In its quest to make you buy games from them, the Epic Store is going to keep giving them away for free.
Update: 10th January, 2019
The splendid What Remains of Edith Finch is now available to download, for free, from the Epic Store. You know what to do.
Original story:
We’re going to stop summarising this eventually, but here are the salient points:
Steam takes a 70% revenue share, so Epic opened a store that will only take 12%. They’ll also waive their 5% Unreal Engine royalties for developers who use their platform. Also, Itch.io lets developers set their own revenue share, while Discord is going to take 10%.
Steam has the user base, but the Epic Store – built into its launcher – does have 5 million users; namely, players of Fortnite. But they need to persuade players and, in order to do that, they’re hoping to attract more players to the platform by giving away freebies.
The first freebie was Subnautica. Next up, Super Meat Boy, which is at the time of writing, still available for another six days.
The next free game on the Epic Store is What Remains of Edith Finch, the superb narrative exploration game. It was one of our games of 2017, with Josh (remember him?) saying it’s “remarkable how free you feel as you’re lead through the house on spoors of curiosity, your route is limned with not just what can be touched and seen, but what form play may take,” and that it is “utterly unique, transporting, and charming, it’s a tale of human vulnerability, strength, and the power that stories have over us all”.
What Remains of Edith Finch will be free to download and keep from the Epic Store from January 10, 2019. It’ll be free for two weeks, when the next game in Epic’s revolving door of freebies will replace it.
