I want more free stuff.

[FOXDUDE69]

Steam doesn't give it's users enough free stuff. In fact, we don't get any free stuff at all from them.

Epic gives you 2 games a week (thanks daddy Sweeney).
GOG gives you a free game almost every sale, mostly old games but more than Valve gives us.
Nintendo lets you trade in Nintendo Coins for games.
I've even gotten multiple free games from Sony over the years! Good games, too! Like the Uncharted trilogy.

Steam on the other hand can't even give us an exclusive skin for playing CSGO for 10 years.
Valve needs to start showing they care about their customers and kick back some of that cheese to the Steam community.

Step up your game Valve!
Give us some Xmas presents in december, free games, coupons, skins.
Send a Steam Deck per month to a random user with more than 1500 games on his/hers account. There's so much you can do to give back to this community that supported you for decades now.

[Swarm]

cSg|mc-Hotsauce님이 먼저 게시:

GunnerAlert님이 먼저 게시:

I have a idea to follow up with yours. After every time our account hits a anniversary, they should give us a free trail to some games for a week. That is one of reasons why I mainly play on Microsoft instead of steam.

You mean like free weeks/weekends publishers already opt into?

:qr:

I mean that after every year if your account spends a certain amount on the site then you should be allowed to play whatever game you want for a week.

[Brian9824]

GunnerAlert님이 먼저 게시:

cSg|mc-Hotsauce님이 먼저 게시:

You mean like free weeks/weekends publishers already opt into?

:qr:

I mean that after every year if your account spends a certain amount on the site then you should be allowed to play whatever game you want for a week.

Can't work, again valve can't give you a trial to a game they don't own, not to mention a week is enough to beat many games.

Every trial on Xbox is from a dev who wants to offer a trial, same as they offer on steam when they offer trials or demos or free weekends

[Callahan420]

"Send a Steam Deck per month to a random user with more than 1500 games bought on Steam"
Fixed that for the OP

[Satoru]

Tito Shivan님이 먼저 게시:

I'm still skeptical about what's Epic long game on the business. And things like them overstretching their free games giveaways (It was originally planned to be only one year of giveaways, we're getting into their FOURTH year of giveaways, with also an increased frequency over their initial schedule) makes me more and more skeptical about their service long-term.

Epic is functionally in 'customer ingestion' mode which is one of the most expensive parts of launching. Their lawsuit with Apple showed how much they were spending on their free games during 2019. And their cost per new user acquisition was ASTRONOMICALLY CHEAP. In 2019 Epic paid 11 million for the free games to developers, and got 5 million new users. That is $2 per user. Most F2P games would kill for anything that cheap. Most spend easily $20-50 per new user just to get them into their game. Stadia would spend $10 million on ONE GAME. Everyone at Epic is pretty much ecstatic at spending what amounts to pennies for their new user acquisition cost compared to traditional methods.

I guarantee Origin nor GOG ever got that level of ROI on their free games/GOG Connect programs. If they did, they'd still be doing it.

Now obviously its easy to get new users in the beginning wiht big splashy free titles. While there is no data since 2019 (since the only reason we have that data is due to the lawsuit) one can probably assume the cost of new users is going up. Since you're running out of new users to suck in, as well as titles you can use to entice people. Also devs are sort of catching on to 'wow we're totally leaving money on the table' and are likely asking for more money too. But even at that point it would sort of approach 'normal' F2P new user acquisition costs. Epic probably spends 10x more money on Fortnite ads, so its still sort of a drop in the bucket with regards to marketing/new user acquisition spending.

[Swarm]

brian9824님이 먼저 게시:

GunnerAlert님이 먼저 게시:

I mean that after every year if your account spends a certain amount on the site then you should be allowed to play whatever game you want for a week.

Can't work, again valve can't give you a trial to a game they don't own, not to mention a week is enough to beat many games.

Every trial on Xbox is from a dev who wants to offer a trial, same as they offer on steam when they offer trials or demos or free weekends

Okay then...maybe free trails to games Valve owns like L4D2 or Portal?

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

GunnerAlert님이 먼저 게시:

brian9824님이 먼저 게시:

Can't work, again valve can't give you a trial to a game they don't own, not to mention a week is enough to beat many games.

Every trial on Xbox is from a dev who wants to offer a trial, same as they offer on steam when they offer trials or demos or free weekends

Okay then...maybe free trails to games Valve owns like L4D2 or Portal?

You can get the entire Valve pack for $13 when on sale.

[Boblin the Goblin]

Satoru님이 먼저 게시:

Tito Shivan님이 먼저 게시:

I'm still skeptical about what's Epic long game on the business. And things like them overstretching their free games giveaways (It was originally planned to be only one year of giveaways, we're getting into their FOURTH year of giveaways, with also an increased frequency over their initial schedule) makes me more and more skeptical about their service long-term.

Epic is functionally in 'customer ingestion' mode which is one of the most expensive parts of launching. Their lawsuit with Apple showed how much they were spending on their free games during 2019. And their cost per new user acquisition was ASTRONOMICALLY CHEAP. In 2019 Epic paid 11 million for the free games to developers, and got 5 million new users. That is $2 per user. Most F2P games would kill for anything that cheap. Most spend easily $20-50 per new user just to get them into their game. Stadia would spend $10 million on ONE GAME. Everyone at Epic is pretty much ecstatic at spending what amounts to pennies for their new user acquisition cost compared to traditional methods.

I guarantee Origin nor GOG ever got that level of ROI on their free games/GOG Connect programs. If they did, they'd still be doing it.

Now obviously its easy to get new users in the beginning wiht big splashy free titles. While there is no data since 2019 (since the only reason we have that data is due to the lawsuit) one can probably assume the cost of new users is going up. Since you're running out of new users to suck in, as well as titles you can use to entice people. Also devs are sort of catching on to 'wow we're totally leaving money on the table' and are likely asking for more money too. But even at that point it would sort of approach 'normal' F2P new user acquisition costs. Epic probably spends 10x more money on Fortnite ads, so its still sort of a drop in the bucket with regards to marketing/new user acquisition spending.

You also have to use EGS for Fortnite. So those numbers are fluffed pretty hard.

[Brian9824]

Satoru님이 먼저 게시:

Tito Shivan님이 먼저 게시:

I'm still skeptical about what's Epic long game on the business. And things like them overstretching their free games giveaways (It was originally planned to be only one year of giveaways, we're getting into their FOURTH year of giveaways, with also an increased frequency over their initial schedule) makes me more and more skeptical about their service long-term.

Epic is functionally in 'customer ingestion' mode which is one of the most expensive parts of launching. Their lawsuit with Apple showed how much they were spending on their free games during 2019. And their cost per new user acquisition was ASTRONOMICALLY CHEAP. In 2019 Epic paid 11 million for the free games to developers, and got 5 million new users. That is $2 per user. Most F2P games would kill for anything that cheap. Most spend easily $20-50 per new user just to get them into their game. Stadia would spend $10 million on ONE GAME. Everyone at Epic is pretty much ecstatic at spending what amounts to pennies for their new user acquisition cost compared to traditional methods.

I guarantee Origin nor GOG ever got that level of ROI on their free games/GOG Connect programs. If they did, they'd still be doing it.

Now obviously its easy to get new users in the beginning wiht big splashy free titles. While there is no data since 2019 (since the only reason we have that data is due to the lawsuit) one can probably assume the cost of new users is going up. Since you're running out of new users to suck in, as well as titles you can use to entice people. Also devs are sort of catching on to 'wow we're totally leaving money on the table' and are likely asking for more money too. But even at that point it would sort of approach 'normal' F2P new user acquisition costs. Epic probably spends 10x more money on Fortnite ads, so its still sort of a drop in the bucket with regards to marketing/new user acquisition spending.

Not really, this is where Epic did some financial magic to trick people who don't know how this works.

See their definition of a customer was anyone who has a login to their store. During that same period they also forced every user of Fortnite to go thru their store so they could count them as a "customer" despite them never having used the store. This even included those who used it on mobile devices, they became an Epic Store customer even without having to own a PC....

Your also neglecting the hundreds of millions they spent on exclusives to get customers. For instance they spent nearly $150 million on borderlands 3 alone which was one of their best selling games.

So looking at just the free games you don't see the whole picture. When you look at total users and third party sales you see a much harsher image of lots of users, but very little spending.

[Satoru]

KittenGrindr님이 먼저 게시:

You also have to use EGS for Fortnite. So those numbers are fluffed pretty hard.

Note that its pretty easy for Epic to track new user acquisitions for free games, since after all a user has to make an account and then acquires the game. thus its super easy to determine why an account was created and to separate them from Fortnite users. Also note that their calculus is purely new user acquisition cost. Their data separated "Entitlements" which is "how many copies were moved" vs "New Epic Accounts" In the same data, Epic gave away 105 million copies of various games but received 5 million new user accounts from that. Their conversions of 'entitlements' vs 'new users' mostly is in the single digits. Only Subnautica (17% and the initial free launch title) and Batman Arkham (10%) ever broke double digits.

Epic tracks Fortnite stuff separately since they have tons of ingestion mechanisms for that, different marketing programs, etc. I'm pretty sure Epic is pulling in more than 4 million new users per year in Fortnite. That number is more like 40-50 million

[Boblin the Goblin]

Satoru님이 먼저 게시:

KittenGrindr님이 먼저 게시:

You also have to use EGS for Fortnite. So those numbers are fluffed pretty hard.

Note that its pretty easy for Epic to track new user acquisitions for free games, since after all a user has to make an account and then acquires the game. thus its super easy to determine why an account was created and to separate them from Fortnite users. Also note that their calculus is purely new user acquisition cost. Their data separated "Entitlements" which is "how many copies were moved" vs "New Epic Accounts" In the same data, Epic gave away 105 million copies of various games but received 5 million new user accounts from that. Their conversions of 'entitlements' vs 'new users' mostly is in the single digits. Only Subnautica (17% and the initial free launch title) and Batman Arkham (10%) ever broke double digits.

Epic tracks Fortnite stuff separately since they have tons of ingestion mechanisms for that, different marketing programs, etc. I'm pretty sure Epic is pulling in more than 4 million new users per year in Fortnite. That number is more like 40-50 million

Brian explained it to you.

There is no way they are pulling even near that per year in Fortnite.

[Satoru]

brian9824님이 먼저 게시:

See their definition of a customer was anyone who has a login to their store. During that same period they also forced every user of Fortnite to go thru their store so they could count them as a "customer" despite them never having used the store. This even included those who used it on mobile devices, they became an Epic Store customer even without having to own a PC....

Note their data fell into 3 buckets

1) Entitlements - number of users who actually took advantage of the free game
2) Payout cost - how much was paid to the developer
3) New Epic account- number of the entitlements that came from newly created epic accounts

So if we look at the launch title of Subnautica

Entitlements - 4.6 million : they gave away 4.6 million copies to users
New Epic accounts : 800k : of those 4.6 million only 800k came from new Epic accounts

Yes many existing fortnite customers likely made it to the 'entitlement' bucket. But they didn't count as a new Epic account which is explicitly what Epic was tracking in that data.

Yes they likely were tracking existing Fortnite users conversions from the client to the store, in addition to a ton of other conversions or metrics. But that's an entirely different metric and isn't what they were measuring in the data provided in the lawsuit

Your also neglecting the hundreds of millions they spent on exclusives to get customers.

I was only referring to data that exists from the Apple lawsuit which specifically showed data from how their free games program fell into various buckets. I don't want to talk about other types of exclusives since there is little verifiable data on this, and its not super relevant to this thread since we're talking more about 'free games' and how much that makes sense given we have a very in depth financial data from Epic which normally would never be public.

I'm simply trying to show "here is data on how effective giving away free games is" this is likely best case scenario of new user acquisition costs since steam's entitlements will likely be literally orders of magnitude higher. Meaning a dev is going to want to be compensated a lot more to flood the steam market with potentially tens of millions of free copies of their game. LIke do you think the Subnautica devs are going to take 1.4 million on steam? They will want MUCH more given the number of entitlements that will flood the on steam will be more like 40 million instead of 4 million on Epic. Aka how much are you giong to pay Subnautica or other devs? Its not going to be on the cheap for $1 million that's for sure.

[Satoru]

KittenGrindr님이 먼저 게시:

Brian explained it to you.

There is no way they are pulling even near that per year in Fortnite.

Epic literally reported their registered user count for Fortnite was 350 million in 2020 and that it rose to 400 million in 2021.

https://twitter.com/fortnitegame/status/1258079550321446912
https://www.ign.com/articles/fortnite-made-9-billion-in-two-years-while-epic-games-store-has-yet-to-turn-a-profit

I mean people want to say Fortnite is dead but... like its not?

I think Roblox is doign way better though but that's sort of a different discussion

And again if you created a system by which your Fortnite new user acquisition costs via free games was costing you $2.37 a user, you'd probably give that person a raise

Note there's also a different metric not shown here which is 'cost for first purchase'. Its one thing to convince a user to make an account, its an entirely different thing to convince them to actually spend money. So looking at Subnatutica, just like those 4.6 million entitlements only resulted in 800k new epic accounts, you further then generally break it down over time of how many of those users then proceeded to make an actual purchase. Obviously if you get 800k new users, but none of them make purchases then that's a big problem.That data is not available for the Epic store but sort of 'generally' speaking its like 10-30x the user acquisition cost in F2P games. Personally my belief is that GOG Connect had likely a catastrophically high 'cost to first purchase' in that GOG Connect did not convert anyone into actual paying customers which is why they canned it.

[FOXDUDE69]

GunnerAlert님이 먼저 게시:

Okay then...maybe free trails to games Valve owns like L4D2 or Portal?

At this point, they should let you buy those with Steam Points.

[Nx Machina]

FOXDUDE69님이 먼저 게시:

Steam doesn't give it's users enough free stuff. In fact, we don't get any free stuff at all from them.

So which is it?

[FOXDUDE69]

Nx Machina님이 먼저 게시:

FOXDUDE69님이 먼저 게시:

Steam doesn't give it's users enough free stuff. In fact, we don't get any free stuff at all from them.

So which is it?

Both, lol. Obviously.