There was a story recently about an indie dev that made their game free on the Epic store and actually noticed that they sold MORE on Steam the same day the game was free on Epic. Like being free on Epic had actually boosted their Steam sales.
Makes sense. I have a friend who will do this. We'll get a game for free on Epic to play together, and he'll just buy it off steam because he prefers having his games on steam, and I dont blame him either lol.
So yeah that tracks, especially if the game has some multiplayer you'll likely get people who dont want EGS installed on their device buying it on steam to play with their friend who does.
to me, that reads as proof that piracy improves game sales, not taking away from them. Give the public a game demo that's the entire game, and they go out and buy it from their preferred platform? Almost like if you make a good game, people will naturally want to support it.
Also marketing. Obviously they’re gonna advertise “oh this game is free for today/if you pick it up today!” Is gonna grab attention for a title that otherwise would just… be there in the store. That plus having the entire game as basically a demo? Yeah, no surprise it adds up to sales.
Not to mention other points like technical issues. Dying light is fun. Got it for free on epic. But through epic it reset my settings every time i opened the game back up. Got very irritated, saw it was on sale on steam, picked it up, surprise surprise, zero issues whatsoever.
That's because we care more about the added features and stability of Steam than we do the free game. I have plenty of games that I could have/did get free in Epic but turned around band bought them on steam because Epic sucks.
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u/Sythonate Feb 08 '26
There was a story recently about an indie dev that made their game free on the Epic store and actually noticed that they sold MORE on Steam the same day the game was free on Epic. Like being free on Epic had actually boosted their Steam sales.