I don't trust these announcements. They announced that the early Fallout games were "going to be free next week". Then, the next week, they weren't. They were replaced by other games for the week.
Because Epic's store is bad and rather than trying to compete on quality, they use anticompetitive practices such as paid exclusives to force you to use their inferior app store.
The free games as bait pulls in people to inflate their user counts artificially for investors, because from what I've read devs aren't seeing a lot of purchases from their store.
And they are trying to force these terrible practices into the iOS ecosystem by abusing the legal system in multiple markets.
At the end of the day Epic's attempt to purchase market share has already been bad for me as a consumer on one platform and it seems like they're going to cause that same harm on another.
It's not comparable to lemmy, which is FOSS and supported partially through donations. It's entire existence is to avoid the problems that Epic-style companies cause. They are the reddit version of App stores.