$10 off all games priced at $14.99 and above, and this even includes games that already might have a sale discount applied to them (as long as the minimum price is still $14.99 and up). It also includes any pre-purchases just before the start of the sale and includes any games you happened to buy just before the start of the sale, where they will refund you $10 automatically within 7-12 days.
Epic’s first “Mega Sale,” launched yesterday, is causing some pricing and availability hiccups for a few publishers. As Kotaku lays out, a couple of games in the store’s small catalog seem to have removed themselves from the platform rather than participate in the temporary price reductions.
Paradox Interactive’s Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 and Klei Entertainment’s Oxygen Not Included are no longer available on the Epic Games Store as of this writing. Bloodlines 2 was actually removed shortly after being listed at a reduced sale price, a state of affairs that Epic’s Sergei Galyonkin said happened because Paradox was unaware of the “sale mechanism.”
“If a developer or publisher chooses to not participate in our sales, we will honor that decision,” an Epic representative told Kotaku. “Paradox Interactive has chosen to not participate in the Epic Mega Sale and the game has been temporarily removed from sale. If you’ve purchased Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 during the period when the discount did apply at the time of check out, Epic will honor that price.”
Paradox also noted in a statement that the game will “return to the store soon,” presumably after the sale is complete.
Seems that the sale has backfired on Epic in a pretty big way. I doubt they will do this again in a hurry, but doing a sale, I think is a make of desperation on their part.
It more seems they need to implement a better system to notify devs/publishers and easily allow them to opt in/out versus just springing it out of nowhere.
I’m not so sure it was a “desperation” attempt because so far by all accounts they are selling games. I think they were just experimenting with a different way to do large sales. Steam and GOG both have various large sales over the course of a year and this was likely just Epic taking a swing at it.
Epic finds new and exciting ways to fuck up well established sales techniques, seriously how do you mess up something simple like a sale. I’m kind of impressed at their failure, it’s not easy to be that incompetent. Not like businesses across the world haven’t been holding sales for centuries…
If Epic started by doing a sale like this to promote their launcher instead of all the anti-consumer, anti-competitive exclusivity, I would be fully on board with Epic.
After all the crap they have done in the past months, I won’t be giving them any money at all for the foreseeable future.
Yeah we’ll see how it goes later down the road. The only one that really interested me so far was the early access Hades by Supergiant (which I did get). There are a couple others I’m slightly interested in but I’m in no rush.
I’m mostly just snagging the free games just because and watching the “story” unfold basically.
In this whole Epic saga what has been the biggest surprise is just how many incredibly dumb mistakes they’ve made while launching their store. From releasing it without many standard e-commerce features to making an epic fail out of something as bog standard as a sale… it makes me wonder if the company is being run by a bunch of children.
I mean, all they had to do was hire a consultancy firm to tell them what they needed to compete with Steam and then hire an IT firm to build it for them. That way the store would have had a shopping cart from the start, would have copied the best features of their competitors and been generally competent. Epic can afford all of this, easily, since Fortnite pulls in a couple billion in profit per year. But they didn’t. They’ve suffered several scandals that were completely avoidable because of this. It’s a good thing that they’re independently rich, because if I was an investor I wouldn’t trust them at all, newbie mistakes do not inspire confidence.
That they’ve not imploded yet is slightly miraculous to be honest.
So I guess then we can assign the Epic Store a theme track of clown noises then? Because this is just another stupid thing they’ve done.
I do suspect though they just borrowed this tool from Fortnite, where such a limit would make good sense since legit buying patterns would be for a limited number of items per whatever interval they’re using. Still makes it a stupid idea though in terms of selling games though.
So while Steam seems to be content to lie belly up before the incompetent Epic Games, Microsoft has jumped into the fray stating that they will be adding more of their games to Steam because they support the ability to play games on multiple platforms.
most of the halo games are coming to steam at some point, and the original Age of empires DE will be be coming too.
Good news, but then again, I played the original Halo, I personally don’t see what the fuss is about, sure it helped FPS shooters to come to consoles, but as a game, its very poor compared to the likes, or Unreal, Quake and 2. and of course the original Doom series.
You have to remember that Microsoft intended the new Age of Empires game to be a windows store exclusive. Everyone had a good laugh at that a while back, seems they’ve come to their senses. This way they will actually sell some copies. I doubt it has much to do with Epic.
Yeah, microsoft has probably finally realised that the microsoft store wasn’t such a great idea, besides, there are still a lot of people on windows 7 / 8, so but yeah, its good that these games are coming to steam.
I’ve been using windows 10 for years now and have never touched the built in store. Why they thought that exclusivity was a good idea, while they no doubt had the numbers of people using it, we’ll never know.
Yeah I read that article a few days ago. Was pretty funny. Say what you will tho, MS is making the attempt to go more “open”, besides making “nice” with Linux these days they’ve apparently also convinced Sony to embrace cross-platform MP functionality. So that’s gunna be a thing.
Microsoft clearly made this decision thinking of their bottom line. To this day people still play Age of Empires 2 multiplayer, but on two different platforms that can’t play together. Yet both are still active. So they probably looked at that and thought if we let people play together we sell more games. Bit cynical perhaps, but a win win in the end.
