The Ultimate Top 10 Best Free Games Ever Given Away on the Epic Games Store

A lot has been said lately about how the digitalization of games is killing the industry, but Epic's weekly giveaway is undeniably one of the bright spots. Every Thursday since December 2018, Epic has handed out a game for nothing. Not a demo, not a rental that vanishes when you stop paying. A permanent copy that's yours forever.

It has quietly built enormous libraries for PC Gamers who never spent a cent. Of course, it was never charity. Court documents revealed that Epic spent millions paying developers flat fees to hand out these games, successfully buying a massive new audience.

It is customer acquisition with a bow on it. But when the games are this good, who cares? Here are the ten best things that ever landed in the pile.

The medieval RPG that refuses to hand you a dragon. No magic, no chosen one, just a blacksmith's son in 1403 Bohemia getting beaten up by better swordsmen until he learns. Instead of traditional power fantasies, Kingdom Come delivers a gritty, grounded simulator where simply surviving a one on one duel feels like a massive achievement.

Epic handing out a hundred hour historical epic of this scale was a massive surprise. It gave millions of players the chance to experience a deeply complex, slow burn adventure they might have otherwise overlooked.

On December 30, 2021, as the finale of its 15 Days of Free Games event, Epic handed over Tomb Raider, Rise and Shadow together, all Definitive Editions, all DLC included. Instead of dropping players into a single story, Epic gave away hundreds of hours of premium content at once.

The trilogy successfully rebuilt the franchise from the ground up, offering massive hub worlds filled with hidden crypts, upgrade trees, and spectacular combat sequences. It is the definitive way to experience one of the best action reboots of the last decade.

One of the very first Epic freebies, live in December 2018, and still one of the best. It drops you in an alien ocean with a crashed ship and nothing worth calling a weapon, and the deeper you swim the worse it gets.

Leaving you completely defenseless was not just a gameplay quirk.

Director Charlie Cleveland explained in a Steam post that the game was built around the time of the Sandy Hook shooting, and while he has never believed game violence causes real violence, he could not bring himself to add more guns to the world. He called it one vote towards a world with fewer guns. Epic paid $1.4 million for it.

A kung fu revenge story where death is the mechanic. Every time you go down you age, gaining power and losing health, so a sloppy run leaves you a brittle seventy-year-old facing the last boss.

If you finish level one at age sixty, you start level two at age sixty. It forces you to replay earlier stages to shave years off your run, turning every single encounter into a high stakes puzzle where you try to survive with maximum efficiency.

Giving away BioShock Remastered, BioShock 2 Remastered and Infinite in a single bundle was a massive flex by Epic. It meant handing over three of the most influential story driven shooters ever made in one afternoon.

The games hold up incredibly well today, mostly because the striking art direction of a decaying 1950s underwater utopia and a floating American fever dream do heavy lifting that raw graphics cannot match. 

Getting the entire saga, complete with all the story expansions that tie the two cities together, was easily one of the highest value drops in the store's history.

Asylum, City and Knight were given away together in September 2019. At the time, it was the most expensive campaign Epic had ever run, costing a reported $1.5 million. It is easy to see why. This bundle handed players the definitive superhero simulator, offering a seamless evolution from the tight, atmospheric corridors of Asylum to the massive open streets of Knight.

Rocksteady practically invented the modern freeflow combat system with these titles. Getting all three masterpieces at once was an unbelievable steal for PC gamers and set a massive benchmark for what the storefront was willing to give away.

Remedy's new weird masterpiece is actually the most repeated giveaway on this list. Epic has handed it out three separate times. You walk into a shifting, brutalist government building looking for your brother and eventually leave as its director.

The game offers incredible physics based combat and an atmosphere unlike anything else in modern gaming. 

Throwing office furniture at supernatural enemies with telekinetic powers never gets old, and giving away a game this stylish multiple times proved Epic was completely serious about building our libraries.

Kojima's massive open world journey is often called a walking simulator, and I mean that as a massive compliment. It is a game entirely built around the mechanics of hauling heavy cargo across a broken, breathtaking country while supernatural weather actively tries to age you to death.

Instead of focusing purely on combat, it forces you to map routes, balance your weight, and rebuild infrastructure with the asynchronous help of other players. Getting an experience this bold and visually stunning for absolutely nothing was a brilliant move for the storefront.

When Epic dropped this massive title, the sheer demand immediately buckled the store. Giving away a full scale, beautifully detailed open world Wizarding World RPG was a staggering flex on its own, but Epic went a step further.

They brought it back for a second run and tied it directly into a Fortnite cross promotion to pull players even deeper into their launcher, and the resulting server meltdowns proved everyone was more than happy to take the deal.

GTA V was the giveaway that absolutely broke everything. When Epic handed out the Premium Edition in May 2020, the sheer volume of traffic immediately took the entire store offline. The rest of the industry suddenly got a very clear look at what Epic was willing to spend to win over PC players.

Giving away the most profitable entertainment product in history for zero dollars was the ultimate mic drop. It permanently transformed the storefront from a new launcher into an absolute necessity overnight.

Reviewing this list makes Epic's strategy completely obvious. The storefront secured its reputation by throwing massive sums of cash at established blockbusters. Epic spent $1.5 million just to secure the Batman trilogy and wrote another $1.4 million check for Subnautica. 

Later on, the company brought in Rockstar's most profitable game ever and happily let the resulting traffic crush their own servers.

This aggressive approach paid off beautifully. Millions of PC gamers currently own massive digital collections without spending a single cent. 

The exchange is completely transparent. You receive incredible games for free while Epic pulls you straight into their storefront. Based on the sheer quality of these giveaways, players will gladly keep accepting the terms of this deal.