People – especially older generations – often dismiss video games as a childish business. This, in turn, doesn’t stop them from being the preferred form of entertainment of millions of people all over the world. The gaming scene is massive, covering a huge variety of genres ranging from the Live Games you can play on your phone to massive multiplayer titles that professional gamers are playing competitively.
Video games can be expensive at times – the average price for a recent title easily exceeds R1000 – but quite often, they are dirt cheap, even free. All you need to know is where to look.
Epic Games Store
Epic, the company behind popular titles like Fortnite and The Division, have launched their own game marketplace and launcher not long ago. To attract users from the all-time-biggest online digital game marketplace Steam, they have decided to lure over the users by giving away at least one game – often two – each week.
The Epic Games Store has already given away some major titles free of charge, and this week, they offer their users a weird indie title called “The Stanley Parable” and a triple-A action game called Watch Dogs.
Humble Store
The Humble Store is the home of the Humble Bundles – collections of mostly indie games that you can buy for a small contribution. Most of the money you spend at the Humble Store goes to various charities ranging from the World Wildlife Fund to DirectRelief or Action Against Hunger. The humble collection of bundles spent years growing into the great video game marketplace it is today.
This week, the Humble Store offers 12 bundles, including games from Capcom (Resident Evil, Megaman), the Just Drive bundle (racing games), along with ebook and course bundles, and such. Plus, the store periodically offers its registered users titles completely free of charge – in the past, it has given away titles like Age of Wonders, GRID, Brütal Legend, and Metro 2033.
GOG.com
GOG – an acronym for “Good Old Games” – started out as an online marketplace where you could buy old games (“fixed” to run on modern operating systems) dirt cheap. In time, it has grown into a much bigger thing, offering new releases and old titles alike. Today, you can preorder upcoming titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and download DRM-free old titles like Tyrian 2000 (released in 1995) through the same interface.
GOG also gives away free games quite often. Right now, it has a long list of titles available for download completely free that you can keep forever.
Video games are not cheap – except when they are. While you can’t expect developers to give away their titles free of charge right when they are released (except for “battle royale” games – those have a different revenue stream) but you’ll be able to build a huge game library even if you only stick to games from a few years ago. Especially because so many of them are free.
