City of Brass with 90% discount on Steam

I share games on discount I bought for myself, but these two looks good too, thanks

I did read an article recently that said it has led to more sales for the game companies.

Whether that's true or not i don't know.

Similar to articles like this :
https://www.tweaktown.com/news/72918/epic-store-giveaways-boosts-exposure-and-sales-similar-to-game-pass/index.html
https://www.techpowerup.com/268057/epic-games-ceo-tim-sweeney-claims-free-game-giveaways-increase-sales-on-other-platforms

Could be all bluster.

This is true, but I think they are playing the long game here. Imagine the players, who started playing Fortnite when it became a thing and never really moved to Steam. Those players now have a store, with decent prices and (optionally) almost a hundred free games. Epic basically eliminates their need to switch platforms..

Free games are a way for them to get new customers, but as it has been proven but their own data it translates mostly in non-paying customers, also yes they don't make money from the epic games store, according to data from last year (2019), which had big exclusives unlike this year (Borderlands3, Control, Outer Worlds, etc) they only made about 30M gross revenue, then you need to subtract from that all the exclusivity deals and free games they offer (which they pay predicted lost sales to their publishers) and all the coupons they paid themselves (i think it was about 10M in coupons) , also pay their emplyoees, and we can't really say plataform maintenence and R&D can we? but well subtract that aswell. They paid 12M for Control exclusivity and 2M for Phonenix Point which is a relatively unknown indie game so you can get a feel for about how much they spent with each exclusivity deal.