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
They’re doing the equivalent of buying twitter followers. The goal is simply to make more people make accounts so they can mislead developers into thinking their market has customers who will buy their game there.
They intentionally did not do it that way. Their thesis here is that people won’t leave Steam because that’s where their game library is already, so they want you to accumulate enough of a library that you’ll get over that hurdle. I think this premise is fundamentally flawed, because while some subset of the market does think that way, why would I ever buy a game on Epic if I could buy it on Steam instead? I’ve never spent a dollar on Epic’s store, but I have a library of 270 games on it. Epic paid for all of those. In one case, I tried a game out that Epic gave away before buying it on Steam later.
Exactly. It’s especially nice because I can use Heroic launcher on my Steam Deck or Linux Desktop and never have to actually use EGS, I just claim on the web and play through another launcher.
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
They’re doing the equivalent of buying twitter followers. The goal is simply to make more people make accounts so they can mislead developers into thinking their market has customers who will buy their game there.
They intentionally did not do it that way. Their thesis here is that people won’t leave Steam because that’s where their game library is already, so they want you to accumulate enough of a library that you’ll get over that hurdle. I think this premise is fundamentally flawed, because while some subset of the market does think that way, why would I ever buy a game on Epic if I could buy it on Steam instead? I’ve never spent a dollar on Epic’s store, but I have a library of 270 games on it. Epic paid for all of those. In one case, I tried a game out that Epic gave away before buying it on Steam later.
Exactly. It’s especially nice because I can use Heroic launcher on my Steam Deck or Linux Desktop and never have to actually use EGS, I just claim on the web and play through another launcher.