![]() Later the same year the store caught more flak when indie title DARQ was denied being on the store due to not accepting an exclusivity deal with them. At the end of the month, on August 26, 2019, Bandai Namco Entertainment publicly refused Epic Store exclusivity for their PC games despite being an almost regular adopter of Unreal Engine 4. The vitriol would only get worse as Epic continued to secure more and more games as Epic Store exclusives, reaching a high boiling point after August 1st, 2019 when the two-person indie development team of Ooblets announced that their game would become a timed exclusive on EGS, which swiftly led to some very heated criticism based on the tone-deaf announcement, some of the backlash was warranted while others (like death threats) not so much. Consumers were especially angry in the case of the latter game as it had been funded primarily through a Fig crowdfunding campaign and had promised its backers it would be available at launch on both Steam and GOG. The controversy mostly stemmed from several of these games having already had pre-order sales on other PC stores like Steam, like Metro Exodus and Phoenix Point. The deal with Epic entailed that games had to be exclusive to the Epic Games Store for a certain period before going to other digital storefronts (most commonly a year, but six months or a few weeks are not unheard of time periods either). In early 2019, Epic drew ire from consumers for making a hard push to secure several third party games as exclusives for the storefront. Smaller indie titles like 20XX, Faster Than Light, both Overcooked games, Tunche, Horizon Chase Turbo and many others have also been made available for free to keep. In the past, this has included some big hits like Alien: Isolation, Death Stranding, the entire Batman: Arkham Series, Prey (2017), and Grand Theft Auto V the latter game caused so many people to visit the store to redeem the game that the entire platform's server was on its knees for 24 hours. ![]() And so while EOS can deter very casual piracy, it's more akin to an SDK or plugin for game developers to leverage to enable cross-play, achievements, and cross-progression, often between storefronts and consoles.Ī free game (or two, if one of them is M-rated or equivalent) are usually given away once per week on Thursdays, and are available to keep forever on the players' account. While Epic does technically have a DRM scheme - EOS Epic Online Services - it isn't treated as such by the company (case in point, Epic themselves baked in a command override for bypassing EOS, making a game DRM Free after its download from the store). ![]() This has lead to a surprising number of AAA games and Indie games alike being DRM Free on EGS and GOG, but not on Steam for a few examples, Spider-Man Remastered, the Batman: Arkham Series, the Tomb Raider Reboot trilogy, Cyberpunk 2077, and Control are all DRM Free on GOG and EGS, but their releases on Steam require Steamworks DRM, Denuvo, or some other measures. ![]() Additionally, licensees of Epic's Unreal Engine 4 and 5 would not have to pay any additional royalties to Epic for sales on the storefront, making the store an even more attractive offer for such games as Unreal 4 is one of the most widely used engines on PC and consoles in both Indie and big budget games.Īnother interesting advantage is that much like GOG, Epic currently does not enforce their own DRM scheme instead, it's up to the developer to implement such measures themselves. The unique advantage of the storefront is that they will take a 12% cut of revenue from game sales, as opposed to the industry standard of 30% for digital distribution services (Microsoft's own store only takes 15%). It offers both Indie and AAA games at the same prices of other storefronts, and much like Steam, also takes into account regional pricing, which can also make games cheaper by either a few pennies or several dollars, depending on circumstances. The Epic Games Store launched at the tail-end of 2018, where they announced that in addition to their existing repertoire of game development, publishing and technology, they would also be expanding into the realm of game distribution, similar to the likes of Steam and GOG.com. Epic Games Store (or EGS for short) is a Digital Distribution platform of video games for Windows and Mac OS created by Epic Games. ![]()
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