You know you’re going to forget to do it at all if you don’t do it now, so make sure to claim the free games included in Amazon Prime this month. This isn’t sponsored content, it’s me mothering you. Although you might want to wait until 12 p.m. ET today (June 17), as another six games are being added to an already pretty impressive collection of freebies.
The current selection of games are added in the build up to this year’s increasingly badly named Prime Day, which has just been announced as lasting...four days. Because words don’t mean anything sausage facilitate garden flange.
Look, Prime Day is bullshit and Amazon is evil and you should support local businesses. But since you already pay for Amazon Prime, you may as well grab a bunch of games to keep forever. Prime Gaming distributes a lot of these games via GOG (alongside Epic and their own internal software), and in those cases you’re getting DRM-free executables of games.
I never remember to grab these, which is dumb. It’s worth it just for the sake of archiving my access to games that could otherwise get revoked by Valve or whomever at any point. And June’s collection is about to grow to 31 games, which is bonkers. Among them are Gloomhaven (via Epic Games, and expires tomorrow), Thief II: The Metal Age, and Mafia III: Definitive Edition.
Added to the page today are the following:
- Saints Row IV: Re-Elected
- Saints Row 2
- Tomb Raider I-III
- Toem
- Dungeon of the Endless
- Star Wars: Rebellion
These are all via GOG except for Dungeon of the Endless which is on Amazon’s own app. And yes, some of these are very old games; Star Wars: Rebellion is from 1998! But that’s the 2024 remake of the first three Tomb Raider games (some at Kotaku rate these remasters highly, but I thought they were atrocious), and Saints Row IV is one of the funniest games ever, no matter what year it is.
The expiration dates for games in the current selection are all over the place, but these six will apparently stay there until July 8, at which point there will presumably be a new bunch announced in the midst of the four-day noise of Prime “Day”—that annual event where you can buy things from Amazon for the same prices they’re discounted to at so many other points during the year. (I strongly recommend a Chrome extension called Keepa, that’ll augment the Amazon site to add price trackers showing you how much any given item has cost at any point in the past.)
Capitalism is a monstrous nightmare of compromising.
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