Am I a cheapskate? I get free games off Epic.

Epic make their choice to do this and they want you to do it. Free is cheap and that is not bad!! Buddy let me ask you why you feel bad when you get a good deal?

Is Game Pass making you feel bad too and all the Xbox Gamers? I feel very good and happy about this and I am seeing happy Game Pass Gamers everywhere!

They are free to do as they please.

Me personally, the whole "pay for exclusive" to deny other platforms for a time period just annoyed me on principle.

So I don't like em', simple as that. Rubbed me the wrong way.

I don't like tencent so i don't spend money on the epic store, but i do get their free games since that doesn't benefit them.

@uninspiredcup: The only reason why Valve doesn’t pay for exclusives is because they already have tons of market share, they don’t need to pay for exclusives. If the situation was reversed so that Epic Games had loads of market share and Valve had the leftover crumbs, then Valve would likely be the ones paying for exclusives instead of Epic. This is something that PC gamers fail to understand. You guys are subconsciously supporting the big guy here. Assuming that the reason why Valve doesn’t pay for exclusives because they are ethically superior, when in reality it’s simply due to lack of need for it.

@nirgal: Actually it still benefits them, because they can use their userbase numbers to encourage other companies to release games on EGS. If you download EGS, Epic can still consider you to be part of their user base and let other companies know they have X amount of users online at any given time. Sure they are aware of people such as you who only go for free games, but there’s still plenty of people who buy games from EGS too.

@lavamelon: then they are misinterpreting the data since non paying customer don't provide any benefit to game companies, specially someone like me that doesn't play online games.

@nirgal: They know they are misrepresenting the data, but they won’t care as long as it helps them more more third parties into EGS. Plus there are lots people who do buy games from EGS so its not fully being misrepresented.

Yup. One more person using the service is one more potential person buying games. I bet there's quite a few who have bought games on EGS after being lured in by the free games. Especially new PC gamers who haven't already got a huge Steam library.

Companies are certainly aware of how bad games sell on the Epic Store compared to Steam, but they're willing to take that hit for Epic Store exclusivity money because PC gamers will buy it anyway once it goes to Steam in 6 months to a year. Or they take the exclusivity deal because they know their game is trash and need to recuperate as many losses as possible (Saints Row reboot and FF7 Remake). Or they're a desperate indie developer in need of funds. However, some games got completely killed by Epic Store exclusivity, even when it came to Steam, such as Samurai Shodown.

They're being offered for free. Take them.

Considering the sheer volume of games they've given away for free over the years, you could have built up enough games to literally never need to buy another game this decade if you didn't want to.

I've missed many a weekly reset and I still have more than 275 games that came completely free.

Honesty, if you haven't been grabbing the free weekly EGS games -- even if you don't own a gaming PC at the moment, even if you don't plan to support EGS -- you're doing everything wrong.

Not cheap to claim free games. Maybe a tiny waste of time if you're not going to play them, but hey you can do what you want.

I don't care on what platform I get games, but personally I won't use EGS. Shelling out cash to publishers for exclusivity (yeah they will fucking take free money at customer's expense of course they will they are a business and don't give any shits in that regard) is disruptive in a bad way for the industry so I won't play along. Frankly there are too many games I actually want to play for me to waste my time claiming free ones I don't care about anyway.

I haven't played that one yet either.... Backlog game. This is a good reminder. Grateful my magical steam deck potato performs so well with the game. 😍

@TheEroica:

What is considered cheap then? This sounds like someone under the classification of 'poverty' trying as best as possible to be included into the lower middle income group.

@jhcho2: A cheap person will skip games they would like to play because they aren't willing to spend money on them. A frugal person seeks out good deals.

Getting free games on Epic doesn't make you cheap, but a person who will only play a game if it's free on Epic could be cheap.

The real cheapskates though, are the ones who pirate games.