Epic Games To Bring Free Game Giveaways to Mobile Store To Tempt Players Away from Google, Apple

The Epic Games free weekly game giveaways have been an easy way for PC gamers to pad out their game library with aging games and help Epic Games draw gamers to its store, which is commonly thought to be inferior to the likes of Steam due to a lack of features. Now Epic Games is bringing that same free game giveaway program to its mobile storefront for iOS (in the EU, at least) and Android.

Announced at a round table discussion at the Seattle Unreal Fest earlier this week, the free mobile game giveaway will launch in Q4, 2024, and the publisher will add third-party apps to its mobile store at the same time. Epic Games Store’s general manager, Steve Allison, who announced the program, was pretty up-front about Epic’s intentions with the game giveaway: “The free games program will launch in Q4 along with the [first] third-party apps showing up, and we’re gonna have some awesome stuff for players that will also be awesome for developers because it’ll help us scale really quickly.”

While many of the games featured in the Epic Games weekly free game giveaway have been obscure indie titles, there have been a fair few AAA standouts, like Control, Borderlands 3, and the Tomb Raider trilogy. While the free game giveaways are undoubtedly going to be an interesting addition for gamers, the introduction of third-party developers is arguably more important for the health of the Epic Games Store in the long run, especially if the store wants to be profitable. Epic’s other announcements at the Unreal Fest this past week are also indicative of its future plans for the Epic Games Store, with new discount deals and Unreal Engine collaborations incentivizing developers to publish their games on the Epic Games Store first or at the same time as on other platforms.

Epic says it will have “between 10 and 50” third-party applications on its mobile store before the holiday season, although there are still some unfinished features, like payments systems, that may require some of these apps and games to be delayed. The Epic Games Store has faced a rather public uphill battle for profitability, with Epic having recently had to resort to laying off over 800 employees due to overspending. Epic isn’t likely to have a much easier time launching a mobile storefront this late in the game, especially since that storefront is only available on iOS in the EU, leaving only Android for the US—the world’s second-largest video game market and the country with the highest number of iPhone users.