Epic has been giving away games on the Epic Games Store since it launched at the end of 2018, enticing Steam users to install its launcher with freebies as big as Grand Theft Auto 5 and Civilization 6. More than 580 million free games were claimed just last year.
Giving away half-a-billion game copies a year, even when paying a small fraction of each copy's list price, is not cheap. Thanks to documents that came out during Epic's legal fight with Apple, we learned that the company spent $11.6 million on free games in just the first nine months of the program. Epic has been giving away games for six years now.
