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Sid Meier's Civilization VI is currently free (Epic via Prime)
(luna.amazon.com)
Epic (ew)
Prime (ew)
If you buy games from Epic you give Epic your money. If you redeem free games from Epic, you support the devs and cost Epic money. Win/Win.
As for Prime, if you have to pay for Prime for other reasons, you might as well as expensive a customer as possible. If you don't have to have Prime, then I agree. Avoid it and Bezos can rot.
Not really, you cost Epic money but give them more users. Which is what they want. Only get free games from them if you want to support Epic.
That logic only works if said users transition into paying customers. Epic wants you to either buy games from them or get hooked intonone of their "free" games like Fortnite. They do not profit at all by people redeeming and playing giveaways.
Disagree, free loading customers still help their customer base. They are still seen as potential customers and normalize having epic store client, legitimizing their own walled garden. It's similar to any free-to-play game. All the customers that pay $0 technically cost the company money, but it's worth having that dead weight to build a player base to get the whales in. Just by installing and having an epic account will inevitably draw other people in that will spend money and lure in investors and developers. They're not dumb.
Really don't think of it from an individual point of view, but as a whole.
I agree for "free to play" games, but not for the store. The idea is that if you use their store you might convert to a customer or start playing their "free to play" games like Fortnite. If you never do, then you are nothing but a cost center. The idea of "we have tons of customers" doesn't really track either because articles like the one posted here shine the light on how non-sensical their giveaways are.
Another angle could be to get you into their store everytime you want to play your giveaway game. Maybe that way they can hook you with something else. That should not be a problem if you use apps.like Heroic Game Launcher and bypass the Epic app altogether to play your games.
I got excited by this then realised i think i already have it from a previous epic sale. Thank you nonetheless!
Lmao. Epic can’t give them away fast enough
It's always free. 🏴☠️
I played the tutorial, and continued the game for several hours after the tutorial part ended.
I struggled to stay awake. It was by far the most boring slog I have ever experienced in any edition of Civ. (I haven't played Civ 7, though.)
It bored me too and it was my first Civ. Which one do you recommend for a first timer? I also have a bunch of Anno and Tropico I got free or near free, so any recommendation for the genre would be appreciated.
Civ 4 is great.
Civ 5 is mostly great if you add the Brave New World (or maybe Gods and Kings) expansion, which revises the game mechanics. My main complaint is that I don't like how religion affects the mid-late game, but the game is still great overall.
Both can be had for cheap when they go on sale.
There's a free and open-source Civ-like game called Unciv. I haven't played it, but I've seen it mentioned often enough that it might be worth a look.
Best civ is Unciv. FOSS civ 5 with way better performance and a lot of QoL changes
Anno 1404 rules and is very playable still. I was never really interested in the series, but that game really got me.
I like Civ 6, but it helps the set it to 'online' speed.
From my experience, the first 50-100 turns are kinda boring (unless you're fighting barbarians) but things get more interesting when you have many cities and things to manage. The game takes a long time to hook me, but when it does it hooks me good. :)
Civ 6 has some cool modes that are interesting, but if you just want a good old game of civ rhen stick to 5 or 4.
this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2026
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