Freebie Folly
How long can the games industry keep giving stuff away for free?
EVERY WEEK I log into the Epic Store and Twitch desktop app and see what freebies are being thrown at me. It’s a weird obsession, I’ll admit, and I end up with more games than I’ll likely ever play, but it’s worth it for the occasional gem. Well, I say “occasional,” but there’s plenty of good stuff being given away: Celeste, ForHonor, Just Cause 4, and more have all dropped into my lap, and that’s just from Epic.
It’s a strange proposition: I offer nothing in return and yet am showered with enough games to eat up all of my free time. I’ve only spent about $20 of my own hard-earned cash on the Epic Store, and yet I scoop up a free game or two just about every week. Sure, there’s rarely anything new, but there’s enough games that I missed when they first released to keep me happy.
How long can bodies like Epic keep this up? Twitch has the backing of the cash cow that is Amazon, but one imagines that Epic is hemorrhaging money. What deals are cut with developers to get their games back out onto players’ machines? How much do the original developers make with each free download? One day, the pool of Fortnite money at Epic HQ will run dry.
Epic’s reputation among devs is generally good, as it takes a slimmer cut of sales profits than other digital storefronts; nobody would be willing to pass up selling their games on Steam otherwise. Perhaps it’s as simple as a matter of buying goodwill from developers. Epic definitely
has the money to throw around right now; Twitch does too, if Jeff Bezos’s evergrowing wealth is anything to go by. But even a behemoth like Fortnite won’t last forever, and I have to question whether Epic would be better off reinvesting that money for the future.