Over 4 million people claim PC Building Simulator free from the Epic Game Store in just over 24 hours

Over 4 million people claimed PC Building Simulator free from the Epic Game Store in just over 24 hours.

PC Building Simulator, which normally goes for £14.99, became Epic's weekly free game at 5pm on Thursday, 7th October.

Then, just after 8pm yesterday, 8th October, Epic tweeted to say PC Building Simulator had already been claimed by over 4 million players.

It's an astonishingly popular giveaway for a game that launched first in January 2019.

PC Building Simulator, which was created by Romanian indie developer Kiss Claudiu and published by The Irregular Corporation, does exactly what it says on the tin: it lets you build and grow your own computer repair business as you learn to diagnose, fix and build PCs. It features over 1000 real world parts from manufacturers like AMD, NVIDIA and ASUS, and has a Free Build mode where you can use all of these to create your perfect PC. People love this game - it has an "overwhelmingly positive" user review status on Steam.

Thanks to the high-profile lawsuit between Epic and Apple, we know it's costing Epic an arm and a leg to take on Steam with its own store. The Epic Games Store releases free games every week, and has snapped up a number of eye-catching PC launch exclusives since it went live in December 2018. And in May this year, we learnt how much Epic paid on a per title basis for the free games released during the first nine months of the Epic Games Store's life.

A document spotted and tweeted by GameDiscoverCo founder Simon Carless lists all the free games released on the Epic Games Store in the nine months to September 2019 - and how much Epic paid for each of them.

The list told us, for example, Epic paid $1.4m to get Subnautica as a free game. Team Meat's wonderful Super Meat Boy, on the other hand, cost just $50,000. Elsewhere, Funcom's Mutant Year Zero cost a cool $1m, whereas the brilliant Fez cost $75,000.

Interestingly, the document showed what really matters to Epic: the user acquisition cost. This is worked out by dividing the "buyout price" by the number of new Epic accounts the free game secured. So, in the case of Subnautica, which was redeemed 4.4m times, the user acquisition cost was $1.74. That is, Epic reckons it spent $1.74 acquiring each user who snapped up Subnautica.

I wonder if Epic is happy with the user acquisition cost for PC Building Simulator? The giveaway ends at 4pm UK time on 14th October.