.
There is a sensible caveat. Claim counts are not play counts, and a giveaway that ends up as one more unopened icon in a library has done Epic more good than it has done the player. The figures Epic publishes measure how many games were collected, not how many were enjoyed.
Still, as business stories go, it is a tidy one. A newcomer worked out what a new user was worth, spent accordingly, and turned the result into something players now plan their week around. Not bad for a line item that started at US$12 million.
Reporting notes