Epic Games Store will continue free game giveaways all 2020
Weekly giveaways!
Epic confirmed today that they plan to keep on giving away a full game for free every week on the Epic Games Store throughout 2020. Previously they'd only confirmed freebies through to the end of 2019, a year they ended with a blowout of daily freebies, though they did quietly kept going when this year started. Epic say over 200 million free games have been claimed so far. I've largely been using this to heap yet more games onto my backlog but Epic have said they pay developers for the freebies so hey, I'm glad if my idle stockpiling gets devs paid.
"To kick things off, we're extending our weekly free game program throughout 2020," Epic said in today's blogblast. "Every single week, come back to claim your game." Alrighty then. I shall.
Looking for more free games? Check out our round up of the best free PC games that you can download and play right now.
The current free game is Sundered, a hand-drawn metroidvania from the makers of Jotun. From Thursday, the freebie will be Horace, a platformer wholly unrelated to the endless bear coiled around our feet in the RPS treehouse.
Epic also used this opportunity to paste a whole load of big numbers into a JPEG in the clumsy modern art form known as the "infographic". Most of the numbers are pointless (did you know that they have 644k Facebook followers? you do now) but there is some interesting stuff.
They say that PC players have spent $680 million (£523 million) in the Epic Games Store so far and of that $215 million (£165m) was on third-party games. Which means, what, $465 million (£358m) or so on Fortnite bits on PC? Damn. I also found it interesting that Creator Codes (an affiliate scheme for #influencers and #contentcreators) have been used on 1,733,180 third-party Store purchases, just to get a sense of the scale of loyalty and interest.
If you enjoy theorycrafting and writing fanfic about digital game stores, you might also enjoy some of the regional breakdowns and things on the graf. Mate I'm just here for the free games.